Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/806

780 unburned bodies is determined by their relative positions in barrows in which both occur. The burned bodies are always above the unburned ones, showing later deposition.

The large majority of the antiquities belonging to the Swedish Bronze age were of native production. Nearly all the articles of bronze are cast; and traces of the use of the hammer do not appear till near the close of the period. Local styles are observable, so that it is often possible to distinguish with considerable certainty



in what part of the North the article was made. Interesting evidences of the home production of these things are often found in the shape of the molds, of stone, in which they were cast, that are occasionally found. A mold of this kind, for casting four saws, is represented in Fig. 3. The presence of unfinished castings, defective specimens, and broken molds, affords sure evidence that the bronze-founding work was done in the country. But "as there are no tin mines in Scandinavia, and the copper mines were probably not worked till more than a thousand years after the end of the Bronze age, we must conclude that the bronze used during this period was imported from foreign countries. Probably it was already mixed, either in the form of works or in bars, because copper and tin in a pure state very seldom occur in the North in finds of this age." Instances of the high perfection which the art of bronze casting had reached are seen in certain large thin bronze vessels cast over a clay core, and a pair of bronze axes with wide-spreading blades consisting of plates of bronze hardly more than the third part of a line in thickness, with the clay core over which they were cast still existing. These axes