xliv. 



group unrivalled in grandeur in Britain. The lake village consisted 

 of a cluster of round huts built upon artificial platforms of clay and 

 timber, surrounded by a stockade. It was made on the edge of a mere, 

 now a tract of peat, and was then protected from attack by the sheet of 

 water extended between it and Glastonbury, about one mile off. The 

 huts, some 12ft. to 14ft. in diameter, were made of wattle and daub and 

 had wooden doors between two and three feet high. Inside was a flat 

 stone platform used as a hearth. The numerous remains in and around 

 them proved that their possessors were advanced in an astonishing degree 

 in the technical arts. They used iron axes, adzes, gouges, and saws in 

 their woodwork, they reaped their wheat with iron sickles of various 

 shapes, they were armed with iron billhooks, swords, spears, and daggers. 

 They had iron chains. The scoriae and the unfinished articles proved 

 that the forges were in the village. They smelted lead ore from the 

 Mendip Hills, and manufactured out of it spindle whorls and weights 

 for nets. Some of the bits of glass slag made it probable that they 

 carried on the manufacture of glass which they used for beads and rings 

 ruby, blue, and green and other personal ornaments. They also were 

 workers in bronze, and were probably the makers of the beautiful 

 bronze bowl adorned with studs found in the village. They used bronze 

 fibula;, rings, pins, and mirrors, and ad (Jed to their personal charms by 

 red ochre arid charcoal, the latter mixed with grease. They wore 

 bracelets and armlets of Kimmeridge shale. They were also potters and 

 used the lathe for the finer articles, although the coarser, for common 

 domestic use, were made by hand. They were also spinners, and 

 employed the loom in weaving. They excelled in the arts of carpentry, 

 as was shown by the well-squared and holed beams, and the wooden 

 buckets, dishes, and bowls, many with flamboyant incised patterns, 

 and by the well-fitted wheels, ladders, and doors, and the handles of 

 their implements and weapons. Canoes of oak gave them access to the 

 mainland. They cultivated wheat on the adjacent land and kept horses, 

 the small prehistoric shorthorn ( Bos longifrons), sheep, goats, and pigs. 

 They also hunted the red deer and roe in the forests, and trapped the 

 beaver and otter in the marshes. Among the birds, mostly of the 

 marshes, on which they fed, wild geese, swans, ducks, and pelicans might 

 be noticed. The last had only been discovered in one other locality in 

 Britain in a peat bog. In their herding and hunting they used big dogs. 

 Their weapons were spears, arrows, slings, axes, billhooks, swords, and 

 daggers, and they probably used the horse in warfare as well as tor 

 ordinary domestic purposes, the bits being of iron and of the snaffle type. 

 The human remains, mostly skulls, found outside the stockade, told their 



