Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/308

280 came the sequence of events recorded in the history of this country; and yet these little heaps, lying immediately beneath the greensward, had retained their places undisturbed, although the Romans used the camp at Cissbury for military purposes, and have left numerous traces of their occupation. From the time when they were made down to to-day there had been no appreciable change in the surface soil in which they rested. With this evidence before us, we cannot shut our eyes to the enormous lapse of time necessary for the production of the great geographical changes which took place in the interval between the Neolithic and Palæolithic ages.

Only some three or four, out of the thousands of implements found at Cissbury, bear traces of polishing, and these are broken; from which we may infer that they passed through the first stage of their manufacture at Cissbury, and were subsequently ground as they were wanted by the people who used them elsewhere. This was probably done at home on one of those grindstones generally found in Neolithic villages, like that, for example, discovered in the log house in Donegal.

It is obvious, from the existence of centres of mining and of manufacture, that the Neolithic tribes of Britain had commercial intercourse with each other. The implements were distributed over districts very far away from the places where they were made, probably by being passed from hand to hand, and tribe to tribe, in the same manner as copper kettles and other articles, coming from the Russians of Kamtchatka, find their way eastward among the Eskimos of West Georgia, and as