Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/357

Rh ARCHAEOLOGY 337 of recesses, more or less ample, affording comparatively dry and commodious shelter, and so being resorted to as places of habitation alike by wild animals and by man himself. ]&amp;gt;ut the most valuable for the purposes of the archaeologist are a class of caverns which occur in limestone districts, jiiid which, from the combined mechanical action of the vater operating on a rock easily eroded, and its chemical action when charged with a certain amount of carbonic acid in dissolving the calcareous rock, are found expanded into long galleries and chambers of large dimensions. There the same chemical agents, acting under other cir cumstances, have dissolved the limestone rock, and sealed up the ancient flooring at successive intervals, thereby fur nishing a test of the duration of long periods of alternate action and repose, and yielding evidence of the most in disputable kind as to the order of succession of the various deposits and their included bones and implements. In Belgium, at Dordogne, and in some parts of the south of France, the caves and rock-recesses are of a much simpler character. Yet there also favouring circumstances have preserved contemporary deposits of the ancient cave- dwellers, their works of art, the remains of their food, and even their cooking hearths. Tlie caves of the drift period accordingly present peculiarly favourable conditions for the study of the post- 1 liocene period. Some of these caverns were evidently iirst occupied by the extinct carnivora of that period, as in the case of the famous Kent s Hole Cave of Devonshire, of which the lowest deposit is a breccia of water-worn rock and red clay, interspersed with numerous bones of the Ursus spelceus, or great cave-bear. Over this a stalag- mitic flooring had been formed, in some places to a depth of several feet, by the long-protracted deposition of car bonate of lime held in solution in the drippings from the roof. Above this ancient flooring, itself a work of cen turies, later floods had superimposed a thick layer of &quot; cave-earth,&quot; in some cases even entirely filling up exten sive galleries with a deposit of drift-mud and stones, within which are embedded the evidences of contempo raneous life bones and teeth of the fossil elephant, rhinoceros, horse, cave-bear, hyaena, reindeer, and Irish elk ; and along with these, numerous weapons and imple ments of chipped flint, horn, and bone the unmistakable proofs of the presence of man. These, again, have been sealed down, in another prolonged period of rest, by a new flooring of stalagmite ; and thus the peculiar circumstances of those cave deposits render them specially favourable for the preservation of a coherent record of the period. Here are the evidences of the animal life contemporaneous with the men of the caves during the drift period; here also are many of their smaller flint implements the flint-cures and the chips and flint-flakes, showing where their actual manufacture was carried on ; and the lances, bodkins, and needles of bone, which could only have been preserved under such favouring circumstances. But besides the actual deposits in the caves, the river gravels of the same period have their distinct disclosures. The spear-heads, discs, scrapers, and other large implements of chipped flint are of rare occurrence in the cave breccia. Their size was sufficient to prevent their being readily dropt and buried beyond reach of recovery in the muddy flooring of the old cave dwelling; and the same cause preserved them from destruction when exposed to the violence involved in the accumulation of the old river drifts. In the north of France, and in England from Bedfordshire southward to the English Channel, in beds of ancient gravel, sand, and clay of the river valleys, numerous dis coveries of large flint implements have been made from the year 1797, when the first noted flint implements of the drift were discovered in the same stratified gravel of Hoxne, in Suffolk, in which lay bones of the fossil elephants and other extinct mammalia. The characteristics of the river-drift implements, as w^ell as of the whole art of the stone age, have been minutely described and illustrated in various works, but especially in Evans s Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain. It is sufficient, therefore, to refer to such authorities for details. But besides the numerous specimens of the manufactures in flint, horn, and bone, illustrative of the mechanical ingenuity of this primitive era, special attention is due to the actual evidences of imitative and artistic skill of the sculptors and draughtsmen of the same period. Different attempts have been made, especially by French savans, to subdivide the palaeontologic age of man into a succession of periods, based chiefly on the character of the mammalian remains accompanying primitive works of art ; and the two great subdivisions of the elephantine or mammoth age and the reindeer age have been specially favoured. Among the w r orks of art of the cave-men of Perigord, in central France, contemporary with the rein deer, various drawings of animals, including the reindeer itself, have been found incised on bone and stone, apparently with a pointed implement of flint. But the most remark able of all is the portrait of a mammoth, seemingly executed from the life, outlined on a plate of ivory found in the Madelaine Cave, on the river Yezere, by M. Lartet, when in company with M. Verneuil and Dr Falconer. If genu ine and the circumstances of the discovery, no less than the character of the explorers, seem to place it above suspicion this most ancient work of art is of extreme value. The skulls and other remains of five individuals have been found to illustrate the men of this period. The cerebral development is good, and alike in features and form of head they compare favourably with later savage races. Their drawings embrace animals, single and in groups, including the mammoth, reindeer, horse, ox, fish of different kinds, flowers, ornamental patterns, and also ruder attempts at the human form. They also carved in bone and ivory. Some of the delineations are as rude as any recent specimens of savage art, others exhibit con siderable skill; but the most remarkable of all is the representation of the mammoth. It has been repeatedly engraved, and as, to all appearance, a genuine contem porary effort at the portraiture of that remarkable animal, its Avorth is considerable. But this sinks into insignificance in comparison with its value as a gauge of the intellectual capacity of the men of that remote age. It represents the extinct elephant, sketched with great freedom of hand, and with an artistic boldness in striking contrast to the laboured efforts of an untutored draughtsman. Whatever other in ference be deduced from it, this is obvious, that in intel lectual aptitude the palaeolithic men of the reindeer period of central France were in no degree inferior to the average Frenchman of the 19th century. 2. This first or palaeolithic period, with its characteristic implements of chipped flint, belonging to an epoch in which man occupied central Europe contemporaneously with the mammoth, the cave-bear, and other long-extinct mammals, was followed by the second or Neolithic Period, or, as it has been sometimes called, the Surface-Stone Period, in contradiction to the Drift Period, characterised by weapons of polished flint and stone. The discovery and exploration of the ancient PfaJdlaiden or lake villages of Switzerland and other countries, including the crannoges of Ireland and Scotland, and of the Jcfokken-mikldings or refuse-heaps of Denmark, Scotland, and elsewhere, have greatly extended the illustrations of this period, and given, definiteness to the evidences of its antiquity. But while it thus includes works of a very remote epoch, it also n. 43