Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/57

Rh account it appears that shafts from 3 feet to 3 feet 6 inches in diameter were sunk through the loam and sand above the chalk to a depth of 30 or even 40 feet; and from the bottom of the shafts lateral galleries were worked, from 5 to 6 feet in height and about the same in width. Stag's horns which had been used as hammers, were found in the galleries, but it is doubtful whether they had been used as pick-axes like those in Grime's Graves. Among the rubble in the galleries, as well as on the surface of the ground above, were found roughly-chipped flints and splinters, and more or less rudely-shaped hatchets by thousands. There is one peculiar feature among these hatchets which I have not noticed to the same extent elsewhere, viz., that many of them are made from the nuclei or cores which, in the first instance, had subserved to the manufacture of long flint flakes, the furrows left by which appear on one of the faces of the hatchets. Sometimes, though rarely, the Pressigny nuclei have been utilized in a similar manner.

In France, pits for the extraction of flint have been discovered at Champignolles, Sérifontaine (Oise) and at Mur de Barrez (Aveyron).

Professor J. Buckman has recorded a manufactory of celts and other flint instruments near Lyme Regis.

In these instances, especially at Cissbury and Grime's Graves in England, and at Pressigny and Spiennes on the Continent, and, indeed, at other places also, there appears to have been an organized manufactory of flint instruments by settled occupants of the different spots; and it seems probable that the products were bartered away to those who were less favoured in their supply of the raw material, flint. At Old Deer, Aberdeenshire, thirty-four leaf-shaped flints, roughly blocked out, were found together.

The chipping out of celts and some other tools formed, not of flint, but of other hard rocks, must have been effected in the same manner. The stone employed is almost always of a more or less silicious nature, and such as breaks with a conchoidal fracture.