Other relics from the mounds, not less interesting than the weapons, are their vessels of pottery; for here we see the earliest traces of another art. This pottery is of a black colour, curiously mixed with powdered shells, perhaps to strengthen the clay, perhaps for ornament. Its pottery belongs to the latter portion of this age of stone, a period distinguished not only by the use of domestic animals, but also by the growth of cereals. We have said that bones of cattle, swine, and in one case of a goose, have been found among the refuse of the funeral feasts. But man was still a hunter, as he is to this day, though he had found other means of support besides the wild game; so we also find the bones of the red deer and the wild bull, both of which supplied him with food. Wolves’ teeth, too, have been found pierced, so as to be strung into a necklace; for personal adornment formed, in those days as now, part of the interest of life. Jet beads have been discovered in large numbers, and even some of amber, which seems to have been brought from the Baltic to these countries and as far south as Switzerland; and it is known that during the last portion of what is, nevertheless, still the stone period, the most precious metal of all, gold, was used for ornament. Gold is the one metal which is frequently found on the surface of the ground, and therefore it was naturally the first to come under the eye of man.
The religion of the mound-builders probably consisted in part of the worship of the dead, so that the very tombs themselves, and not the cromlechs only, were a sort of temples. And yet they had the deepest dread of the reappearance of the departed upon earth—of his ghost. To prevent his ‘walking’ they adopted a strange practical form of exorcism. They strewed the ground at the grave’s mouth with sharp stones or broken pieces of pottery, as though a ghost could have his feet cut, and by fear of that be kept from returning to his old haunts. For ages and ages after the days of the mound-builders the same custom lived on of which we here see the rise. The same ceremony—turned now to an unmeaning rite—was used for the graves of those, such as murderers or suicides, who might be expected to sleep uneasily in their narrow house. This is the custom which is referred to in the speech of the priest to Laertes.[12] Ophelia had died under such suspicion of suicide, that it was a stretch of their rule, he says, to grant her Christian burial.
‘And but the great command o’ersways our order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
To the last trumpet: for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her.’
* * * * * * * * *
The body of him for whom the mound was built was not buried in the centre, but at one end, and that commonly the east, for in most cases the barrows lie east and west. It is never stretched out flat, but lies or sits in a crouched attitude, the head brought down upon the breast, and the knees raised up to meet the chin. So that the dead man was generally left facing toward the west—the going down of the sun. There cannot but be some significance in this. The daily death of the sun has, in all ages and to all people, spoken of man’s own death, his western course has seemed to tell of that last journey upon which all are bent. So that the resting-place of the soul is nearly always imagined to lie westward in the home of the setting sun. For the rest, there seems little doubt that the barrows represent nothing else—though upon a large scale—than the dwelling-home of the time, and we may believe that the greater part of the funeral rights connected with the mounds were very literal and unsymbolical.[13] The Eskimo and Lapps of our day dwell in huts no more commodious than the small chambers of the barrows, and exceedingly like them in shape; only they keep them warm by heaping up over them not earth but snow. In these hovels they sit squatting, in an attitude not unlike that of the skeleton of the tumuli. Of the human remains the skulls are small and round, and have a prominent ridge over the sockets of the eyes, showing that the ancient race was of small stature with round heads—what is called brachycephalus, or short-headed, and had over-hanging eyebrows; in short, their skeletons bare a considerable resemblance to those of the modern Laplanders.
We are still, however, left in darkness about that part of the stone-age thought which has left the grandest traces, and of which we should so much have wished to be informed; I mean the religion. Besides the tumuli we have those enormous piles of stone called cromlechs, or dolmens, and sometimes miscalled Druid circles—such as the well-known Stonehenge; these cromlechs were, we may believe, temples or sacred places. Each arrangement of the stones is generally like a simple portico, made by placing one enormous block upon two others; and these porticoes are sometimes arranged in circles, as at Stonehenge, sometimes in long colonnades, as at Carnac in Brittany. Lesser dolmens have been found in most European countries. There can be little doubt that these huge monuments possessed a religious character. And here is one proof of the fact. As a rule, the grave-mounds—the tumuli—are built upon elevations commanding a considerable prospect, and it is rare to find two within sight. Yet over Salisbury Plain, and the part about Stonehenge, they are much more numerous, as many as a hundred and fifty having been discovered in this neighbourhood, as though all the ground about this great cromlech were a hallowed region, and it were a desired privilege to be buried within such sacred precincts. Of the worship which these stone altars commemorate we know absolutely nothing. There seems to be no reasonable doubt that they belong to the period we are describing. The name Druid Circles, which has been sometimes given them, is an absurd anachronism, for, as we shall have occasion to see later on, the ancestors of the Kelts (or Celts), to whom the Druidical religion belonged, were probably at this time still living on the banks of the Oxus in Central Asia; at any rate they had not yet migrated to Brittany or to Great Britain. Thus, though we must continue to wonder how these people could ever have raised such enormous stones as altars of their religion, the nature of that religion itself is hidden from us.
The tumuli and the relics which they contain are the truest representatives of the second stone age which have come down to us. The barrows raise their summits in every land, and the characteristic features of the remains found in them are the same for each. We must judge that they, that the most genuine stone-age tumuli, arose during the greatest extension of the stone-age races, before any new peoples had come to dispute their territory. What the kitchen-middens show in the germ, they show in its perfection—all the perfection attainable by it.
We have already enumerated the most important forms of weapons and implements found in these tumuli; and there would be no use in entering upon a lengthy verbal description of what would be so much better illustrated by drawings. The books enumerated in the Appendix give abundant illustrations of the stone-age remains. One caution, however, we need to give the reader. This second stone age is called, we know, the age of polished stone. But, as has been already said, that by no means implies that all the implements made in these days were polished. On the contrary, certain stone manufactures, notably arrow-heads, were never polished. They went on being made by chipping, not only during the whole of the second stone age, but far into the first metal age, when bronze had been introduced and was used for the manufacture of numerous weapons and implements. The grinding of the edges of certain sharp weapons is a more important characteristic than the polishing of the whole or a portion of their surface. But this grinding was not universally employed, but used generally only for the larger implements.
The lake
villages.
And now, having dealt with the remains from the tumuli, the flower, as we may call them, of the second stone period, we pass on to a third series of remains, which must be in part contemporary with the stone-using men, and have continued on and been absorbed into the metal age, which next supervened. These remains came from what are called the lake-dwellings, and though traces of such dwellings have been found in many countries in Europe, in our isles among others, still the chief provenance of the lake-dwellings, so far as our discoveries yet go, is in Switzerland and the north of Italy. But let it not be supposed that these lake-dwellings extended over a short period. A variety of separate pieces of evidence enforce upon us the conclusion that the stone age in Europe endured for at least two thousand years. Even the latter portion of that epoch will allow a cycle vast enough for the lives of the lake-dwellers; for the dwellings did not come to an end at the end of the age of stone, they only began in it. They were seen by Roman eyes almost as late as the beginning of our own era.
For at least two thousand years, then, we may say, the men who lived in the country of the Swiss lakes, and those of Northern Italy, adopted for the sake of security the custom of making their dwellings, not upon the solid ground, but upon platforms constructed with infinite trouble above the waters of the lake. And the way they set about it was in this wise: Having chosen their spot—if attainable, a sunny shore protected as much as possible from storms, and having a lake-bottom of a soft and sandy nature—they proceeded to drive in piles, composed of tree-stems taken from the neighbouring forests, from four to eight inches in diameter. These piles had to be felled, and afterwards sharpened, either by fire or a stone axe, then driven in from a raft by the use of ponderous stone mallets; and when we have said that in one instance the number of piles of a lake village has been estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000, the enormous labour of the process will be apparent. This task finished, the piles were levelled at a certain height above the water, and a platform of boards was fastened on with pegs. On the platform were erected huts, probably square or oblong in shape, not more than twenty feet or so in length, adapted however for the use of a single family, and generally furnished, it would appear, with a hearthstone and a corn-crusher apiece. The huts were made of wattle-work, coated on both sides with clay. Stalls were provided for the cattle, and a bridge of from only ten or twelve to as much as a hundred yards in length led back to the mainland. Over this the cattle must have been driven every day, at least in summer, to pasture on the bank; and no doubt the village community separated each morning for the various occupations of fishing, for hunting, for agriculture, and for tending the cattle. As may be imagined, these wooden villages were in peculiar danger from fire, and a very large number have suffered destruction in this way; a circumstance fortunate for modern science, for many things which had been partially burnt before falling into the lake have, by the coating of charcoal formed round them, been made impervious to the corroding influence of the water. Thus we have preserved their very grain itself, and their loaves or cakes of crushed but not ground meal. The grains are of various kinds of wheat and barley, oats, and millet.[14]