Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/809

Rh of different color from those on the sides. It ended in thick ornamental tassels. A fibula, which may have fastened the jacket or the mantle in front, a spiral finger-ring, two bracelets, a torque, and three round decorated plates with points projecting in the middle, ornaments of the belt, were found in the coffin, and a dagger, the occurrence of which with a woman's body gives the archæologists something to speculate upon. These graves were of the early Bronze age, and are therefore nearly three thousand years old. Both this body and the one in the Treenhoi barrow were inclosed in coffins made of the cloven and hollowed trunk of an oak, and were wrapped in untanned hides.

The ornaments of this age were far more beautiful and varied than those of the Stone age. They were made chiefly of gold and bronze. Amber was more rare than in the Stone age; and silver ornaments and glass do not seem to have yet been known. They included ornaments for the neck and breast, belt ornaments, bracelets, finger-rings, bronze buttons, combs, pendants, and pins. The weapons consisted of daggers, axes, spears, bows and arrows, probably clubs and slings, swords, helmets, and shields. The last were usually of wood or leather, but some of them are very elaborate works of bronze. Representations of helmets appear in the rock-carvings, but an actual specimen—a chin-piece, beautifully decorated and overlaid with gold—of only one has been found. The swords, of which, with daggers of bronze, large numbers have been found in Sweden, were made for thrusting and not for cutting, were short-hilted, and had two-edged and very pointed blades; their sheaths are sometimes unearthed in a more or less complete state of preservation. One is made of wood overlaid with well-tanned leather, and lined with fine skin; others are all wooden, without leather, but sometimes decorated with carved ornaments. Not all of their weapons and tools were of bronze. Flints still continued to be used for the cheaper sorts, and for those most liable to be lost; and bronze seems to have been the mark of a choicer tool, a more favorite weapon, and perhaps of more wealth in the owner.

Suggestions of agricultural and pastoral occupations appear in the rock-carvings. One of these sculptures, at Tenegby, in Bohuslän, represents two animals harnessed to a plow and driven by a workman who is walking behind. Another, on one of the