Page:Archaeologia volume 38 part 2.djvu/72

300

The thickness of these latter beds we ascertained by boring, as the pit is not worked below the bed of clay No. 4. The shells are all of existing species of fresh-water and land mollusca, such as Unio, Planorbis, Succinea, Bithinia, Valvata, Pisidium, Cyclas, and Helix; and are not, as Mr. Frere had supposed, of marine origin.

An old workman in the pit at once recognised one of the French implements shown him, and said that many such were formerly found there in a bed of gravel, which, in the part of the pit formerly worked, attained occasionally a thickness of three to four feet. The large bones and flint weapons were found indiscriminately mixed up in this bed. Bones are still frequently met with in the bed of clay No. 4, and Mr. T. E. Amyot, of Diss, whose father was for many years Treasurer of this Society, has an astragalus of an elephant which was found here, it is believed in this bed, and also various other mammalian remains from this pit.

During the winter of 1858-59 the workmen had discovered two of the flint implements (to which they gave the appropriate name of fighting stones), one of which Mr. Prestwich recovered from a heap of stones in the pit. It is more of the oval than of the spear-head form. Since that time several other specimens have been discovered, principally in the bed of brick-earth No. 2. Numerous other weapons which have been exhumed at Hoxne in former years are preserved in various collections, but there is no record of the exact positions in which they were found. At Hoxne, however, as well as at Amiens, I have had ocular testimony on this point; for in the gravel thrown out from a trench dug under our own supervision, I myself found one of the implements of the spear-head type, from which however the point had been unfortunately broken by the workmen in digging.

It must have lain at a depth of about eight feet from the surface, and the section presented in the trench was as follows:—