Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples

by marquis de Jean-François-Albert du Pouget Nadaillac

For centuries this occupation of caves continued, offering as they did a shelter that was dry and warm in winter, and cool in summer. Homer tells us that the Cyclops lived on the heights of the mountains and in the depths of the caves,[4] and Prometheus says that, like the feeble ant, men dwelt in deep subterranean caves, where the sun never penetrated.[5]

Whilst the men of the Petit-Morin valley hollowed out caves, or enlarged those made by nature, others took refuge in buts made of dried clay and interlaced branches, or in tents of the skins of the animals they had slain, and, though these fragile dwellings have disappeared, leaving no trace, there yet remain indelible evidences of the presence of many successive generations. Everywhere throughout the world we find heaps of rubbish, consisting chiefly of the shells of mollusca and crustacea, broken bones, flakes of flint, and fragments of stone and bone implements, covering vast areas and often rising to a considerable height.

Not until our own day did these rubbish heaps attract attention, and it was reserved to our own generation, so interested in all that relates to the past, to recognize their true significance. Steenstrup noticed, in the north of Europe, that these mounds consisted nearly entirely of the shells of edible species, such as the oyster, mussel, and littorina littorea; that they were all those of adult specimens, but not all subject to similar conditions of existence or native to the same waters. The kitchen-middings, or heaps of kitchen refuse—such was the name given to these shell-mounds—could not have been the natural deposits left by the waves after storms, for in that case they would have been mixed with quantities of sand and pebbles. The conclusion is inevitable, that man alone could have piled up these accumulations, which were the refuse flung away day by day after his meals. The excavation of the kitchen-middings confirmed in a remarkable manner the opinion of Steenstrup, and everywhere a number of important objects were discovered. In several places the old hearths were brought to light. They consisted of flat stones, on which were piles of cinders, with fragments of wood and charcoal. It was now finally proved that these mounds occupied the site of ancient settlements, the inhabitants of which rarely left the coast, and fed chiefly on the mollusca which abounded in the waters of the North Sea.

These primeval races, however savage they may have been, were not wanting in intelligence. The earliest inhabitants of Russia placed their dwellings near rivers above the highest flood-level known to or foreseen by them. The Scandinavians were most precise in the orientation of their homes, and M. de Quatrefages points out that the kitchen-midding of Sœlager is set against a hill in the best position for protecting those who lived near it from the north winds, which are so trying in these districts on account of their violence. At Havelse, says Sir John Lubbock, the settlement was on rather higher ground, and, though close to the shore, was quite beyond the reach of the waves. The English visitors had an excavation made whilst they were present, and in two or three hours they obtained about a hundred fragments of bone, many rude flakes, sling stones, and fragments of flint, together with some rough axes of the ordinary shell-mound type. The excavations at Meilgaard a little later by the same explorers were even more fruitful in results.

Scandinavia does not appear to have been occupied in the Paleolithic period, and the most ancient facts concerning it only date from the expeditions of the Romans against the Teutons, and our knowledge even of them is very incomplete.[6] We are still ignorant of much which may have been known to the Carthaginians and the Phœnicians. It is possible that in the remote days under notice the Scandinavians were ignorant of the art of tilling the ground, for so far no cereal or agricultural product of any kind has been discovered, nor the bones of any domestic animal, except indeed those of the dog, which may, however, have been still in a wild state. Amongst the bones collected from the kitchen-middings, those of the stag, the kid, and the boar are much the most numerous. The bear, the urns, the wild cat, the otter, the porpoise, the seal, and the small mammals, the marten, the water-rat and the mouse, have also been found. At Havelse were collected more than 3,500 mammal bones, amongst which do not occur those of the musk-ox, the reindeer, the elk, or the marmot; their absence bearing witness to a more temperate climate than that of the present day in the regions under notice. The stag antlers found belong to every season of the year, from which we may conclude that the people of these districts, like the cave-men of the Pyrenees, had given up a nomad life and remained at home all the year round, living in the dwellings they had built upon the shores of the sea.

Amongst the birds found, we may mention the large penguin, now extinct, the moor-fowl, which fed entirely on pine buds, and several species of clucks and geese; whilst amongst the fish were the herring, the cod, the dab, and the eel. The numerous relics of chelonia prove the existence of numbers of the turtle tribe in the North Sea.

A great variety of objects, most of them of a coarse type, have been found beneath the kitchen-middings; metals are however completely absent, and it is probable that they were quite unknown to the Scandinavians for several centuries after their arrival in the country.

It is easy to quote similar facts in other countries. In 1877, Count Ouvarof mentioned, at the Archæological Congress at Kazan, some kitchen-middings near the Oka, a little river flowing into the Volga near Nijni-Novgorod. In excavating some bougrys, or little mounds of sand overlooking the valley, he discovered amongst the layers of alluvium, successive deposits of cinders and fragments of charcoal, which appear to have been the remains of a fire. A little lower down in another deposit were fragments of pottery, stone weapons and implements, and an immense number of shells. Judging from these relics of their daily life, this numerous population must have fed exclusively on fish and mollusca, for excavations brought to light but few mammal bones. The mollusca were all of species that only live in salt water. From this we know that the waves washed the shores near this bougry, and that a milder climate probably prevailed in these regions, making life more supportable.

Virchow has recognized on the shores of Lake Burtneek in Germany, a kitchen-midding belonging to the earliest Neolithic times, perhaps even to the close of the Palæolithic period. He there picked up some stone and bone implements, and notices on the one hand the absence of the reindeer, and on the other, as in Scandinavia, that of domestic animals. But in this case, the home of the living became the tomb of the dead, and numerous skeletons lay beside the abandoned hearths. Similar discoveries have been made in Portugal; shell-heaps having been found thirty-five to forty miles from the coast, and from sixty-five to eighty feet above the sea-level. Here also excavations have brought to light several different hearths; and in many of the most ancient kitchen-middings in the valley of the Tigris were found crouching skeletons, proving that here too the home had become the tomb.[7]

Similar deposits are by no means rare in France. M. du Chatellier mentions one in Brittany, which he estimates as 325 cubic feet in size. From it be has taken spear- and arrow-heads, knives and scrapers, some highly finished, others but roughly cut and often with scarcely any shape at all. The population was evidently ichthyophagous, to judge by the vast accumulations of shells of scallops, oysters, limpets, pectens, and other mollusca. The few animal bones are those of the stag, the bear, and certain wading birds.