FLINTS AND POTSHEEDS. 11 



inhabited the country, as well as of those which had been brought 

 into a state of domestication. I am indebted to Mr. William Boyd- 

 Dawkins, F.R.S., for identifying those I have discovered, a detailed 

 account of which will be given in the sequel. 



There are two other series of objects,, which are found still 

 more constantly, and even more abundantly, than the bones, and 

 for the presence of which it is much more difficult to account; 

 namely, flints and potsherds. They occur at times in very large 

 quantities ; the flints generally in the shape of mere chippings and 

 waste pieces, but often as manufactured articles, such as arrow- 

 points, knives, saws, drills, and scrapers, &c. The potsherds are 

 sometimes fragments of the ordinary sepulchral pottery, but more 

 frequently of vessels which, on account of their better firing and 

 the absence of ornament, appear to be those of domestic utensils. 

 Both flints and potsherds are found distributed throughout the 

 whole of a mound, and in some instances in such quantities as to 

 suggest the idea that the persons who were engaged in throwing up 

 the barrow, scattered them, from time to time, during the process. 

 They are certainly not there accidentally T . The potsherds might 

 be supposed to be fragments of vessels broken at the funeral or 

 other feasts, but then we should expect to find many pieces be- 

 longing to the same vessel more frequently than is the case. I have 

 met with the remains of at least twenty different utensils in the 

 same barrow, whilst the fragments which belonged to any one 

 vessel formed a very inconsiderable portion of the whole. 



It is difficult to account for the occurrence of the flints and 

 potsherds in question, except on the supposition that they sym- 

 bolised some religious idea, though what that idea was we may 

 not be able even to conjecture. A passage in Hamlet (act v. scene i) 

 may possibly have reference to this ancient rite, though it is in 

 the play spoken of as being unholy. Those rites, however, which 

 are thought pious in one religion are often accounted accursed in a 



1 It has been suggested that these flints came into the barrows along with the 

 surface soil, of which, in a great measure, many of them are formed ; chippings and 

 other pieces of used flint being, as is well known, strewn abundantly on the ground 

 where these early people dwelt, and near to which they buried their dead. This way 

 of accounting for their occurrence, though plausible, cannot I think be maintained, 

 inasmuch as they are found abundantly amongst the chalk rubble of which many 

 barrows are made, and in the chalk filling in of graves, where no surface soil is mixed 

 with it ; and also in places where flint chippings &c. are not met with amongst the 

 surface soil. And even where the barrow is made up of such material as is ordinarily 

 found to contain them, and that abundantly, yet the number of them in some mounds 

 is so very large as to preclude the idea that they can ever have been laid on the surface 

 in quantities so great as to account for that abundance. 



