24 RELIQUIAE AQUITANICJE. 



used in our own country by the gipsies namely, that of burying in the ground the 

 animal encased in clay, and lighting a fire over it. The only other way, then, in 

 which they can have cooked their food is by boiling ; but the general absence of 

 pottery in the Reindeer- caves of Perigord makes it difficult to imagine how they 

 could effect this, unless we suppose they may have employed means still, or until 

 lately, used by the Indians of North America, who boil their food without putting 

 the vessel in which it is cooked upon the fire. Vessels of wood, of bark, or of plait 

 so firmly worked as to contain water, are all spoken of by travellers within a 

 century past as in use for boiling food by means of stones heated in the fire 

 and then thrown into these vessels filled with water, which is thus boiled from 

 within*. 



Although there is, in this district of Perigord, throughout these deposits of the 

 Reindeer-period, an almost entire absence of pottery, there are yet indications that 

 in a later period of the Stone-age the knowledge of it was possessed by the inhabi- 

 tants of this country; for at the distance of a few miles, on a plateau of considerable 

 elevation near the Chateau of the Marquis de Campagne, abundant fragments of 

 rude pottery have been lately observed, in connexion with a carefully chipped 

 barbed arrow-head of so called Celtic type, and a portion of a polished stone axe. 



Former Climate. In addition to the presumption of a once colder climate 

 which is furnished by the fauna, it is difficult to suppose that at the period when 

 these remains were left the climate was the same as it now is ; for, though we 

 may have examples in the habits of the present Esquimaux, that in their cold 

 climate it is possible to live without detriment to health amid an accumulation 

 of animal remains, the case would be very different in the South of France, 

 where at the temperature of the present day such accumulations would, except in 

 Avinter, become speedily a fearfully decomposing mass. That the inhabitants of 

 that day had no such difficulty to contend with may be inferred from their having 

 almost invariably chosen a southern exposure and the warmest and sunniest nooks 

 for their residences ; and that they lived in them at all seasons, and did not quit 

 them in summer for cooler ones, is evident from the occurrence of the Reindeer 

 horns and bones in all conditions of age. 



It is to be noted that in this country there are no high mountains, among whose 

 snows, as in the Pyrenees, the Reindeer could have taken refuge from the summer 

 heats, the greatest elevation being a little over eight hundred feet. 



* The European bushranger in Australia practises a similar method of heating water, in a hollowed lump 

 of the soft Bottle-tree. See also the Chapter on " Fire-making and Cooking," in E. B. Tylor's ' Early 

 History of Mankind,' 1865. EDIT. 



