And perhaps, since primitive worship concerned the community rather than the individual,[472] common superstitions and participation in sacrificial feasts were already beginning to do their work of creating the sense of kindred between divers groups, out of which, ages later and after successive new invasions, war and policy were to develop a state.[473]
We have gathered some scraps of information from the tools and weapons and pottery, the dwellings and mines, the graves and the skeletons of neolithic man. Can these dry bones live? Only for him who has imagination, which, as the historian whose own was supported by a vast armoury of solid knowledge declared with splendid paradox, ‘is the mother of all history as of all poetry.’[474] It is not when we are reading the memoirs in which discoveries are recorded, not when we are wandering through the galleries of a museum, that those happy moments come in which we discern the faint outlines of the prehistoric world, but rather when we are roaming over sand or moor or upland, looking for the tools that those old workers wrought, in the midst of the monuments which their hands upreared. Not the outward life alone comes back to us—the miner with lamp and pick creeping down the shaft; the cutler toiling amid a waste of flints; herdsmen following cattle on the downs; girls milking at sundown; lithe swarthy hunters returning from the chase; fowlers in their canoes gliding over the meres; serfs hauling blocks up the hillside to build the chambers in yonder barrow; the funeral feast; the weird sepulchral rites; the bloody strife for the means of subsistence between clan and clan:—we think also of the meditations of the architects who created those monuments in memory of the dead and of the adventurous lives of those who were thus honoured; of their survivors’ desperate denial of death’s finality; of the immeasurably slow, age-long movement of expanding civilization; of the influence of superstition, paralysing, yet ever tending to consolidate society; of the enthusiast whose thoughts soared above the common level; of the toil that spent itself in millenniums past, but is still yielding fruit; of unrecorded deeds of heroism and of shame; of man’s ambition and of woman’s love.
An alien invasion: period of transition.
Before the Neolithic Age came to its end invaders began to appear who had not yet learned the art of metal-working, but who belonged to a race of which the people in possession knew nothing.[475] Sepulchral customs began to change. Long barrows were erected still, but, as in France, Holland, and other lands,[476] mounds of circular form were rising, and at last supplanted them. It was a time of transition; and although in the far west and the far north the Stone Age lingered on, another was approaching, which had long since dawned in more favoured lands,—the Age of Bronze.
CHAPTER IV
THE BRONZE AGE AND THE VOYAGE OF PYTHEAS
A Copper Age preceded the Bronze Age in certain countries, but has not been proved to have existed in Britain.
Those who have learned to realize the extreme slowness with which material culture was evolved in its earlier stages would be disposed to doubt whether the first metallic implements were made of bronze, and to ask whether, at all events in some part of the world, the Neolithic must not have merged into a Copper Age. It is easy to imagine that the accidental melting of a piece of copper ore may have suggested the possibility of fashioning the metal into tools; and that inventive cutlers took impressions of stone axes in clay, and found that they could make from them copper axes which were not liable to break:[477] but one can hardly believe that simultaneously the discovery should have been made that the softness and bluntness of copper could be remedied by mixing with it a small proportion of tin. It is indeed not inconceivable that bronze was the first metal which was ever manufactured; for near the surface copper ores often contain tin oxide; and it has been proved that by smelting such ores bronze can be produced.[478] But of course only experiment could have shown that tools made of this metal were better than copper. The Egyptians were acquainted with the use of copper long before they began to manufacture bronze;[479] and in many parts of the British Isles as well as of the Continent copper implements have been discovered which belonged to prehistoric times.[480] But such discoveries do not necessarily prove the existence of a Copper Age: they may often be accounted for by the supposition that tin, which is far less widely distributed than copper, was temporarily wanting. In many cases implements of copper and of bronze have been met with in intimate association; and sometimes copper implements of advanced type with primitive bronze.[481] When, on the other hand, copper implements are repeatedly found in deposits which are known to be older than the oldest bronze in the districts in which they occur, the conclusion is irresistible that they were used there before bronze was manufactured.[482] There was certainly a Copper Age in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyprus; and probably also in Hungary, Northern Italy, Spain, and Ireland, with which, in ancient times, Spain was closely connected, and in which copper celts were unmistakably modelled upon those of stone: but for Britain the evidence is not sufficient.[483] We must assume then provisionally that in our island the metal which was first used for cutting-tools was bronze.
Bronze implements used for many centuries in Europe before the Iron Age.