Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/267

Rh pierced, appear to have been more probably used in certain games.

Cup-shaped cavities occasionally occur on stones which have not apparently been intended for use as hammers. In the soil of one of the barrows at Rudstone, near Bridlington, Canon Greenwell found a fragment of a greenstone pebble, nearly flat on one face, in which a concave depression, about an inch over and inch deep, had been picked. In the National Museum at Edinburgh is a subquadrate flat piece of grit, 1 inch thick and about 3 inches long, on each face of which is a cup-shaped depression about 1 inches in diameter. It does not appear to have been used as a hammer. Mr. James Wyatt, F.G.S., had a piece of close-grained grit, in shape somewhat like a thick axe-head, 4 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 3 inches thick, with four concave depressions, one on each face and side, found at Kempston Road, near Bedford. What purpose these hollows fulfilled, it is difficult to guess. The stones in which they occur may, however, have been used as anvils or mortars on which to hammer or pound; or the cavities may have served to steady objects of bone, stone, or wood in the process of manufacture. Anvil stones, with pits worn on their faces, probably by flints having been broken upon them, have been found in Scotland. A sandstone with a concave depression on each of its six faces has been regarded by Mortillet as a grindstone for fashioning stone buttons or the convex ends of other implements. I have seen analogous cavities produced, on a larger scale, on blocks of granite which have been used as anvils, on which to break road materials. The cup and ring cuttings common on ancient stone monuments, especially in Scotland, do not come within my province. Flat stones, with cup-shaped markings upon them, sometimes as many as seven on a stone, were found in considerable abundance in some of the Yorkshire barrows examined by Canon Greenwell.

The stones with cup-shaped depressions in them, found in the caves of the Reindeer Period in the south of France, have the hollows, in nearly all instances, upon one of their faces only, and have therefore more probably served as mortars than as hammers. The pebbles, from the same caves, which have been used as knapping or chipping stones, are usually left in their natural condition on the faces, though worn away at the edges, sometimes over the whole periphery. A very few of the hollowed stones show signs of use at the edges.

Stones with cup-shaped depressions, like those from the French caves, are in use in Siberia for crushing nuts and the seeds of the Cembro Pine; and among the natives of Australia for pounding a bulbous root called bellilah, and the roasted bark of trees and shrubs for food. Some Carib examples of the same kind are in the Ethnological Museum at Copenhagen, as well as some from Africa, used in the preparation of poison.