6 Annals of the South African Museum. 



Aurignacian or Magdalenian, they are exposed on the surface, or 

 occur in shell mounds or in rock-shelters. They are found, occasion- 

 ally also with more ancient types, on the floor of huge sand-dunes 

 by the sea-coast, when these are exposed and bared, to be no less 

 periodically covered again, by the boisterous prevailing winds. They 

 are common near the water-places called here " fonteins," i.e., springs, 

 and mostly always near to, or in, depressions where rain-water 

 accumulates in the season : the " vleis," or " pans " of South Africa. 



When of a more ancient type, Chellean-Mousterian, they are 

 bedded in alluvial deposits, often very deeply. They occur in 

 numbers on the talus of mountains and high hills. They are met 

 with, but then mostly singly, in the exposed banks of rivers ; 

 occasionally they are found on the surface, or where river terraces 

 occur which, however, are not proved to l)e old. Often also they 

 are found singly, where no trace of land erosion is perceptible or 

 traceable, unless we go back to early pliocene — this showing plainly 

 that their presence there is purely accidental. 



The material is always a rock of hard texture ; no implement 

 made from a flint nodule has as yet been found, because the material 

 does not exist in South Africa. The hardest stone occurring locally 

 or at some distance off has been selected for the large and small 

 implements. It is Table Mountain sandstone (more or less quartzitic), 

 Karroo quartzite, dolerite, lydianite, or shale indurated by the in- 

 trusion of dolerite, surface quartzite of various textures, cherty 

 sandstone, Dwyka chert, banded jasper, diabase, agate, and chalce- 

 dony, white quartz either sugary or transparent, even granite. 

 Implements made of green bottle and white plate glass have also 

 been found. 



It happens not unfrequently that implements are met with in 

 situations where the rock of which they are made is known to be 

 absent. Barter may account for their presence there, but it is most 

 likely that they were carried and left where found by owners of 

 migratory or roaming habits or dispositions, clan-forming aborigines 

 that have disappeared, leaving behind them, however, these artefacts 

 as a testimony to their former existence. 



It soon becomes plain, even after a superficial examination, that 

 the making of implements of forms so various cannot have been 

 simultaneous. The technique is too dissimilar, the general facies 

 also. Next to the scraper-knife flaked off a hard stone for a passing 

 want and probably discarded immediately after, we find a laurel leaf- 

 shaped lance-head worked by careful secondary trimming on either 

 side and of nearly pure Solutrian type ; a "coup de poing " of a finish 



