104 INTRODUCTION. 



impossible they can ever have served any other than a temporary 

 purpose, and one not admitting- of their being- much handled. 

 Some of the cinerary urns and 'food vessels' have been only very 

 partially exposed to the action of fire^ sometimes indeed having 

 been scarcely altered by heat from the natural condition of the 

 clay. This coarseness and fragileness characterise almost all the 

 cinerary urns and a large number of the ' food vessels.' It is 

 true indeed that many of the latter, and nearly all the ' drinking 

 cups,' are of better-tempered and finer clay, and have been sub- 

 jected to much more complete firing, but even the strongest of 

 these are but ill adapted for most household work, and would 

 certainly not bear the knocking about to which such vessels 

 must necessarily be submitted. Nor do any of them seem, from 

 their shape, to be well suited for such purposes as domestic 

 utensils are intended for. The cinerary urns would undoubtedly 

 answer no end, which can be imagined, except for storing away 

 grain or some other vegetable products; but the very small 

 size of some of them precludes any such idea. Nor is the shape, 

 with its invariably narrow bottom, at all what would be chosen 

 for such a purpose. The Swiss Lake Dwellings have produced 

 large numbers of vessels, of all sizes, and belonging both to the 

 stone and bronze age, which had been made by those lake-dwellers 

 for the ordinary use of the household. These are all of quite 

 a different nature from the pottery of the barrows ; and, as might 

 be expected from the purpose for which they were fabricated, 

 though many are very rudely made, yet they are much better 

 baked, and of a more enduring character, than the sepulchral 

 vessels in question. Mr. Way suggests that the over-hang- 

 ing rim, so characteristic a feature in the cinerary urns, was 

 intended as a means of supporting the vessel by passing a thong 

 or some such appliance round the urn, underneath the pro- 

 jecting part of it. The objections to this view appear to be 

 many. In the first place it scarcely seems to be a natural mode 

 of suspending such a vessel, and the rim in many cases projects 

 too slightly to give sufficient security to the fastening; the urns 

 also are much too fragile, and the clay is wanting in that suf- 

 ficient cohesion which would allow the vessel, when filled with 

 even a light substance, to be suspended in that way. The 

 peculiar appearance the cinerary urns present, with the almost 

 universal overhanging rim, giving them as it does so marked 

 a character, I cannot regard as caused by the requirements of 



