The second form, the dunn—or schmalnackiges Beil—may be compared to a long and flattened almond with a small part at the pointed end removed and a narrow strip cut off from each side. The flatter surfaces nearly meet at the end opposite the cutting edge, leaving this end thin. The surfaces have become much more nearly flat, and the cross-section a rectangle with somewhat short ends and slightly curved sides. These belong to the period of the earliest stone graves or still earlier. They could be easily fastened in a wooden handle. This form is very common in Scandinavia.
The third form, the breit—or dick—nackiges Beil, has almost exactly the shape of a thick chisel-blade with broad and thick back opposite the edge, and is rectangular in cross-section. It appears in the later megalithic tombs and the underground stone vaults or cists.
Thin-backed axe. | Hammer axes—Late Neolithic. |
Palæolithic hand-stones—“Coups-de-Poing.” |
FORMS OF PREHISTORIC AXE
Late in the Neolithic period, usually after the introduction of copper, we find an axe—or “hammer-axe”—shorter and much thicker, somewhat in the shape of a very light stonemason’s hammer, and with a hole for the handle. These axes sometimes had two cutting edges, sometimes one edged and the other blunt for hammering. Many of them were exceedingly beautiful in form, design, and finish. But this method of fastening the head to the handle greatly weakened the brittle stone. Many of them were probably merely articles of luxury or adornment. The hole was made by twirling a stick or bone, with plenty of sand, water, and patience.
We have thus in the axes and the megaliths a well-established sequence of forms, but no means of fixing dates except at the beginning and end of the whole period. Apparently there was a long time between the Scandinavian shell-heaps and the fully established Neolithic culture, of which we have practically no records.
Peculiar types of axes (except the mattock), and the megaliths do not occur in the province of the banded pottery, which itself will probably some day give us the clew to a system of chronology. The pottery of Thessaly, Thrace, and certain parts of the Balkan Peninsula is being gradually synchronized with that of Mycenæan and pre-Mycenæan Greece. Important discoveries seem reasonably certain in a not distant future. We can only wait for them with what patience we can assume.
Our real and definite knowledge of the age of the lake-dwellings is hardly better. Hoops tells us that they belong to the Beech period of the Swiss flora. But this period may be much older in Switzerland than in Scandinavia; how much older we do not know. The underground stone burial-cysts of Switzerland look late. The small number of the villages containing no trace of copper and the high grade of household arts and technique in even the oldest of them suggest the same conclusion. Here again it seems dangerous to even conjecture a date.
Montelius, whose opinion on these subjects is certainly of great value, says: “All things considered, I am convinced that the first stone graves were erected here in the north more than 3,000 years before Christ.”[132] (It may be safe, therefore, to date them provisionally between 3000 and 4000 B. C.) “The epoch of the dolmens with covered entrance (Gangräber) begins about the middle of the third millennium B. C., and the epoch of the stone vaults or cysts (Steinkisten) corresponds to the centuries about 2000 B. C.”