The Difference between Historic and Prehistoric Time.
It will be necessary before we examine the group of caves used by man in prehistoric times, to point out the important difference in the measurement of time within and beyond the borders of history. When we speak, for example, of the date of the Norman Conquest, we imply that we can ascertain by historical records, not merely that it succeeded the invasion of Britain by the English or Danes, and happened before our own time, but that the interval which separates it from those events can be accurately measured by the unit of years. If, however, we attempt to ascertain the date of any event which happened outside the historical limit, we shall find that it is a question solely of relation. When we speak, for example, of the neolithic age, we merely mean a certain stage of human progress which succeeded the pal?olithic,135 and preceded the bronze age, but we have no proof of the length of the interval dividing it from the one or the other. The historic “when?” implies “how long ago?” the prehistoric “when?” merely implies a definition before and after certain events, without any idea of the measurement of the intervals.
An attempt to ascertain the absolute date of prehistoric events must of necessity fail, since it is based on the improbable assumption that the physical agents have acted uniformly, and that therefore the results may be used as a natural chronometer. The present rate of the accumulation of débris, as at the Victoria Cave of the preceding chapter, or of that of silt in the deltas of rivers, such as the Nile, or the Tinière, may convey a rough idea of the high antiquity of prehistoric deposits; but a slight change either of the climate, or of the rainfall, would invalidate the conclusion. When the greater part of Europe lay buried under forest, when Palestine supported a large population, and when glaciers crowned some of the higher mountains of Africa, such as the Atlas, the European and Egyptian climates were probably moister than at the present time, and the rainfall and the floods greater, and consequently the accumulation of sediment quicker than the observed rate under the present conditions. And in the same way all estimates of the lapse of past time, based upon the excavation of a river valley, or the retrocession of a waterfall, such as Niagara, lie open to the same kind of objection. It is not at all reasonable to suppose that the complex conditions which regulate the present rate of erosion, have been the same during the time the work has been done, and it therefore follows that the work done is a measure of the power employed, and not of136 the length of time during which it has been in operation. We must, therefore, give up the idea of measuring the past beyond the memory of man, as represented in historical documents, by the historic unit of years. We can merely trace a definite sequence of events, separated one from another by uncertain intervals. And for that series of events which extends from the borders of history back to the remote age where the geologist, descending the stream of time, meets the arch?ologist, I have adopted the term prehistoric.85
The Prehistoric Fauna.
The prehistoric period is characterized by the arrival of the domestic animals in Europe, under the care of man. The dog, swine, horse, horned-sheep, goat, Bos longifrons, and the larger ox descended from an ancestor, according to Professor Rütimeyer, of the type of the great Urus, make their appearance together, in association with the remains of man, in the neolithic stage of civilization.86 Subsequently they spread over the whole of our continent, for the most part under the care of man. The Bos longifrons, however, and possibly also the Urus, reverted to feral conditions, just as the horses and oxen, in the Americas and Australia, have done at the present time, and their remains are therefore frequently found in association with animals undoubtedly wild. The domestic horse, the variety of hog descended from the wild boar, and the domestic cattle derived from the Urus, may possibly have passed under the yoke of man,137 in Europe, since their wild stocks were to be found in that area, both in the prehistoric and pleistocene times. This, however, cannot be affirmed of the swine descended from the southern variety of Sus Indica, or of the Celtic shorthorn, of the sheep, or goat, since their wild ancestors were not indigenous in Europe. These animals must have been domesticated in some area outside Europe; and since central Asia is the region where the wild stocks still exist, from which all the domestic animals are descended, it is reasonable to suppose that they were domesticated in that region, and thence introduced, by a race of shepherds and herdsmen, into our quarter of the world.
This conclusion is considerably strengthened by the evidence which Professor Heer has advanced, as to the vegetables used by the dwellers on piles in the Swiss lakes, among which some, such as the two kinds of millet, the six-rowed barley (hordeum hexastichon), the Egyptian wheat (triticum turgidum), and a weed (Silene cretica), accidentally brought along with them, are distinctively of southern derivation.
The most important wild animals living in this country during the prehistoric period are the urus, the gigantic skulls of which occur in the peat bogs of England and Scotland, the Irish elk, the moose (Cervus alces), and the reindeer. The two last are far more abundant in the north than in the south of Britain; their remains have been discovered in the neighbourhood of London, those of both animals at Walthamstow, and those of the latter at Crossness in Kent, on the banks of the Thames. The remains of the bison have not been recorded from any prehistoric deposit in this country.
The Irish elk is the only animal which has become138 extinct; while the moose, or true elk, is the only wild species which has not been proved to have been living in the preceding age. The stag was very abundant.
The prehistoric fauna is distinguished from that of the pleistocene not merely by the appearance of the animals above mentioned, which were hitherto unknown, but by the absence of many species which were living during the latter period. The cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, and mammoth, for example, became extinct, the musk-sheep and lemming were banished from a temperate latitude to take refuge in the regions of the north, while the spotted hy?na, the hippopotamus, and Felis caffer, retired to the warm regions of Africa, where they are still living.
The Arch?ological Classification.
The prehistoric period has been classified by the arch?ologists according to the stages of human progress which it presents. At the frontier of history, in each country, we find that the dwellers were acquainted with the use of iron, and had found it to be the most convenient material for the manufacture of cutting weapons and implements. Before this the voice of tradition points out that bronze was the only material used for these purposes, and stone before bronze. These three stages of human culture, or the ages of iron, bronze, and stone, have been fully verified by investigations which have been made in various parts of Europe, into the prehistoric habitations and burial-places of man.
This classification by no means implies an exact chronology, or that any one of these ages, with the exception perhaps of the first, covered the whole of Europe at the same point of time, but that the order in139 which they followed each other is the same in each country which has been explored. There is good reason for the belief, that at the time the Egyptian and Assyrian empires were in the height of their glory, Northern Europe was inhabited by rude polished-stone-using races. And it is a well-ascertained fact, that while the inhabitants of Britain and Scandinavia were in their bronze age, the Etruscans and Ph?nicians were in their full power in the south. It is obvious again, that, even in the same country, the poorer classes must have been long content to use the ruder and more common materials for their daily needs, while the richer and more powerful used the rarer and more costly. These three ages must therefore necessarily overlap. “Like the three principal colours of the rainbow,” writes Mr. Evans,87 “these three stages of civilization overlap, intermingle, and shade off the one into the other; and yet their succession, as far as Western Europe is concerned, appears to be equally well defined with that of the prismatic colours, though the proportions of the spectrum may vary in different countries.” They cannot reasonably be viewed as hard and fast lines of division, mapping off successive quantities of time.
The age of stone is subdivided by Sir John Lubbock into the neolithic periods, or that in which polished stone was the only material used for cutting, and the pal?olithic, in which mankind had not learnt to grind and polish his implements. The latter belongs to the pleistocene, or quaternary period, since the pal?olithic implements are found in association with the remains of the animals characteristic of that age.
The prehistoric caves, therefore, may be divided into three classes if the arch?ological method of analysis be140 employed: 1, into those containing evidence of the use of iron; 2, those containing proof of the knowledge of bronze; 3, and lastly, those in which traces of polished stone weapons have been discovered unassociated with metals. By the animal remains which they contain they may be distinguished from those of the pleistocene age, both by the absence, as well as the presence of certain species which have been enumerated.
From the arch?ological point of view, two out of the four ages are still represented. Stone is, at the present time, the only material used in the more remote regions of Australia, although it is fast being replaced by iron, which has superseded bronze, and is spreading rapidly over the whole earth. The group of historic caves described in the preceding chapter may be said to belong to the iron age, that is to say, to that later portion of it in which the events are recorded in history.
The traces of the occupation of caves by man in the iron and bronze ages are so extremely scarce, that it is certain that they were but rarely used as habitations. Man had sufficiently advanced in civilization in those times to construct artificial dwellings and tombs for himself, instead of using the natural shelters which were so very generally occupied in Europe by his ruder neolithic predecessors.
Cave of the Iron Age.
In the course of the systematic exploration of caves in the Mendip Hills, carried on by Messrs. Ayshford Sanford, Parker, and myself, a cave was examined in Burrington Combe, near Wrington, in Somerset, which may be referred to the iron age, and which we named Whitcombe’s Hole. It opened upon the side of that141 magnificent combe, at a height of about 135 feet from the bottom and fifteen from the top, and ran horizontally inwards, the floor being formed of an accumulation of earth mingled with charcoal, and containing numerous broken bones and teeth. The latter belonged to the wolf, fox, badger, rabbit, hare, stag, goat, and Celtic shorthorn. In the lower portion were the fragments of a rude, unornamented urn of a coarse black ware, with the rim turned at right angles, along with a bent piece of iron, which bears a strong resemblance to those found strengthening the corners of wooden coffins in the Gallo-Roman graves on the banks of the Somme. The fractures of the bones, with one exception, were caused by the hand of man, and not by the teeth of the carnivora. The position renders the cave eminently fitted for concealment, for while commanding an extensive view down the Combe, it is invisible both from above and below, and opening on the face of an almost vertical cliff, it is easily defended. If the urn be sepulchral, the interment must be of a later date than the occupation, because it is made in the débris which resulted from the latter.88
Caves of the Bronze Age in Britain.
The cave of Heathery Burn,89 near Stanhope, in Weardale, co. Durham, is the only one in this country that has furnished a large series of articles of the bronze age. It is described by Mr. Elliott as running into the142 precipitous side of a ravine, at a height of about 10 to 12 feet above the level of the Stanhope Burn, and as being partially traversed by water. Since its discovery in 1861, it has been altogether destroyed by the removal of the stone to be used as a flux in smelting the ore of the Weardale Iron Company, and an admirable section of its contents was therefore visible from time to time. A stratum of sand at the bottom, two feet nine inches thick, deposited by the stream, and containing angular masses of limestone that had dropped from the roof, was covered by a sheet of stalagmite three inches in thickness. On this rested a mass of bones and implements imbedded in silt or sand, and sealed over by a thickness of stalagmite of from two to eight inches.
Fig. 32.—Bronze Knife, Heathery Burn (natural size).
Fig. 33.—Bronze Armlet, Heathery Burn.
Fig. 34.—Bronze Spearhead, Heathery Burn (? size).
Fig. 35.—Bronze Mould for casting a socketed celt.
On removing the upper of these two stalagmitic floors a perfect human skull was discovered, along with broken bones of animals, charcoal, limpet shells, bone pins, an instrument of bone like a paper-knife, coarse pottery with fragments of chert imbedded in its mass, a portion of a jet armlet, as well as several boars’ tusks. The same stratum at another place furnished a singular bronze knife with a socket for the handle (Fig. 32),90 bronze pins, celts, an armlet of twisted wire (Fig. 33), along with shells of limpet, mussel, and oyster, and charcoal, and at a third, on the other side of the watercourse, a bronze143 spear-head. Subsequently, many articles were added to the above list, seven pins, three rings, two split-rings, a “razor,” disk, three socketed celts, one chisel, two gouges, and four spear-heads of bronze, and a fine bracelet, and two ornaments of the horse-shoe, or split-ring type, made of thin plates of gold. One of the spear-heads, in the collection of the Rev. Canon Greenwell, is represented in Fig. 34. There were also waste pieces of bronze, and the half of a bronze mould for casting celts, Fig. 35, in which one of the associated celts had actually been cast, since it is of the same pattern. These articles were probably concealed in the cavern by workers in bronze, who were prevented, by some unforeseen accident, from obtaining them again. The charcoal and the broken bones of the Bos longifrons, badger, and dog, imply that the cave had been used as a habitation; and possibly the two human skulls, which have been described by Professor Huxley and Mr. Carter Blake, may have belonged to the possessors of the hoard of bronze and gold. Both were discovered in the same stratum and below the floor of stalagmite.
The more perfect of the two skulls is considered by Professor Huxley to belong to the same long-headed race of men as that found at Muskham, in the valley of the Trent,—to a form which he terms the River-bed type, and that cannot be separated from those obtained from the long tumuli of the South of England, and considered by Dr. Thurnam to belong to a Neolithic Basque, or Iberian population.
Articles distinctly of the bronze age have been already noticed as having been met with in the caves of Kirkhead, in Cartmell, and in Thor’s Cave, in Staffordshire. From the latter the bracelet of thin bronze, Fig. 31, was145 obtained by Mr. Carrington, of Wetton. The rarity of bronze implements in caves in Britain and the Continent is probably, to a large extent, due to the value of the material, and to the fact that it could be re-melted. If a bronze article happened to be broken, the pieces would naturally be kept for future use, and not thrown away, as in the case of a fractured stone implement. The former, therefore, are rare, the latter comparatively abundant.
The cave called the Cat-Hole, in Gower (Glamorgan), explored by Colonel Wood in 1864, contained several human skeletons, flint flakes, fragments of red pottery marked with a string, cut bones, a stone muller, and a bronze socketed celt. The last is of the same pattern as some of those in the collection of the Rev. Canon Greenwell, from Heathery Burn, and has been cast in a mould similar in size and ornamentation to that figured in woodcut 35.
The Caves of Césareda probably occupied by Cannibals.
The contents of three caves91 in the Iberian peninsula, referable to the dawn of the bronze age, render it very probable that the use of human flesh was not unknown in those times.
In 1867 Senhor J. L. Delgado described his researches in the caverns of Césareda, in the valley of the Tagus, in the Casa da Maura, Lapa Furada, and Cova da Maura.146 The first of these contained two distinct strata. The lower, consisting of sand mixed with fragments of rock, rested on the stalagmite, and contained fragments of charcoal, one implement of bone, and many of flint, a scraper, a flake, and an arrow-head. The broken bones and teeth belonged to the following animals:—The lynx, fox, brown-bear, dog and wolf, a species of deer, the water-vole, and the rabbit. None of the remains of the carnivora had been subjected to the action of fire, or had been used for food. A human skull with lower jaw was dug out of the deepest part, but, since the matrix had been disturbed, it had probably been interred after the accumulation of the deposit.
It is recognized by Professor Busk92 as belonging to the same long type as the skulls of the caves of Gibraltar and the Basque graveyard, measuring in length 6·7 inches, in breadth 5·3, in height 5·5, and therefore possessing cephalic and latitudinal indices of ·785 and ·820.93
The upper stratum, a sandy loam, contained a large quantity of stones, and numerous articles fabricated by man: polished-stone axes, flakes, and other instruments of flint, bone, and antler, fragments of coarse black pottery, with bits of calcareous spar imbedded in its substance, and two plates of schist ornamented with a rude design, which may have been used as amulets. Fragments of charcoal were scattered throughout the matrix, and adhered to some of the pottery and to the burnt pebbles. The most abundant remains were those of man. They were to be counted by thousands, and were so fragmentary and scattered that it was impossible147 to put together one perfect skeleton. The teeth, belonging for the most part to children or fully-grown adults, were particularly abundant. The long bones had lost, very generally, their articular ends, had been fractured longitudinally, and some of them had been cut and scraped. It is therefore probable that this accumulation was formed by a tribe of cannibals: the evidence that human flesh formed their principal food being precisely of the same nature as that by which the flint-folk of the Périgord are proved to have subsisted on the flesh of the reindeer. Professor Busk,94 however, is inclined to believe the facts in support of cannibalism insufficient. The associated animals consisted of the bat, dormouse, rabbit, horse, a small ox, allied to Bos longifrons, sheep or goat, wild cat, wolf, fox, and dog. The contents of the other two caves were precisely of the same nature, and had been accumulated under the same conditions.
A bronze arrow-head, discovered in the upper stratum, and the ornamentation of the stone amulet, consisting of alternate triangles and zigzag ladders, as remarked by Mr. John Evans, indicate that the upper deposit belongs to the age of bronze, and probably to an early stage, when stone was being superseded by bronze, since many stone celts were found in the same spot.
The ancient burial-places of Ultz, in Westphalia, furnish a second case of the practice of cannibalism, according to M. Schaaffhausen of Bonn95. They are probably of the age of bronze.
148
The Cave of Reggio, in Modena.
The human remains in a cave in the province of Reggio,96 on the northern flank of the Apennines, brought before the Prehistoric Congress at Bologna by M. l’Abbé Chierici, and considered by him to be proofs of cannibalism, are probably merely the result of interment in a refuse-heap that had previously been accumulated. They were associated with bronze pins, rivets, polished-stone axes, and various implements of bone, fragments of pottery and of charcoal, bones of pig, sheep, and dog, and belong therefore to the period of transition from the neolithic to the bronze age.
The caves have contributed but very little to our knowledge of the bronze-folk in any part of Europe. Examples, such as those given above, are scattered through France and Spain, but they are not sufficiently important to require notice. We could not expect that men, in the high state of civilization implied by the beautiful jewellery and ornaments which are distinctive of the bronze-folk, would have chosen the wild, half-savage life which is involved in cave-habitation.