In every country, and in every climate, we find men as well as women manifesting a taste for ornament. The progress of civilization has greatly increased this taste, but it existed as a natural instinct in the very earliest days of humanity, and the contemporary of the mammoth and the cave-bear, the cave-man cowering in his miserable den, sought for ornaments with which to deck himself. In the caves near the stations occupied by primeval men we find little bits of fossil coral, beads of hardened clay, the teeth of bears, wolves, and foxes, boars’ tusks, and the jawbones of small mammals, fish-bones, and belemnites pierced with holes, and intended to be used as amulets or ornaments to be worn round the neck. At Lafaye, we find the incisors of small rodents serving the same purpose. The dweller in the Sordes Cave owned a precious necklace made of forty bears’ and three lions’ teeth. The teeth found often have on them ornamental lines, which doubtless indicated the rank or celebrated the deeds of the chief. The Abbé Bourgeois describes some stags’ teeth found at Villehonneur (Charente), two of which bore scratches which may have had some signification. At Cro-Magnon were picked up some ivory plaques pierced with three holes; at Kent’s bole were found some oval disks measuring five by three inches, which in the delicacy of their workmanship presented a curious contrast to the other objects taken from the same cave. In the Belgian caves here picked up some thin slices of jet and some ivory plaques, and in those of the south of France fragments of steatite, cut into rectangular and lozenge shapes, whilst in the Thayngen Cave was found a pendant of lignite ([Fig. 27]). Men were not content with natural products; fashion demanded new forms and fresh materials.
Figure 27.
1. Lignite pendant. 2. Bone pendant (Thayngen Cave).
But what most attracted the attention of the ancient inhabitants of France were bright-colored shells. The caves of Roquemaure have yielded nearly a thousand disks and beads made of cockle-shells; at Cro-Magnon more than three hundred shells were picked up which formed a collar or necklace, which was not however so valuable as that of the man of Sordes. M. de Maret discovered at Placard numerous shells; some belonging to ocean species still extant, and others fossils of forms now extinct. Many of them are foreign to the country in which they were found. From the most remote times therefore the inhabitants of the present department of Charente fished in the Gulf of Gascony, crossed Aquitania, visited the shell marl deposits of Anjou and Touraine, and penetrated as far as the present Paris basin. The finding of the Cyprina Islandica in one of the French caves proves that the prehistoric men of France even went as far away as the north of England. This is by no means an isolated fact; numerous shells from the department of Champagne had been taken to tire shores of the Lesse and the Meuse. At Solutré have been found belemnites, ammonites, and Miocene shells, which were certainly never native to that district, with pieces of rock-crystal from the Alps, and beads made of a jadeite of unknown origin.
In Scotland have been found necklaces of nerites and limpets; at Aurignac, eighteen little plaques of cockle shell pierced with holes in the centre. At Laugerie-Basse, a man overtaken by a landslip had been crushed by the stones which had fallen upon him; time has destroyed his clothes, but the shells with which he had decked himself are still preserved.[21] He had worn four on his forehead, two on each shoulder, four on each knee, and two on each foot. All idea of these shells having formed a necklace must be abandoned; they were all notched, and had been used either to adorn or fasten the clothes.
The most interesting discoveries, however, were those made in the caves of Baoussé-Roussé, of which we have so often spoken. M. Rivière picked up the skeletons of two children, some thousand shells (Nassa neritea) artificially pierced, which had been used to deck their garments: Near an adult were other shells forming a necklace, a bracelet, an amulet, and a garter worn on the left leg; whilst on the head was a regular résille or net, not unlike that of the Spanish national costume, which net was made of small nerita shells and kept in place by bone pins.
We must also mention amongst favorite ornaments beads made of jet and of very fine ochreous clay dried in the sun, of calcareous crystalline rock, and of grayish schist, and in other places of beads of amber or of hyaline quartz, the brightness of which attracted the attention. At the station of Menieux (Charente) with flints of a type to which it is usual to give the names of Moustérien or Solutréen, excavations have yielded numerous carefully polished balls of calx, varying in diameter from one to two inches. If there had been any doubts as to their use, those doubts would have been removed by the discovery at Laugerie-Basse of a fragment of the shoulder-blade of a reindeer on which was engraved the figure of a woman wearing round her neck a necklace of clumsy round balls. Other yet stranger ornaments have been found, for which what we have said about the cannibalism of early man should have prepared the reader. Our ancestors of the Stone age adorned themselves with necklaces of human teeth, and two skeletons have been dug out wearing round their necks this token of their victories. M. de Baye possesses in his collection some round pieces of skull pierced with holes ([Fig. 28]), and at the meeting of the American Association in 1886, at Ann Arbor (Michigan) were presented some ornaments made of human bones from a mound in Ohio.
In taking from the gangue in which it was imbedded a skull from the megalithic monument of Vauréal, Pruner Bey noticed a fragment of a human shoulder blade pierced with an incision in which was fixed a little rounded piece of bone. This style of ornament seems to have remained in use for many centuries, for M. Nicaise has lately discovered at Moulin d’Oyes (Marne) a necklace made of calx balls, shells, and pendants cut out of the scales of unio shells. On this necklace hung a round piece of human cranium, and in the Gallic cemetery at Varille, the exterior lamina of a human lumbar vertebra was fastened to a necklace made of coral beads.