Fig. 4.—Brixham Cave Flint Implement. (Evans). (½).
Sufficient correspondence is traceable between the implements of the cave-earth and the river-drift to assign them to the same era; and so to justify us in testing its arts by their combined disclosures. The ossiferous cave of Brixham, which has recently been subjected to an exhaustive scientific investigation, consists of a series of galleries and passages in the Devonshire limestone. They are partly natural fissures, and partly chambers hollowed out by the action of running water. Those have been refilled with gravel, red cave-earth, and layers of stalagmite, which were in process of deposition while the ursus spelæus, or great cave-bear, still haunted their recesses, and when the reindeer was a native of the neighbouring region. Though visited from time to time by man, Brixham cave had never been made his dwelling-place or workshop; and so it has revealed only his rudest tools. Of these, Fig. 4 is a characteristic example of a rude lanceolate implement, which embodies within itself some very significant glimpses of the era to which it belongs. The great valleys were excavated and refilled with the rolled gravel of the drift during the prolonged operations of ice and floods. But it is here seen that the violence of the floods extended even to the recesses of the caves. The implement has been broken into three pieces, evidently at the period of the original filling up of the cave. One portion was recovered buried in the cave-earth of the flint-knife gallery; another fragment lay far apart, under three and a half feet of earth, in a neighbouring gallery; while a third portion has escaped even the careful and discriminating search which resulted in the recovery of those long-dissevered fragments. It has to be borne in remembrance that every fragment of flint found in the cave-earth was preserved, whether showing traces of human workmanship or not. Thirty-two fragments were discovered in all; with an interval of nearly a month between the finding of the first and second portions of the implement figured here. A still longer period elapsed before it was noticed that they fitted to each other as parts of the same worked flint. Most of the fragments so found have undergone great alteration in their structure, and have become absorbent and brittle. How little chance, therefore, is there that any delicately formed flint-tool should be recovered in the rolled gravel-beds!
But the comparatively virgin soil of the New World has examples of like primitive workmanship in reserve, to illustrate the significance of some of those amorphous flints which bear the evidence of art, and yet seem almost too artless for any purpose of man. The valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries have a special attraction as the sites of numerous earthworks and other remains of a prehistoric race, known, from one prominent class of their structures, as the Mound-Builders. In more recent centuries, within the period of European intercourse with the New World, the same valleys have been occupied by warlike tribes of the Red Indian race; and now that an industrious population has supplanted their ephemeral lodges with the cities and farmsteads of the Anglo-American settler, the traces even of the latest aborigines seem primitive as those of Europe’s neolithic era. During the summer of 1874 I devoted part of the long vacation to an inspection of some of the most remarkable earthworks and other ancient remains of this interesting locality; and among other objects illustrative of its past history, I visited the Flint Ridge, a siliceous deposit of the carboniferous age, which extends through the State, from Newark to New Lexington, and has been worked at various points to furnish materials for native implements. Here I had an opportunity of exploring the ancient pits from which it is assumed that the constructors of the gigantic earthworks of the neighbouring valleys procured the flint, or hornstone, of which their weapons and implements were chiefly made. The point visited is on the summit of an undulating range of hills about ten miles distant from the city of Newark and its remarkable earthworks, hereafter described. At various points along the ridge, both there and in other parts of the State, numerous funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five to fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of mining may be seen in other localities, as at Levenworth, about three hundred miles below Cincinnati, where the grey flint, or chert, abounds, of which large implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the pits are in many cases covered with the fractured flints, broken up, and partially shaped as if for purposes of manufacture. There for the first time I looked upon true counterparts of the drift implements; and in the course of an hour or two had no difficulty in procuring specimens closely repeating many forms familiar among those common to the cave-earth and the drift-gravel of France and England.
We are apt to think of the old flint and stone-workers as merely picking up the chance materials suited to their simple craft. But the use of flint in the manufacture of sling-stones, arrow-heads, and other missile weapons, as well as of all ordinary household implements, and those of war and the chase, involved a constant demand for fresh materials, frequently procurable only from distant localities. It is what might be assumed, therefore, apart from any direct evidence, that a regular system of quarrying for flint nodules best fitted for the tool-makers’ art was pursued; and that a trade or barter in the raw material furnished supplies to tribes remote from the flint-bearing chalk or gravel. But also it appears from the interesting explorations of Colonel A. Lane Fox at Cissbury, near Worthing,[[33]] and from those of the Rev. W. Greenwell, at Grime’s Graves, near Brandon, in Norfolk,[[34]] that the flint nodules were not only quarried, but prepared on the spot; so that the miner carried off with him, not a mere load of flint nodules, as the modern manufacturer might burden himself with the iron ore: but flints of the required dimensions, roughly shaped for the final operation which was to fashion them into knives, scrapers, arrow and lance-heads, hatchets, etc. Precisely the same process is manifest in the remains found in the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio. Flakes or spawls, knives, scrapers, almond and lanceolate blocks, abound in the first crude stage of manufacture. In studying those on the spot, I was strongly impressed by the similarity of many of them to the ruder implements of the drift; and hence was led to surmise that in the latter also we have in many cases, not the artless implements which fitly suggest a maker correspondingly deficient in even such skill and reasoning as guides the modern tool-making savage; but only rudely-blocked flints, fresh from the quarry, and in a condition least susceptible of injury in the violence to which the tool-bearing gravels have necessarily been subjected. May it not be, moreover, that in some of the richest deposits of such worked flints in the gravels of France and England, we have really the dispersed materials of such quarry accumulations, and not the stray implements of individual hunters? In this way only can we satisfactorily account for the fact that such traces of primeval man are now successfully sought for on purely geological evidence. The archæologist digs into the Celtic or Saxon barrow, and finds as his reward the implements and pottery of its builder. But English geologists, having determined the character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French drift, have sought for flint implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the fossil shells of the same period, and with like success. They have now been obtained in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey.[[35]] So entirely indeed has the man of the drift passed out of the province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up his “notes on further discoveries of flint implements in beds of post-pleiocene gravel and clay,” with a list of forty-one localities where gravel and clay-pits, or gravel-beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly be found, and subsequent discoveries have confirmed his anticipations.
It has been felt by many as an element which in some degree detracted from the otherwise incontrovertible force of this accumulated proof, that where the wrought flints are discovered in situ, they occur in beds of gravel and clay abounding in unwrought flints in every stage of accidental fracture, and including many which the most experienced archæologist would hesitate whether to classify as of natural or artificial origin. But on the assumption of regular quarrying and working in the flint-bearing strata, such traces of palæolithic art may be expected to occur in the river-gravels, as a geological formation in which the requisite material abounded; and which, moreover, in its latest reconstruction belongs to the river-valleys best adapted to be the habitat of post-glacial man. They are, in fact, the localities to which the experience of the archæologist would direct him when in search of the traces of rude hunting and fishing tribes; but also they are the same mammaliferous strata to which the geologist turns when looking for remains illustrative of the extinct fauna of the post-glacial age.
Fig. 5.—Lanceolate Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio, (2/3).
In and around the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio, are now to be seen the accumulated results of centuries of mining and quarrying, extending in all probability from the era of the Mound-Builders to the extinction of the Miamis, Shawnees, and other recent occupants of the Ohio valley. Swept by floods into the lower valleys, the smaller fragments would be broken up and disappear; and only such specimens would survive unchanged as in the valley of the Somme have startled archæologists by their numbers; and tempted sceptics to assign their origin to accidental fracture in the beds of gravel and unwrought flints in which they chiefly occur. In Fig. 5 a worked flint is shown, picked up in one of the pits on Flint Ridge, in Licking County, Ohio. A small piece has been broken off the point by recent fracture. Its analogy to one familiar type of drift implements can scarcely admit of question. This, it will be remembered, had never been removed from the pit, and doubtless represents the material thus roughly blocked out, from which the old artificer designed to fashion a finished tool. Another common type is shown in Fig. 6, roughly chipped into the crude form of an almond-shaped blade. Some of the specimens acquired by me are weather-stained from long exposure, and others discoloured and brittle; but many of them exhibit little traces of the effect of time. It may be doubted, indeed, if any of them can be regarded as of remote antiquity; though, doubtless, the ancient Mound-Builders
Fig. 6.—Almond-shaped Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio. (2/3).