It is natural to ask for what object the enormous trouble of erecting these lake-dwellings could have been undertaken; and the only answer which can be given is, that it was to protect their inhabitants from their enemies. Whether each village formed a separate tribe and made war upon its neighbours, or whether the lake-dwellers were a peaceful race fleeing from more savage people of the mainland, is uncertain. There is nothing which leads us to suppose they were a race of a warlike character, and as far as the arts of peace go they had advanced considerably upon the men of the tumuli. More especially do the woven cloths, sometimes worked with simple but not inartistic patterns, excite our admiration. They had their trade too. Ornaments of amber are frequent, and amber must have been brought from the Baltic; while in one settlement, believed to be of the stone age, the presence of a glass bead would seem to imply indirect commerce with Egypt, the only country in which the traces of glass manufacture at this remote period have been found.[15] It is believed by good authorities, that the stone age in Europe came to an end about two thousand years before Christ, or at a date which is generally considered to be about that of Abraham; and its shortest duration, as we saw, must also be considered to be two thousand years.
These men of the lakes stand in no degree behind the mound-builders for the material elements of civilization. Nay, they are in some respects before them. Their life seems to have been more confined and simple than that which was going on in other parts of Europe. Its very peacefulness and simplicity gave men the opportunity for perfecting some of their arts. Thus their agriculture was more careful and more extended than that of the men of the tumuli. Their cattle would appear to have been numerous; all were stall-fed upon the island home; if in the morning driven out to pasture over the long bridge to the mainland, they were brought home again at night. To agriculture these lake-dwellers had added the special art of gardening, for they cultivated fruit-trees; and they span hemp and flax, and even constructed—it is believed—some sort of loom for weaving cloth. Yet for all that, if in these respects they were superior to the men of the tumuli, their life was probably more petty and narrow than the others’. There must have been some grandeur in the ideas of men who could have built those enormous tombs and raised those wondrous piles of altar-stones. If the first were made in honour of their chiefs, the existence of such chiefs implies a power in the stone-age men of expanding into a wide social life; so too the immense labour which the raising of the cromlechs demanded argues strong if not the most elevated religious ideas. And it has been often and truly remarked that these two elements of progress, social and religious life, are always intimately associated. It is in a common worship more than in common language that we find the beginning of nationalities. It was so in Greece. The city life grew up around the temple of a particular tutelary deity, and the associations of cities arose from their association in the worship at some common shrine. The common nationality of the Hellenes was kept alive more than anything in the quadrennial games in honour of the Olympian Zeus, just as the special citizenship of Athens found expression in the peculiar worship of the virgin goddess Athênê. So we may well argue from the great stone remains, that man had even then made some progress in political life. They show us the extended conditions of tribal government. But the lake-dwellers only give us a picture of the simplest and narrowest form of the village community. It is with them a complete condition of social equality; there is no appearance of any grade of rank; no hut on these islands is found larger or better supplied or more cared for than the rest. A condition of things not unlike that which we find in Switzerland at the present day; one favourable to happiness and contentment, to improvement in the simpler arts, but not to wide views of life, or to any great or general progress.
The civilization of
the stone ages.
And now let us, before we bid adieu to the men of the stone age, recount our gains, and see what picture the researches of pre-historic science allow us to draw of the progress of mankind from its earliest condition to that in which we now find it. We will forget for a moment the great gap which intervenes between the two stone ages, the age of unpolished stone and the age of polished stone, and simply following step by step the changes in human implements much as if we were walking round the cases of some well-arranged museum, we will note, as we pass it, each marked improvement or new acquisition in the arts of life.
1. To begin, then, with the men of the river drift—so far as we can judge, the rudest and most uncultured of all. It is not certain that these men had so much as wooden handles to their implements of stone, but it is probable that they had them. As we have said, they had only two or three marked varieties in these weapons. How little advance there seems from the state of simply using or hurling the stones in the state in which they are found! At the same time, it must be said that the implements of wood or horn, pointed stakes or even javelins, which these early men may have had would almost certainly have perished.
Nor, again, is there any evidence that the men of the drift period were cognizant of the use of fire, though here it is more likely that they were than that they were not.
2. When we come to the cave-dwellers we see marked signs of a higher civilization. The first and most important of these signs undoubtedly is the evidence of knowledge how to procure fire. We see a much greater variety in the implements used by the cave-dwellers. This, no doubt, is due in part to the disappearance of a portion of the implements of the drift age; but still we must take things as we find them. And putting side by side the specimens of the drift-implements and the cave-implements, we are at once struck by the superiority of the latter in make and in variety of form.
Thirdly, as has already been pointed out, we have here the earliest traces of art. On that subject it is not necessary again to dwell.
3. And now pass on to the second stone age, and see what progress man has made in the interval which separates the two periods. We begin with the society represented by the kitchen-middens. We do not possess any certainly polished-stone implements from these refuse-heaps. But I do not lay any great stress upon the invention of the art of polishing or even of grinding the stone; though that was not without importance, for it enabled the men of the second stone age to make use of much harder and more durable sorts of stone for their cutting implements. The earliest stone-age men made their implements of all sorts almost exclusively of flints, because the flint was a stone not difficult to chip into shape and to give an edge to by chipping. But when it comes to polishing or grinding instead of chipping an edge upon stones, there are a variety of other kinds of stone which are much more durable and much more serviceable than flints are, for the very reason that they are not liable to chip, and these stones (jade, granite, greenstone, obsidian, or one or other of the marbles, for example) we find a good deal employed during the latter stone age.
What, however, is more significant than would be the use of polished-stone implements by the kitchen-midden men is the evidence of their use of canoes, and therefore the evidence that they understood the art of navigation.