Fig. 32.—Bronze Knife, Heathery Burn (natural size).
Fig. 33.—Bronze Armlet, Heathery Burn.
Fig. 34.—Bronze Spearhead, Heathery Burn (½ size).
Fig. 35.—Bronze Mould for casting a socketed celt.
On removing the upper of these two stalagmitic floors a perfect human skull was discovered, along with broken bones of animals, charcoal, limpet shells, bone pins, an instrument of bone like a paper-knife, coarse pottery with fragments of chert imbedded in its mass, a portion of a jet armlet, as well as several boars’ tusks. The same stratum at another place furnished a singular bronze knife with a socket for the handle ([Fig. 32]),[90] bronze pins, celts, an armlet of twisted wire ([Fig. 33]), along with shells of limpet, mussel, and oyster, and charcoal, and at a third, on the other side of the watercourse, a bronze spear-head. Subsequently, many articles were added to the above list, seven pins, three rings, two split-rings, a “razor,” disk, three socketed celts, one chisel, two gouges, and four spear-heads of bronze, and a fine bracelet, and two ornaments of the horse-shoe, or split-ring type, made of thin plates of gold. One of the spear-heads, in the collection of the Rev. Canon Greenwell, is represented in [Fig. 34]. There were also waste pieces of bronze, and the half of a bronze mould for casting celts, [Fig. 35], in which one of the associated celts had actually been cast, since it is of the same pattern. These articles were probably concealed in the cavern by workers in bronze, who were prevented, by some unforeseen accident, from obtaining them again. The charcoal and the broken bones of the Bos longifrons, badger, and dog, imply that the cave had been used as a habitation; and possibly the two human skulls, which have been described by Professor Huxley and Mr. Carter Blake, may have belonged to the possessors of the hoard of bronze and gold. Both were discovered in the same stratum and below the floor of stalagmite.
The more perfect of the two skulls is considered by Professor Huxley to belong to the same long-headed race of men as that found at Muskham, in the valley of the Trent,—to a form which he terms the River-bed type, and that cannot be separated from those obtained from the long tumuli of the South of England, and considered by Dr. Thurnam to belong to a Neolithic Basque, or Iberian population.
Articles distinctly of the bronze age have been already noticed as having been met with in the caves of Kirkhead, in Cartmell, and in Thor’s Cave, in Staffordshire. From the latter the bracelet of thin bronze, [Fig. 31], was obtained by Mr. Carrington, of Wetton. The rarity of bronze implements in caves in Britain and the Continent is probably, to a large extent, due to the value of the material, and to the fact that it could be re-melted. If a bronze article happened to be broken, the pieces would naturally be kept for future use, and not thrown away, as in the case of a fractured stone implement. The former, therefore, are rare, the latter comparatively abundant.