Chapter 5

Fig. 22.—Bone Spatula, Keiss.Fig. 23.—Bone Comb, Burghar.Fig. 24.—Bone Comb, Burghar.

Alike in the ivory and bone carvings of the modern Esquimaux, and in the rare but invaluable evidences of primitive art furnished by those of the ancient Cave-Folk of the Dordogne and other oldest human dwellings, it is seen how favourable such easily wrought material was to the development of a mechanical skill and artistic ingenuity such as must have lain dormant had the primitive artificers been wholly limited to flint and stone. The same result is traceable, though in a less degree, to the analogous material of the Islanders’ shell-period. But implements and ornaments made of marine shells have a further interest from the evidence they occasionally afford of distant traffic, or interchange of foreign commodities.

Tools of horn, bone, and ivory possess a value of another kind. With them, as on a common ground, the palæontologist and the archæologist meet and determine the relative ages of the primitive artist and his materials. In the Glamorganshire cavern at Paviland Dr. Buckland found the skull of a mammoth, or other fossil proboscidian, and beside it the remains of cylindrical rods and armlets made from its ivory. In the famous Aurignac cave, on the northern slope of the Pyrenees, were arrows and other implements of reindeer horn, a bodkin fashioned out of the horn of the roedeer, and a tusk of theursus spelæus, perforated and carved in imitation of the head of a bird. The Dordogne caves in like manner reveal the natives of Southern France in its old post-glacial era, hunting the aurochs and reindeer, and fashioning their horns and bones into lances, bodkins, needles, clubs, ceremonial or official batons, and other implements of varied purpose and design. Among the “prehistoric remains of Caithness,” which rewarded the explorations of Mr. Samuel Laing in the mounds at Keiss, were numerous implements made from the horns and bones of the reindeer, red-deer, ox, horse, and whale. Some of them are of the rudest character; and all indicate a condition of life akin to that of the tribes of the Labrador, or the Alaska coast at the present day. Fig. 22 is a spatula roughly formed from the bone of an ox; unless, as Mr. Joseph Anderson has suggested, it be the first stage in the process of fabricating a comb, of the type shown in Figs. 23, 24. The latter, found at Burghar, in Orkney, is a precise counterpart of the long-handled combs still in use by the Esquimaux for separating the sinew-threads, which supply them with one important resource in making their clothing. Those relics point to times when the fauna differed even more than the men of this era from those of the present day. In the mounds of the Ohio Valley, on the other hand, the bone implements and animal remains appear to be referable to existing species; and so supply evidence in contradiction of the extreme antiquity assigned by some to the mounds and their builders. One special value of primitive tools of horn, bone, and ivory is thus manifest. They embody glimpses of truth in relation to climate, native fauna, culinary practices, and special objects of the chase; and to this easily worked material we owe disclosures of an æsthetic faculty, and of artistic capabilities pertaining to the Troglodytes of the Dordogne, to whom, but for such evidence, might, and probably would have been assigned a rank in humanity as far below the standard of the modern savage as the Patagonian or Australian falls short of that of the average European of our own day.

The artificial origin of many of the rudest of the worked drift-flints has been challenged. But of the human workmanship of the large flint implement found alongside of the bones of a fossil elephant in the quaternary gravels of the London basin, near Gray’s Inn Lane; or of the spear-heads which lay under similar fossil bones in the drift of the valley of the Waveney, at Hoxne, in Suffolk, no doubt has ever been suggested. Both were discovered upwards of a century before the idea of man’s contemporaneous existence with the mammals of the drift had been mooted; but if such specimens of his art are to be made the sole test of human capacity in that primeval era, they might justify the idea of some lower type even than the wretched Patagonian or Australian. But contemporary cave deposits check our conclusions from such partial evidence; and suggest that in those rudest specimens of palæolithic art we have only the most indestructible relics of an epoch by no means destitute of inventive ingenuity or artistic skill.

All the cave deposits referred to were accompanied with human remains. In the Glamorganshire Cavern a female skeleton lay in close proximity to the skull of the fossil elephas, embedded in a mass of argillaceous loam. Adapting his deductions to the ruling idea which then guided the author of theReliquiæ Diluvianæ, Dr. Buckland refers to the cylindrical rods and rings of ivory as “made from part of the antediluvian tusks that lay in the same cave; and,” he adds, “as they must have been cut to their present shape at a time when the ivory was hard, and not crumbling to pieces as it is at present on the slightest touch, we may from this circumstance assume to them a high antiquity.” Dr. Buckland’s idea of the antiquity implied by such cave remains was very different from what is now universally accepted. But it is not to be overlooked that here, as in the Aurignac, and other sepulchral caverns, the interment may belong to an epoch long subsequent to that of the fossil mammals. The tusk of a mammoth from the Carse of Falkirk, now in detached pieces in the museum of the University of Edinburgh, was rescued from the lathe of an ivory-turner; and the fossil ivory of Siberia is a regular article of commerce.

But in other examples of a like character we are left in no doubt. The deer’s-horn harpoons of the whalers of Blair-Drummond Moss are unquestionably contemporaneous with the fossil whales; and although the implements are rude enough, they will class with harpoons and fish-spears here described, some of which have been found associated with works in bone and ivory of great ingenuity and skill. The Greenland whale undoubtedly haunted the northern shores of Scotland within historic times. Its bones occur in Scottish brochs and kitchen-middens; and among the many traces of prehistoric arts and habits of life disclosed by the contents of the Scottish subterranean dwellings, one of the most interesting is a large drinking-cup fashioned from the vertebra of a whale. It was found in a weem on the Isle of Eday, in Orkney, along with a bone scoop, bone pins, combs, and other primitive relics, including some of metal. The cup measures 4½ inches high; and, as shown in Fig. 25, is a very simple adaptation of the natural form of the bone by sawing off the protruding spinous processes.

Fig. 25.—Whale’s Vertebra Cup.

The ancient workman had his knife, saw, adze, chisel, drill, and scraper,—or plane, as we may term it,—all made of flint. The worn and triturated edges of many of those flint-tools show abundant evidence of their use in fashioning some hard substance. He had also his file, made of grit-stone; of which various examples have been found in the caves. They are generally styled whetstones; but their purpose was probably the very same as that of a modern file. Some are of coarse-grained stone, and others of a finer grit. Without some such tools it would have been impossible to bring the more elaborate implements of bone and ivory to the state of finish which they present. Among such, the harpoons and fish-spears furnish a variety of types, diversified by the ingenuity of the workman, and the necessities of his craft. Examples of such primitive fishing implements of widely different eras are here grouped together. The three-pronged fish-spear, Fig. 26, illustrates the art of the Esquimaux fisherman: that living race of Arctic seas, which alike in arts and in condition of life, realises for us in so many ways the men of Europe’s post-glacial age. Alongside of it are a hook, or spear-head of deer’s-horn, Fig. 27, and a barbed fish-spear of the same material, Fig. 28, both the work of the ancient Lake-dwellers

Fig. 26-30.—Fish-spears and Harpoons.

of Neuchâtel. They present interesting analogies to the most familiar types of bone or ivory fish-spears of the French and English post-glacial era, of which Figs. 29, 30 are examples from the Dordogne Caves. Fig. 31, though worn and fractured, illustrates a form of the cave harpoon-blade, barbed only on one side. It is from Kent’s Cavern, where other, though less perfect, examples have been found. One of these, figured by Mr. Evans,[44]is specially noticeable for its curved form. Similar implements have repeatedly occurred in the cave-deposits, as in those of the Dordogne, and at Bruniquel, where also serrated flints or saws were found in unusual abundance. Fig. 36, from the cave of La Madelaine, is a good example of the unilateral fish-spear, much superior in workmanship to the similar implement of the modern Fuegian, shown in Fig. 33, and well adapted to the wants of a river-fisherman. But the form of the Kent’s Cavern type rather suggests that it was one of the blades of a large two-pronged, or three-pronged spear, similar to examples still in use among the Esquimaux:

Fig. 31.—Harpoon, Kent’s Cavern.

Fig. 32.—Bone Spear-head, Dordogne Caves.

Fig. 33.—Fuegian Harpoon.

of which one, now in the museum of the University of Toronto, shown in Fig. 26, illustrates the probable design of the curved blades. In the caves of the Dordogne and Garonne valleys repeated discoveries of bone needles, in association with the barbed fish-spear, have been noted. They are objects of delicate manipulation, the value of which is proved by the occurrence of examples accidentally broken, and drilled with a new eye. The caves of the Dordogne pertained, even in the remote era of the mammoth or reindeer periods, to a race of inland hunters and fishermen to whom such a harpoon would have been cumbrous, if not wholly unsuited to their requirements. But the Kent’s Hole Troglodyte had probably more formidable prey to encounter, and so adapted the implements of the chase to his special requirements. Of the bilateral barbed fish-spear, a good, though imperfect example is shown, the natural size, in Fig. 32, from Laugerie Basse, in the Dordogne. Another, Fig. 34, was found imbedded in the red cave-earth of Kent’s Cavern, underneath a bed of black earth, containing flint-flakes and bones of extinct mammals, over which the stalagmitic flooring had accumulated to a thickness of a foot and a half. Similar implements have been recovered from other Dordogne Caves. Fig. 35, from La Madelaine, is a variation of the latter type, in which the barbs are disposed alternately on either side.

Fig. 34.—Fish-spear, Kent’s Cavern.

Fig. 35.—Fish-spear with bilateral barbs, La Madelaine.

Fig. 36.—Fish-spear with unilateral barbs, La Madelaine.

It is alike interesting and highly suggestive of the characteristics of man as a rational being, thus to find his ingenuity, when stimulated by similar necessities, begetting closely analogous results in ages separated by intervals so vast that we vainly strive to measure them by any standards of historical chronology. But the ingenuity manifested in the construction of his fishing and hunting gear very inadequately reveals to us the aptitudes of the men of the drift or the cave periods. In those remote epochs, as now, man was an intelligent being, gratifying his taste in many ways by works often involving great labour, and leading to no other practical results than many labours of the carver and house-decorator, the painter, sculptor, and engraver of our own day. Among the works of art, for example, of the cave-men of the Dordogne, contemporary with the mammoth and the reindeer of Central France, various incised drawings of animals, executed both on bone and slate, apparently with a flint stylus or graver, have excited an unusual interest. They include representations of the fossil horse, as on a carved baton, or mace, Fig. 37; of the reindeer, in groups, and engaged in combat; of the ox, fish of different kinds, flowers, ornamental patterns, and some ruder attempts at the human form. Carvings in bone and ivory illustrate the same ingenious mimetic art. But the most remarkable of all is the portraiture of the mammoth, Fig. 38, outlined on a plate of ivory, and to all appearance drawn from the life. It represents the extinct elephant, sketched with great freedom and even artistic skill; and not only compares favourably with the best specimens of modern savage delineation, but exhibits so much freedom of handling as to look more like the sketch of an artist skilled in the use of his pencil. I can recall no example of savage art exhibiting such freedom; and none but an experienced draughtsman could execute with pencil or etching-needle anything approaching to the expression and character given by means of a few lines, executed with no laboured effort, but evidently dashed off by one who had full confidence in his powers.

Fig. 37.—Carved Baton, or Mace (1/3).

This most ancient example of imitative art was found in the Madelaine Cave, on the river Vézère, by M. Lartet, when in company with M. Verneuil and Dr. Falconer. The circumstances of the discovery, therefore, no less than the character of the explorers, place its genuineness beyond suspicion. Its worth is great as a piece of contemporary portraiture of an animal known to us only by its fossil remains. But this sinks into insignificance in comparison with its value as a gauge of the intellectual capacity of the men of the reindeer age of central Europe. Many of their carvings ornament the horn or ivory handles of implements and weapons; but the etching referred to was manifestly executed with no other aim than the gratification of the artistic taste of the draughtsman, and resembles the free sketches thrown off by an artist in an idle hour.

Fig. 38.—The Mammoth, engraved on ivory.

But there is another point worthy of notice here, the interest of which is greatly increased by the undoubted antiquity of the relic. This palæographic tablet is a right-handed drawing; and the same may be affirmed of the group of reindeer, and of others of the Madelaine etchings. They are executed in profile, looking to the left, as any right-handed draughtsman naturally does, unless he has some special reason for deviating from the direction which the facility of his pencil suggests.

The question of right-handedness, as a natural or acquired practice peculiar to man, has a special interest when viewed in relation to his innate instincts or attributes in the remote dawn of human intelligence thus anew brought to light. The universality of right-handedness as a characteristic of man has been assumed, partly on the concurrent evidence of language, which shows the general habit of using one hand in preference to another. But the prevalence of the use of the right hand among savage nations is still a mere assumption. The statistics have yet to be collected, and are by no means readily accessible. Any evidence of the prevalence of right-handedness among a people still in the primitive stage of stone implements must be exceedingly vague. In the rude manipulations of a purely savage life, with the imperfection of the tools and the general absence of combined operations, the distinction in the use of one hand rather than the other is of little importance. In digging roots, climbing rocks or trees, in the rude operations of the primitive boat-maker or hut-builder, in hunting, flaying, cooking, or most other of the operations pertaining not only to the hunter, but even to the pastoral stage, there is little manifest motive for the use of one hand more than the other; and on the supposition of either becoming more generally serviceable, it would neither attract notice, nor interfere in any degree with the arts of life, though some gave a preference to the right hand, and others to the left. Hence the difficulty of determining the prevalence of right-handedness among savage nations. Its manifestations in the rude arts of the isolated workman are obscure, and any uniformity of action becomes apparent only in those combined operations which are comparatively rare in savage life. Yet even in the languages of the Hawaiians, Fijians, Maoris and Australians, terms are met with showing the preferential use of one hand. In the rudest state of society, man as a tool-using animal has this habit engendered in him; and as he progresses in civilisation, and improves on his first rude weapons and implements, there must arise an inevitable tendency to give the preference to one hand over the other, not only in combined action, but from the necessity of adapting certain tools to the hand.[45]

An interesting episode relating to this assumed speciality of man is introduced in a communication by the Rev. W. Greenwell to the Ethnological Society of London, on the opening of some ancient Norfolk flint pits, popularly known as “Grime’s Graves.” In these were found not only implements of flint, a hatchet of basalt, hammers, stones of quartzite and other pebbles, and numerous clippings and cores of flint, along with a bone-pin, and another implement of bone which Mr. Greenwell supposes to have been used in detaching the flakes of flint for knives and arrow-heads; but also a number of primitive deer-horn picks, which had been used by the ancient quarrymen by whom the flint was thus procured, and fashioned into tools.

The picks made from the antlers of the red-deer were constructed simply by detaching the horn at a distance of about sixteen or seventeen inches from the brow end, and then breaking off all but the large brow-tine, with the help of fire and rude cutting implements of flint. They had been used both as picks and hammers, the point of the brow-tine serving for a pick, and the broad flat part opposite to it as a hammer for breaking off and detaching the flint from the chalk; while excavations through the solid chalk were effected by means of hatchets of basalt. The marks of both tools were abundant on the walls of the galleries; and many of the rude picks, including the two specially referred to, were coated with an incrustation of chalk, bearing the impress of the workmen’s fingers. Here, as in the Brixham cavern, an accident, which brought the ancient operations to an abrupt close, sealed up the evidence of them beyond reach of all obscuring interpolations, until their discovery in recent years. In clearing out one of the subterranean galleries excavated in the chalk, it was found that “the roof had given way about the middle of the gallery, and blocked up the whole width of it. On removing this, it was seen that the flint had been worked out in three places at the end, forming three hollows, extending beyond the chalk face of the end of the gallery.” In front of two of these hollows lay two picks, corresponding to others found in various parts of the shafts and galleries, made from the antler of the red-deer. But in this case the writer notes that the handle of each was laid towards the mouth of the gallery, the tines, which formed the blades of the tools, pointing towards each other, “showing, in all probability, that they had been used respectively by a right and a left-handed man. The day’s work over, the men had laid down each his tool, ready for the next day’s work; meanwhile the roof had fallen in, and the picks had never been recovered,” until their reproduction in evidence of the supposed habits of the right and left-handed workmen, by whom they were employed at the close of that last day’s labour, in the prehistoric dawn.[46]

Fig. 39.—Scottish Stone Bracer.

Mr. Evans, in discussing the use of certain perforated plates of stone frequently found in British graves, adopts the idea that they were bracers, or guards, to protect the left arm of the archer against the recoil of the string in shooting with the bow. But, he adds, “unless there was some error in observation, plates of this kind have been occasionally found on the right arm”; and he refers to a skeleton observed by Lord Londesborough, on the opening of a chambered barrow at Driffield, the bones of the right arm of which were laid in a very singular and beautiful armlet, made of some large animal’s bone, set with two gold-headed bronze pins or rivets, most probably to attach it to a strap which passed round the arm, and was secured by a small bronze buckle found underneath the bones. This also Mr. Evans supposes to have been the bracer, or guard of an archer; and he adds, “possibly this ancient warrior was left-handed.” A Scottish example, from a large tumulus on the shore of Broadford Bay, Isle of Skye, is here shown, Fig. 39. These plates, or guards, are most frequently made of a close-grained green chlorite slate; and in various cases flint arrow-heads have been noted among other contents of the same grave. But the cist in which the supposed left-handed warrior lay contained a bronze dagger, some large amber beads, and a drinking-cup; but no arrow-heads to confirm the idea that he had been laid to rest with his bow beside him, and the guard ready braced on his arm, like one of the seven hundred left-handed Benjamites, every one of whom could sling stones at a hair’s breadth, and not miss. Possibly the novel and richly finished armlet occupied its proper place on the right arm as a personal decoration suited to the rank of the wearer.

But bronze pins and daggers carry us into later times than those of the Troglodytes of the Dordogne. Ancient though the Driffield barrow unquestionably is according to ordinary chronology, it is a very recent sepulchre compared with the catacombs of the French reindeer period, the drawings from which undoubtedly suggest the right-handedness of the draughtsmen who used the stylus and graver so dexterously in that birthtime of the fine arts in transalpine Europe.

But similar traces of primitive art, assigned to a still earlier epoch, have been recently reported from the vicinity of the Dardanelles. Mr. Frank Calvert describes the discovery of numerous stone implements, some of them of large size, and much worn, imbedded in drift two or three hundred feet thick, underlying stratified rocks, as he believes, of the miocene period. Flint implements are rare, and the most common material is red or other coloured jasper. Among fossil bones, teeth, and shells from the same formation, remains of the Dinotherium, and the shell of a species of Melania pertaining to the miocene epoch, have been identified; and Mr. Calvert writes to theLevant Herald:—“From the face of a cliff composed of strata of that period, at a geological depth of 800 feet, I have myself extracted a fragment of the joint of a bone of either a dinotherium or a mastodon, on the convex side of which is deeply incised the unmistakable figure of a horned quadruped, with arched neck, lozenge-shaped chest, long body, straight forelegs, and broad feet. There are also traces of seven or eight other figures, which, together with the hind quarters of the first, are nearly obliterated. The whole design encircles the exterior portion of the fragment, which measures nine inches in diameter, and five in thickness. I have also found, not far from the site of the engraved bone, in different parts of the same cliff, a flint flake, and some bones of animals fractured longitudinally, obviously by the hand of man, for the purpose of extracting the marrow, according to the practice of all primitive races.”[47]

These traces of primitive art Mr. Calvert recognises as “conclusive proofs of the existence of man during the miocene period of the tertiary age.” They at least furnish additional illustrations of his intellectual activity, however remote the antiquity to which he is traced; and show the same ideas of comparison which enter so largely, not only into modern artistic design, but into much of the rhetoric and poetry of later times.

Among living races the Innuit of Alaska, within three degrees of Behring’s Strait, are skilful carvers in ivory. They chiefly use the teeth of the Beluga, a small white whale common in their seas, and from this they carve birds, fish, seals, deer, and other animals, as well as bodkins, needles, awls, and other implements, with considerable skill. They obtain the walrus tusks in barter from more northern tribes; and from those they make fish-spears, harpoons, and other larger implements. They also amuse themselves with graving, on plates of bone or ivory, dances, hunting-scenes, and other familiar incidents. Of the latter, Mr. W. H. Dall remarks, in his interesting narrative ofAlaska and its Resources: “These drawings are analogous to those discovered in France, in the caves of Dordogne.”[48]They are so, in so far as both are attempts at representing contemporary animal life by untutored man; but the accompanying illustrations of Innuit art show how greatly the work of the modern savage draughtsman falls short of that of the artist of the Mammoth epoch of Europe.

Fig. 40.—Hunter’s Tally Deer’s-horn.

Fortunately our knowledge of the men of that remote era is supplemented by evidence of a still more direct kind. In 1868 the construction of a railroad led to the removal of an extensive talus on the left bank of the river Vézère, at Cro-Magnon, exposing a cave, or shallow recess in the face of the rock, within which were found a succession of strata, with traces of the action of fire, and including flint scrapers, bone bodkins, arrow-points, and other implements, along with bones of theElephas primigenius,Felis spelæa, the reindeer, fossil-horse, and ivory tablets and tynes of deer-horn, marked with a series of notches, supposed to be hunters’ tallies recording the produce of the chase. One of the latter, interesting as an illustration of these earliest efforts at numerical notation, is shown in Fig. 40. But most valuable of all were the human skeletons, including those of an old man, a woman, and portions of others of two young men, and a child. Beside them lay nearly three hundred marine shells, chiefly theLittorina littorea, some perforated teeth, and—as if to determine the era of the Troglodytes of Cro-Magnon,—several implements made of reindeer horn.

Evidence of a similar kind accumulates with the interest which it has excited. To the south of the Alps the caverns of Baoussé Roussé have yielded a singularly rich series of implements and personal ornaments of flint, ivory, bone, and shell; and more important than all, a nearly perfect human skeleton, brought to light in the Mentone Cave, with the skull still decorated with its ornamental head-gear of perforated shells (Cyclonassa neritea) and canine teeth of theCervus elaphus, originally strung, as is supposed, on a net for the hair. Across the forehead lay a large bone hair pin, made of the radius of a stag, with the natural condyle retained as its head.[49]The correspondence between the Mentone skull and those of Cro-Magnon is considerable. Already, therefore, sufficient remains of the ancient cave dwellers have been recovered to enable us to form some definite idea of their physical characteristics.

Fig. 41.—Skull of Old Man of Cro-Magnon—Profile.

The Cro-Magnon men and women are large of stature. Their skulls, like that of the Mentone Cave, are of a dolichocephalic type, and so far accord with the Esquimaux, rather than with any Turanian head-form. But it is important to note that in no other respect do they yield the slightest countenance to the theory favoured by some, that the cave-men of palæolithic Europe bore an affinity to the Esquimaux, and that in the latter we have the living representatives of post-glacial, if not still older man. If indeed the Cro-Magnon and Mentone skulls are, as they have been assumed to be, those of contemporaries of the mammoth and reindeer of Southern Europe, Dr. Pruner-Bey remarks of the race: “If we consider that its three individuals had a cranial capacity much superior to the average at the present day; that one of them was a female, and that female crania are generally below the average of male crania in size; and that nevertheless the cranial capacity of the Cro-Magnon woman surpasses the average capacity ofmaleskulls of to-day, we are led to regard the great size of the brain as one of the more remarkable characters of the Cro-Magnon race. This cerebral volume seems to me even to exceed that with which at the present day a stature equal to that of our cave-folks would be associated: whether the skulls from the Belgium caves are small, not only absolutely, but even relatively in the rather small stature of the inhabitants of those caves.”[50]Along with this ample cerebral development, the general form of the head is graceful and symmetrical. Alike in the Cro-Magnon and Mentone examples the total absence of prognathism is noted. An expressive, though strongly marked orthognathic profile with ample forehead, prominent nose, moderately developed superciliary ridges and maxillaries, and a well-formed chin, all compare favourably, not only with the foremost savage races, but with many civilised nations of modern times.

Skull of Old Man of Cro-Magnon.Fig. 42.—Front View.Fig. 43.—Vertical View.

Of the age of those Troglodytes of France, M. Lartet remarks: “The presence of the remains of an enormous bear, of the mammoth, of the great cave-lion, of the reindeer, the spermophile, etc., in the hearth-beds, strengthens in every way the estimation of their antiquity; and this can be rendered still more rigorously, if we base our argument on the predominance of the horse here, in comparison with the reindeer, on the form of the worked flints, and of the bone arrow and dart-heads.”[51]This argument, however, overlooks the possibility of the interments long after the accumulation of the hearth-beds with their included relics. Assuming this cavern period of Central France as the later subdivision of the palæolithic age of Europe, its drawings and carvings represent the arts of a remote era, compared even with the polished stone-hammers and chipped flints contemporary with the oldest implements of bronze. It is obvious, therefore, that a comparison between the rude worked flints of the cave-men of Southern France, and the highly finished stone implements of the Bronze Period of Northern Europe, is no true gauge of any intermediate progress or development. The artist to whose pencil or graving-tool we owe the only authentic portraiture of the mammoth, unquestionably possessed skill and intellectual vigour adequate to the production of any stone implement or personal ornament pertaining to the arts of Western Europe at the commencement of its metallurgic period. In truth it is far easier to produce evidences of deterioration than of progress, in instituting a comparison between the contemporaries of the mammoth, and later prehistoric races of Europe, or savage nations of modern centuries. They had advanced, as M. Paul Broca says, “to the very threshold of civilisation.” They possessed arts, industry, and apparently such a degree of social organisation as their external circumstances admitted of. But then, as at many subsequent periods, the elements of progress were arrested at this stage, and the whole work of civilisation had to be begun anew.

A careful study of the native arts of the American continent, in subsequent chapters, will bring under our notice the intellectual efforts of man in a purely savage state, and so help to a determination of what is implied in certain partial manifestations of mimetic design. This is the true corrective of any tendency to an undue estimate of the general progress implied by such evidence. It will be seen that a rare aptitude is shown among certain tribes for mimetic drawing and carving; yet it is of limited application, and accompanied by little superiority to surrounding tribes in the employment of the arts for the general requirements of savage life. Even in such cases, however, it is an evidence of latent powers, capable of development under favourable circumstances. The Esquimaux have been stimulated by the necessities of Arctic life to great ingenuity in the fashioning of their weapons, and in all other appliances of the chase, on which their very existence depends; but they are skilful, as a savage people, in the ornamental, as well as the useful arts. Their skin and fur dresses are fashioned and decorated with great taste; and many of their ivory and bone implements are beautifully carved. There is in the Museum of the University of Toronto a set of Esquimaux children’s toys, including miniature men, dogs, sledges, and objects of the chase, all carved in ivory with ingenious skill. The Thlinkets of Alaska, lying on the borders of the true Esquimaux region, make ladles and spoons from the horns of the deer, the mountain sheep, and the goat, which are special objects of the chase, and carve them with elaborate ingenuity. Grotesque masks of wood, paddles, knife handles of bone, bodkins, combs, and other personal ornaments, chiefly of walrus ivory, are all carved with great variety of design, though scarcely in a style of high art.

Fig. 44.—Tawatin Ivory Carving of Whale.

Among the tribes lying immediately to the south, the Tawatin Indians of British Columbia specially excel in ivory carving. Their personal ornaments are lavishly decorated; and many of their carvings resemble in so far the mammoth portraiture of the Madelaine artist, that they are simply efforts of skill, having no other end in view than the pleasure derived from their execution. It will be seen, however, in the conventional representation of the whale, as shown in Fig. 44, how far they fall short of the ancient workers in ivory in literal truthfulness of delineation. In one respect indeed this piece of Tawatin carving recalls a characteristic of early Christian art. Trifling as the correspondence is, it is curious thus to find the modern Indian carver of the Pacific coast giving to the monster of the deep the same barbed tongue which forms the conventional attribute of the dragons and leviathans of medieval Europe. But it is greatly more interesting to note, not only the thoroughly native style of art of their more elaborate carvings; but to recognise in many of them certain traits which recall characteristics of the finished sculptures on the ruins of Central America and Yucatan. This is strikingly shown in another of their carvings, Fig. 45, where some of the points of resemblance help to confirm other traces, hereafter indicated on different grounds, of early intercourse, if not of a common relationship, between savage tribes of the North-West, and ancient civilised nations of Central America and the Mexican plateau.

Fig. 45.—Tawatin Ivory carving.

In times still prehistoric, though apparently recent in comparison with the mammoth or reindeer period of France, the works of the ancient Lake-dwellers of Switzerland furnish illustrations of the application of horn, bone, and ivory to many useful purposes for which the metals are now considered as alone suitable. The site of the pfahlbauten at Concise, on Lake Neuchâtel, has been peculiarly rich in the illustrations it has yielded of implements in flint, stone, bone, horn, and also in bronze. The skulls, horns, and bones, both of domesticated animals, and of those procured in the chase, are also abundant; and among the latter, the red deer and the wild boar appear to have predominated as articles of food.

The Natural History Museum of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which owes its existence to the indefatigable zeal of the lamented Professor Agassiz, is enriched by a collection of remains of the ancient Swiss Lake-dwellers, obtained under peculiarly favourable circumstances. The father of the distinguished naturalist was for a period of fifteen years the clergyman of Concise; and it chanced that the son revisited his native canton at a time when the construction of a railway viaduct across part of the neighbouring lake led to the discovery of numerous traces of its ancient population. He was accordingly able to secure a choice collection illustrative of aboriginal arts, including some characteristic specimens of horn and bone implements, from which some illustrative examples are here selected. Fig. 46 may be described as a chisel made of a hog’s tooth inserted in a haft of deer’s-horn, precisely after a fashion familiar to the Red Indian, of converting the incisor of the beaver into a useful cutting tool. The same collection includes knives, daggers, bodkins, or awls, made of bone or ivory, and hafted in like manner with horn; as well as implements of flint and stone hereafter referred to.[52]

Fig. 46.—Hog’s Tooth Chisel, Concise.

Among the tools and personal ornaments wrought of mammoth ivory, which Dean Buckland describes as found in the Goat Hole Cavern at Paviland, is a skewer made of the metacarpal bone of a wolf, flattened at the edge at one end, and terminated at the other by the natural rounded condyle of the bone. Implements of this type are by no means rare. The original disclosures of Kent’s Cavern included arrow and lance-heads, bodkins, pins, hair-combs, netting-tools, and other implements, all made of bone. Similar objects have been repeatedly found in Scottish weems and brochs, and in the kitchen-middens of Britain, Denmark, and other European accumulations of the like kind. Fig. 47 represents a group of such objects, chiefly from one of the primitive subterranean dwellings, at Skara, in Orkney. It includes a small perforated ivory pin, and a bodkin made after the fashion of the Goat Hole wolf-bone implement from the metatarsal bone of a small ox. Implements of this simple character are common to the arts of many periods and states of society; and like the flint and stone implements of nearly every age and country, help to illustrate the tool-making instinct peculiar to man.

Fig. 47.—British Bone Implements.

Isolated in the little island-worlds of the Pacific Ocean, man is found again and again, in a condition which seems to involve all but absolute privation of the materials on which his constructive faculty can operate. The extensive archipelago interposed between the Society and Gambier Islands and the Marquesas, consists exclusively of coral islands. There the native arts are mostly of an inferior character; though their small and slight canoes are propelled with great rapidity by means of a paddle ingeniously formed with a curved blade. But every idea of rudeness in their arts gives way to wonder and admiration on discovering the limited materials at the command of the workmen. The cocoa-palm furnishes supplies for matting and weaving, and the cassytha stems and cocoa-nut fibre are plaited into ropes. A finer cord is made of human hair; and bones of the turtle and the larger kinds of fish supply the only material for fish-hooks and spears. There are no natural productions on the islands harder than shell or coral; and from these accordingly the native tools are made. Here, therefore, we see what reason is capable of achieving in the development of ingenious arts, amid a privation of nearly all that seems indispensable to the first efforts at constructive skill. Compared with such inadequate means, the flint, stone, horn, and bone of Europe’s stone-period seem little less ample, than the contrast of her later metallurgic riches with the resources of that primitive era.

Though the natives of the Antilles possessed some natural advantages over the inhabitants of the volcanic and coral islands of the Pacific: yet the abundance of large and easily-wrought shells invited their application to many useful purposes; and accordingly when first visited by the Spaniards, the large marine shells with which the neighbouring seas abound, constituted an important source for the raw material of their implements and manufactures. The great size, and the facility of workmanship of the widely-diffusedpyrulæ,turbinella,strombi, and other shells, have indeed led to a similar application of them among uncivilised races, wherever they abound. Of such, the Caribs made knives, lances, and harpoons, as well as personal ornaments; while the mollusc itself was sought for and prized as food. In Barbadoes theStrombus gigasstill furnishes a favourite repast; and numerous weapons and implements made from its shells have been dug up on the island. The accompanying illustrations (Fig. 48) are selected from specimens illustrative of the primitive manufactures of the Antilles presented to me by Dr. Bovell. They were dug up with other relics, in the island of Barbadoes, where traces of the aboriginal Carib blood continued till very recently to mark a portion of the coloured population. The Christy collection includes various examples of axes believed to be of Carib workmanship, from Porto Rico, St. Juan, and St. Thomas. They are worked in greenstone, mottled jade, green jasper, and a hard light green slate, mostly in wedge-form. But the most characteristic specimen of local art is an axe of coral rock, 7½ inches long, semi-cylindrical, and tapering at both ends, which was found in the cave of Cuevetas, twenty miles from Puerto del Principe, Cuba.

Fig. 48.—Carib Shell-Knives.

The Carib aborigines of the Antilles furnish a striking example of what the more active manifestations of moral degradation among a savage people really imply. Compared with the gentle, passive Indians met by the Spaniards on the first islands visited by European explorers, the Caribs were a cruel and fierce race of cannibals, as hateful in all their most salient characteristics as the New Zealanders or Fijians. Yet time has proved, even under very unfavourable circumstances, that the fierceness and aggressive cruelty of the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles corresponded to the wild fury of the old viking rovers of Europe, and gave proof of energy and stamina capable of sturdy endurance; while the gentle and friendly Indians of the larger Antilles, without, in reality, any superior moral attributes, but only the characteristics of a weak and passive nature, have disappeared, leaving behind them scarcely a memorial of their existence. The Caribs are the historic race of the Antilles. Their chronicles derive vitality and endurance, like those of ancient Europe, from the vicissitudes of war. Those show them as restless aggressors; and though long since expelled from their ancient insular possessions, they still appear on the southern mainland as the people of an encroaching area; and the marches of their extending frontier ring with the shouts of border warfare, as fierce, and to us not greatly less substantial than the Wendish and Bulgarian warrings of Henry the Fowler, and his German Markgräfs of well-nigh a thousand years ago.

In 1851, Sir Robert Schomburgk communicated to the British Association the results of recent ethnological researches in St. Domingo. In these the observant traveller deplored the fact that of the millions of natives who at its discovery peopled the island, not a single pure descendant now exists, though he could trace in the Indios of mixed blood the peculiar features and other physical characteristics of the Indian still uneradicated. In the absence of a true native population, Sir Robert Schomburgk remarks: “My researches were restricted to what history and the few and poor monuments have transmitted to us of their customs and manners. Their language lives only in the names of places, trees, and fruits, but all combine in declaring that the people who bestowed these names were identical with the Carib and Arawaak tribes of Guiana. An excursion to the calcareous caverns of Pommier, about ten leagues to the west of the city of Santo Domingo, afforded me the examination of some picture-writings executed by the Indians after the arrival of the Spaniards. These remarkable caves, which are in themselves of high interest, are situated within the district over which, at the landing of the Spaniards, the fair Indian Catalina reigned as cacique.” To this district they were tempted by the news of rich mines in its mountains. In 1496, a fortified tower was erected, called originally San Aristobal; but so abundant was the precious metal, that even the stones of the fortress contained it, and the workmen named it the Golden Tower. But the lives of millions of the miserable natives were sacrificed in recovering the gold from their mountain veins; and then, the mines being exhausted, the country was abandoned to the exuberance of tropical desolation, while the caverns which had previously been devoted to religious rites, became places of retreat from the Spaniard and his frightful bloodhounds. One of the smaller caves still exhibits a highly interesting series of symbolic pictures, which the Indians had traced on its white and smooth walls. Near the entrance of a second cave, Sir R. Schomburgk discovered decorations of a more enduring character carved on the rock, and of these he remarks: “They belong to a remoter period, and prove much more skill and patience than the simple figures painted with charcoal on the walls of the cave near Pommier. The figures carved of stone, and worked without iron tools, denote, if not civilisation, a quick conception and an inexhaustible patience, to give to these hard substances the desired forms.” From his examination of the tools and utensils still in use in Guiana, Sir Robert doubted such to be the work of the Caribs; but he admitted that they are only found where we have sure evidence of their presence; and he under-estimated both the skill and patience shown by many native artists equally poorly provided with tools.

Other relics of native art and history attracted the attention of the traveller, and he specially dwelt with interest on a paved ring of granite, upwards of 2200 feet in circumference, with a human figure rudely-fashioned in granite occupying the centre. It stands in the vicinity of San Juan de Maguana, in St. Domingo, which formed, at the time of its first discovery, a distinct kingdom, governed by the cacique Caonabo, the most fierce and powerful of the Carib chiefs, and an irreconcilable enemy of the European invaders. It is called at the present day, “El Cercado de los Indios,” but Sir Robert Schomburgk questioned its being the work of the inhabitants of the island when first visited by the Spaniards, and assigned it, along with figures which he examined cut on rocks in the interior of Guiana, and the sculptured figures of St. Domingo, to a people far superior in intellect to those Columbus met with in Hispaniola. These he conceived to have come from the northern part of Mexico, adjacent to the ancient district of Huastecas, and to have been conquered and extirpated by their Carib supplanters, prior to European colonists displacing them in their turn.

The roving Caribs supplied themselves with axes and clubs of jade, greenstone, and others of the most prized materials of the mainland; but they turned the easily wrought shells of the neighbouring seas to account in much the same way as the natives of the coral islands of the Pacific to whom any harder material is unknown. But while noting the varied uses to which the shells of the Caribbean Sea were applied by the natives of the archipelago, a greater interest attaches to the indications of an ancient trade in these products of the Gulf of Florida, carried on among widely-scattered tribes of North America, long before its discovery by Columbus.

Abundant evidence proves that the large marine shells were regarded with superstitious reverence, alike by the more civilised nations of the land around the Gulf, and by others even so far north as beyond the shores of the great Canadian Lakes. In the latter case it is not difficult to account for the origin of such a feeling among tribes familiar only with small native fresh-water shells. But in one of the singular migratory scenes of the ancient Mexican paintings, copied from the Mendoza Collection,[53]in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, a native, barefooted, and dressed in a short spotted tunic reaching to his loins, bears in his right hand a spear, toothed round the blade, it may be presumed with points of obsidian, and in his left hand a large univalve shell. A river, which he is passing, is indicated by a greenish stripe winding obliquely across the drawing, and his track, as shown by alternate footprints, has previously crossed the same stream. On this trail he is followed by other figures nearly similarly dressed, but sandalled, and bearing spears and large fans; while a second group approaches the river by a different trail, and in an opposite direction to the shell-bearer. Other details of this curious fragment of pictorial history are less easily interpreted. An altar or a temple appears to be represented on one side of the stream; and a highly-coloured circular figure on the other, may be the epitomised symbol of some Achæan land or Sacred Elis of the New World. But whatever be the interpretation of the ancient hieroglyphic painting, its general correspondence with other migratory depictions is undoubted; and it is worthy of note, that, in some respects, the most prominent of all the figures is the one represented fording the stream, and bearing a large tropical univalve in his hand.

The evidence thus afforded of an importance attached to the large sea-shells of the Gulf of Mexico, among the most civilised of the American nations settled on its shores, deserves notice in connection with the discovery of the same marine products among relics pertaining to Indian tribes upwards of three thousand miles distant from the native habitat of the mollusca, and separated by hundreds of miles from the nearest sea-coast.

Back to Index Next