The earliest signs of the existence of man in Berkshire are, as we have said, the implements of stone, mostly flint, found in the gravels; and the implements of the Palaeolithic Period take us back to a very old time, so old that the surface features of our district were then quite different from what we see now.
There is a fine series of Palaeolithic implements in the Reading Museum, and most of them have been found in gravel-pits near the river Thames in the Reading and Twyford district, or in the Cookham and Maidenhead district. The implements occur in the gravel in such a way as to prove that they were brought into the position in which we find them at the same time and in the same manner as the other stones in the gravel, and the men who made them consequently lived at or before the date of the making of the beds of gravel. All the gravels in question were made by our rivers, and as the places where we find the implements are in some cases from 85 to 114 feet above the present level of the river, we infer that the valley has been deepened as much as from 85 to 114 feet since the time when the men who made the implements lived.
Wayland Smith’s Cave
We now come to the Neolithic Period when, as we have seen, man was a much more civilised person than the earlier man is believed to have been. Some of his burial mounds still remain, and being oval in plan are known as long barrows. Wayland Smith’s Cave, a mile to the east of Ashbury (p. 83), is composed of some 32 stones, the remains of a long barrow of Neolithic times.
Flint Implements of the Neolithic Period found in Berkshire
Neolithic implements are of stone, but in many cases they are unlike the older implements in being of polished stone. In the Reading Museum there is a fine polished flint chisel from Englefield, and also polished axes from Broadmoor, from Pangbourne, and from the beds of the Thames and Kennet. In the British Museum there is a beautiful dagger of flint from a barrow on Lambourn Down. Pretty little arrow-heads have been found at many places on the downs and in the Wallingford district.
There was in Berkshire a long interval between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Periods, but so far as we know there was no such break between the Neolithic Period and the Bronze Age. All we can say is that there was a time when the inhabitants of our district began to use implements of copper, or of copper alloyed with tin, i.e. bronze, for some purposes, but they still continued to use implements of stone, and it is not always possible to say whether a stone implement belongs to the Neolithic Period, to the Bronze Age, or to an even later date.
Many remains of the Bronze Age have been found in burial-mounds or barrows, and the barrows of this period are circular, with a diameter of fifty to one hundred feet, and hence termed round barrows. Many pieces of sepulchral pottery of this age from Berkshire will be found both in the British Museum and the Reading Museum. A considerable number of bronze implements were found in one place at Yattendon, and another hoard of them was discovered at Wallingford. A great many bronze swords, daggers, and spear-heads have been found in the river Thames, and are to be seen in the Museums.