ARCHEOLOGY. 



houses or in caverns in the rocks, having no 

 implements of metal, but using knives of stone 

 and awls of pointed bone. They had no pottery, 

 and their household utensils were made of wood 

 or leather, their arms were the bow and arrow, 

 and javelins headed with pointed bone. Their 

 women dressed the skins of animals killed in 

 the chase, and sewed them into garments with 

 needles of bone. They knew neither letters, nor 

 writing, nor chronology, and had no traditions 

 of their tribal history. They had no domestic 

 animal except the dog, and one peculiar variety of 

 their food, of which they made great use, was a 

 soup prepared from broken bones. Judging from 

 the evidence afforded by the caves of the Valley 

 of the Vdzere, every one of these traits must have 

 had its parallel among their occupants in the 

 early ages. 



A large number of ossiferous caverns have been 

 explored in other parts of France, and in Belgium, 

 Switzerland, and Savoy, which have for the most 

 part yielded similar results. 



Kent's Cavern, in Devonshire,* which was for 

 a number of ye.irs systematically worked by Mr 

 Pengelly, has yielded evidence that in this country 

 the earlier cave-dwellers were contemporary with 

 the same group of extinct animals as in France, 

 and the implements obtained from it are strikingly 

 similar in type to those obtained in such abun- 

 dance from the French caves. The Brixham 

 Cave, near Torquay ; the Hyena Den of Wookey, 

 near Wells ; King Arthur's Cave, in Herefordshire, 

 and several others both in England and Wales, 

 also belong to this earliest series. 



On the other hand, the ossiferous caverns of 

 Scotland have neither yielded remains of extinct 

 animals nor implements of the stone period. The 

 most remarkable of these, at Borness, Kirkcud- 

 brightshire, has yielded a group of implements 

 similar to those from the Settle caves in England, 

 which are assigned to the Romano-British period. 

 That the first occupation of these ossiferous 

 caverns was within the period represented by the 

 river-drift implements, is obvious from the fact 

 that a large proportion of the cave-implements are 

 of drift types. The animal remains associated 

 with both these groups of implements are also to 

 a certain extent the same. It is customary, how- 

 ever, to discriminate between the two periods, and 

 to speak of that represented by the drift as the 

 period of the Mammoth, and that of the caves 

 as the period of the Reindeer. This distinction, 

 however, does not necessarily imply an absolute 

 chronological sequence; in fact, it rather seems 

 that we must regard the implements of the drift 

 and those of the caves as at least partially con- 

 temporaneous. 



Antiquity. What measure of antiquity is im- 

 plied in the presence of the extinct animals, and 

 the absence of the domesticated species (which 

 are characteristic of the later prehistoric times), 

 we have no means of determining. It has been 

 attempted to be estimated by calculating the rate 

 of accumulation of the stalagmitic layers under i 

 which the earliest cave-deposits are found. But 

 we are warned, on the authority of Mr Evans (him- 

 self an able geologist, as well as an accomplished 

 advocate of the antiquity of man), that ' the rate 



* An account of the excavation of Kent's Cavern is given in the 

 tract entitled 'The Ancient Cave-men of Devonshire,' forming 

 No. 76 of Chambers's Miscellany. 



of deposit of stalagmitic matter vanes so much 

 with different conditions, that its thickness affords 

 no true criterion of the length of time during 

 which it has accumulated.' On the other hand, 

 the Brown Bear (Ursus antes), which in the 

 I earlier caverns is contemporary with the mam- 

 moth and other extinct animals, occurs in the 

 Settle Cave in the Romano-Celtic layer; and Mr 

 j Boyd Dawkins states that it was undoubtedly 

 living in this country during the Roman occupa- 

 tion ; while M. Dupont affirms that it existed in 

 i Belgium till the loth century. It is recorded in 

 the Orkney inga Saga (written about 1225 A.D.) 

 that the reindeer also a contemporary of the 

 mammoth, and the characteristic animal of the 

 cave-period was hunted by the earls of Orkney 

 in their dominion of Caithness in the middle of 

 the 1 2th century. Its remains, which are found 

 in the refuse-heaps of the ' Pictish towers ' or 

 burgs of Caithness and Sutherland, attest the 

 truth of the record. If, therefore, we have two 

 of the group of the extinct animals of the caves 

 surviving to historic times, we cannot deny the 

 possibility of the survival of their earlier contem- 

 poraries to a time much nearer the historic period 

 than is usually assigned to them. Nevertheless, 

 these caves remain, as we have said, the earliest 

 habitations of man in Europe of which we have 

 any knowledge. 



It would be wrong, however, to suppose that 

 all deposits found in caves are necessarily of 

 this primitive period. The habit of cave-dwelling 

 is neither exclusively prehistoric, nor peculiarly 

 characteristic of a period marked by a low type 

 of civilisation. In almost every age of human 

 history, hermits, banditti, and outlaws have 

 adopted it from choice ; or kings, princes, and 

 ! persecuted men have been driven to it from 

 necessity. In this very district of Perigord, in 

 i France, where the early cave-dwellers have left 

 i such abundant traces of their existence in the 

 reindeer period, there are caves of medieval occu- 

 pation ; and the habit of burrowing in the rocks 

 is not entirely abandoned in the Valley of the 

 Ve"zere at the present day. In the neighbourhood 

 of Chartres, in the very centre of France, accord- 

 ing to Mr Barn well, there are many thousands of 

 human beings still living in dwellings in the 

 rocks. Nor is the habit quite extinct in Scotland. 

 The writer is familiar with two natural caves in 

 the Bay of Wick, which have been inhabited for 

 many years by five or six families of gipsies, and 

 the parish registers bear entries in recent years 

 of births and deaths (they do not register their 

 marriages) occurring in caves. 



We learn from the life of St Kentigern and other 

 sources, that the clerics of the early Scottish 

 church were in the habit of retiring to caves and 

 solitary places, which they termed dtscrta, for 

 religious meditation and seclusion from the world. 

 The name Dysart, in Fife, still commemorates the 

 desertum of St Serf, where he encountered the 

 devil in his cave, and worsted him, as Wyntoun 

 tells. So St Adrian and his followers occupied 

 the caves at Caiplie, Wemyss, and St Monance ; 

 and the wide-spread nature of the custom is 

 attested by the occurrence of caves traditionally 

 connected with the early leaders of the Scottish 

 Church on many other parts of the coast The 

 caves themselves tell of the vigils of the clerics 

 or their followers, by the innumerable crosses and 



