Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/451

Rh polished and rendered uniform in size, by being drawn through a circular hole by European manufacturers at the present day. They may, however, have served as ornaments, or even in some cases as wrist-guards. One engraved by Squier is much like Fig. 356, but thinner, and with the holes rather farther from the ends. Schoolcraft, suggests their employment to hold the strands or plies apart, in the process of twine or rope making.

The Rev. Canon Ingram, F.G.S., was the first to suggest that these British plates were bracers or guards, to protect the arm of the wearer against the blow of the string in shooting with the bow, like those in use by archers at the present day. In corroboration of this view, he cites the position of the plate in the Roundway barrow, between the bones of the left forearm, and the fact of so many of them being hollowed in such a manner as to fit the arm; while he argues that the similarity in the character and position of the perforations, in the hollowed and flat varieties, affords presumptive evidence that the use of both kinds of tablets was the same. I am inclined to adopt Canon Ingram's view, though, unless there was some error in observation, plates of this kind have been occasionally found on the right arm. In a barrow at Kelleythorpe, near Driffield, examined by the late Lord Londesborough in 1851, was a chamber containing a contracted skeleton, the bones of the right arm of which "were laid in a very singular and beautiful armlet, made of some large animal's bone" (actually of stone), "about 6 inches long, and the extremities, which were a little broader than the middle, neatly squared; in this were two perforations about half an inch from each end, through which were bronze pins or rivets, with gold heads, most probably to attach it to a piece of leather which had passed round the arm and been fastened by a small bronze buckle, which was found underneath the bones." These objects are now in the British Museum. In the cist was also a bronze dagger, with a wooden sheath and handle, some large amber beads, a drinking-cup, and the upper part of the skull of a hawk. Possibly this ancient warrior was left-handed, like the seven hundred chosen men of Benjamin, every one of whom could yet "sling stones at an hair breadth, and not miss."