Ingenuity of Lake Dwellers, Clothing, &c.—It has been remarked that the brains of most savages and the skulls of most primitive races are larger than, in theory, they ought to be; often rather larger than the brains and skulls of the average masses of the great cities of the present day; but this need not cause surprise, if the life of intelligent interest passed by the savage child be taken into consideration. From the tenderest age he was observant of all the devices practised by his parents for procuring clothing, food, means of defence, in short, all the essentials of existence; the natural result of his wild life was health and strength; indeed, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, it could only be the robust who lived through the hardships and climatic exposure incidental to a savage life. The lake dweller was no exception to this rule, for his ingenuity would be most fully exercised in endeavouring to procure the means of sustenance for his family. It is easy to imagine the various daily occupations needful in his struggles for existence. Timber from the forest supplied him with materials both for his dwelling and for fuel; the skins of wild animals furnished him with clothing, he shaped them with a sharp flint flake, and sewed them with thongs, using as needle the pierced bone of some bird or small mammal. In early Irish history mention occurs of skin or leather garments: when Muircheartach MacNeill made his celebrated circuit of Ireland, A.D. 942, it is stated that his soldiers were clad in long leather cloaks. We are not left to mere conjecture regarding the manner in which the men of these primitive times protected themselves from the inclemency of the weather. In the year 1821 the body of a man, about six feet in height, with dark, reddish-coloured hair, short beard, and teeth in a good state of preservation, was found ten feet below the surface of a bog, on the lands of Gallagh, near Castle Blakeney, county Galway. The head, legs, and feet were bare, but the body was covered with a deer-skin tunic reaching to the knees and half-way down the arms; in front it was laced and fastened by thongs of the same material. The mantle was, unfortunately, much injured in the disinterment, but a few fragments of it still hung together; portions of the seams sewed with fine gut of three strands still remained; “the regularity and closeness of the stitches are most remarkable, as shown by the accompanying cut, in which a portion of one of the joinings is represented double the natural size. This closure was effected by what is termed the looped stitch, similar to that used in working a button-hole, so that by having each stitch knotted the chance of ripping was lessened.”[80] The age of the Irish mummy (if we may apply that term to the body here described) is considered by some to date back at least 2000 years.
Fig. 11.
Fragment of Deerskin Garment.
A bed of growing peat is endowed with marvellous powers. It seems to act like the ancient Egyptian process of embalming on the bodies of men or animals that have become accidentally entombed in it, preserving them for centuries after their contemporaries have, by the ordinary laws of nature, totally disappeared, and organic substances, such as butter, seem also to feel its influence. Peat may bear comparison with ice, the well-known preservative properties of which were strikingly illustrated by the discovery on the shores of Lake Oncoul, in Siberia, of a carcass of the Elephas primigenius, or mammoth (supposed to have become extinct in the Pleistocene period) in a perfect state, and so well refrigerated that, when thawed, the dogs of the neighbourhood devoured its flesh. Again, in 1846, the summer in Siberia had been unusually hot; the frozen marshes which extend along each side of the river Indigirka were thawed, and a perfectly preserved carcass of a mammoth floated down the stream. This monster had most probably met his death centuries before by sinking into the deep snow of the morasses, was frozen over, and thus remained until the exceptional summer heat melted his icy prison.
Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages.—We know that the learned have divided the period man has inhabited the globe into what may roughly be called three Ages—the Stone, the Bronze, and the Iron. Ancient mythology presented us with another, ycleped the Golden, when our planet was supposed to be a paradise, and man lived in a state of perpetual happiness; it is to be feared that the idea of a golden age, either past or to come, is purely mythical. Future archæologists may, perhaps, be tempted to apply the designation “Steel” to the present or now commencing epoch, in order to distinguish it from the mere “Iron Age.” Improved methods of manufacture are now-a-days causing steel in some degree to supersede its parent metal, iron, even as iron superseded bronze. Excavations on the site of crannogs have demonstrated clearly the fact that some of them have had a continuous existence throughout the three ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Classification of the earth’s history into those three ages does not, however, imply a defined and distinctive period when stone, bronze, or iron alone was in exclusive use, though there may possibly have been a time in which only stone and bone were available. When the empires of the Tigris and Nile were in their prime, the northern littoral of Europe was inhabited by a race using implements of bone and stone, but these regions were in the Bronze Age[81] at the period when the Phœnicians had attained the zenith of their power. According to some writers, the inhabitants of the Baltic littoral had not till early in the Christian era discarded bronze and stone for iron. Although weapons of bone or flint were certainly of an earlier age than bronze and iron, yet it is more than probable that flint, bronze, and iron may have been in use at one and the same period, and even in the same locality, down to a period long subsequent to the Christian era. To this day the Esquimaux use bone implements, but they also employ iron, so that in remote countries a stone age might be said still to exist, the few iron implements in possession of the wild tribes being acquired by recent contact with western civilization. In Ireland there is no fixed line of demarcation between the stone, the bronze, and the iron age; there was an overlapping and co-mingling as the better and more useful metal gradually superseded its predecessor. Thus a stone instrument, by itself, would be a most deceptive guide in determining the state of civilization of the inhabitants of the site on which it was discovered, because stone implements are also found associated with articles both of bronze and iron. “Like the three principal colours of the rainbow,” writes Mr. Evans, “these three stages of civilization overlap, intermingle, and shade off, the one into the other; and yet their succession, as far as Western Europe is concerned, appears to be equally well defined with that of the prismatic colours, though the proportions of the spectrum may vary in different countries.” Petrie, the well-known Irish antiquary, was the first to claim for a large class of iron remains the position of an interesting connecting link, which they are now allowed to hold, between the bronze manufacture of a remote age and the industrial achievements of comparatively modern days. At the period of the first discovery of the remains of Irish lake dwellings, archæologists looked upon objects of iron found in lakes, or in their immediate vicinity, with very little interest, for it was considered that they could not have held out against the corroding influence of water for a lengthened period; therefore iron was supposed to stamp lacustrine habitations with a mediæval or even modern impress. The belief was then very general that the inhabitants of Erin of the prehistoric period, having existed generation after generation as manufacturers of flint and stone weapons, had gradually, through some unknown channel, become acquainted with gold, silver, and bronze, and that this latter metal, down even to the advent of St. Patrick, was used almost exclusively in the manufacture of weapons of war, small ornaments for personal adornment, and objects of domestic use. Articles of stone, bone, wood, bronze, and iron have been discovered in strange medley: swords, spear and javelin heads, axes, daggers, knives, hones, querns, shears, tweezers, chains, combs, pins, brooches, beads, horse trappings, cauldrons of hammered bronze, lumps of iron slag, &c.—in short, every conceivable object, from the rudest flint implement to highly-finished silver ornaments.
The accidental discovery of the great historical crannog of Lagore, in the county Meath, already referred to, presents the first, and probably the most important, treasure-trove of earliest iron implements. In A.D. 848 an Irish chief, with his Danish allies, plundered this island fortress and burnt it; whilst in 933, nearly a century later, the place again suffered a similar fate at the hands of another marauder. Nothing more was heard of it till the date of its disinterment, about the year 1840. The latest period, therefore, to which the majority of the antiquities so plentifully found within and around this stronghold may be referred, is somewhere between the eleventh and earliest half of the tenth century. This approximate date is about the historic limit in which the so-called “Iron Age” may be allowed to have reached back in Ireland. How long it had previously existed there must be matter of conjecture; but it is almost incredible that its natives should have been far behind their neighbours in the art of metallurgy; and we know that Cæsar[82] found the Britons acquainted with the use of iron. It can only be surmised that, at some very remote period, bronze as the prevailing material gave way to iron, but the period of transition may probably be counted by centuries.[83]
Weapons and Tools.—In nearly all Irish crannogs, more especially in the larger sites, weapons of war and of the chase have been discovered in abundance, consisting chiefly of arrow- and spear-heads, swords, daggers or skeans, knives, and axe-heads. The numerous fragments of artificially fashioned bone found in and around crannogs plainly demonstrate how much that material was utilized by their inhabitants; many tips of the antlers of deer contained in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy and in that of the Royal Historical and Archæological Association, have evidently been sawn from the original branches, and employed in forming handles for swords, knives and daggers; some are ornamented, whilst others are pierced with a hole at one extremity, having evidently been fabricated for a distinct purpose, for spear- or javelin-heads, &c.; these were attached to handles or shafts, by means of the sinews of animals, or thongs of skin. Amongst primitive races the transition from tool to weapon is slight; the same article must, in many cases, have served the double purpose. Arrow- or spear-heads have been found of bone, horn, flint, bronze, and iron; they are usually of small size. Figs. [12] and [13], from Lough Ravel, county Antrim, represent (half-size) flakes fashioned into arrow- or spear-heads. [Fig. 14] is a flake of basalt (full-size) from Toombridge, in the same county. [Fig. 15] is a flint implement from the recently discovered crannog of Lisnacroghera.[84]