692 EEPORT — 1881. 



Temains of the wattled sides of the liut, had left their impressions in the circular 

 hed of clayey matter, some of which showed cuts made with the axe and the 

 saw, seemingly of metal. The dropping from the eaves of this hut had stained the 

 ground all roimd with colouring from the thatch of the roof, which probably was 

 the straw of wheat, as the author possesses carbonised grains of this cereal from 

 the primary interment of an undoubted British barrow near. Unlike the previous 

 dwelling, the occupier had not been interred within the walls of this circle, but 

 just a few feet outside, towards the rising sun. The bones were accompanied by a 

 delicately formed flint knife lying close to the right arm, and a finely ornamented 

 food vase near the head. As in the previous case the dwelhng had been crushed 

 down at the time of interment, and carefully covered with the barrow, showing 

 but a step between the habitation of the living and the house of the dead. 



5. On the Origin and. Use of Oval Tool-stones. By W. J. Knowles. 



The author stated that the use of oval tool-stones was not clearly understood. 

 Sir WiUiam Wilde, in the Catalogue of the Royal Irish Academy, defines them as 

 oval or egg-shaped stones, more or less indented on one or both surfaces. He states 

 that their use is problematical, and that they were ' denominated Tilhuggersteens 

 by the Northern antiquaries, who consider them chippers of flint or stone, and 

 believe that in working they held them between the finger and thumb applied to 

 these side cavities.' Sir John Lubbock, in ' Prehistoric Times,' gives a somewhat 

 similar accoimt of them, and states that it is very doubtful whether they really 

 belong to the Stone Age. Mr. John Evans, F.R.S., states in his Presidential 

 Address to the Anthropological Institute on January 29, 1878, when referring to 

 a case where one was found with flint scrapers and other objects, that 'if it could 

 be proved that they were contemporaneous he would more readily accept the scrapers 

 as being of the Age of Iron, than the tool-stones as belonging to that of Stone.' 

 The author has found a few of these tool-stones with flint objects in the sandhills 

 of Portstewart and Ballintoy, in the North of Ireland, and on one occasion he dug 

 up half of a tool-stone closely associated with flint scrapers, flakes, hammer-stones, 

 and cores at Ballintoy. He had frequently found stones with roughened and indented 

 spots, which appeared to be oval tool-stones in an early stage of formation. In the 

 sandhills of Dundrum, county Down, he obtained several of these among the flint 

 objects ; but during the summer of 1880, when excavating a spot which must have 

 been the site of an ancient dwelling-place, he dug up a very perfect stone hatchet 

 seven inches long, two flint knives, several scrapers, hammer-stones, and cores, and 

 among these a stone of the tool-stone class having one central pitted spot. The 

 finding of this pitted stone in such close proximity to cores, hammer-stones, and 

 flakes, caused the author to believe that the flint implement-makers must have 

 supported their cores or blocks of flint on a stone anvil, when about to dislodge flakes, 

 by striking with the hammer-stone, and that such an operation constantly repeated 

 would produce the pits on the anvil. This idea was confirmed by a similar anvil- 

 stone of larger size, with hammer-stones, flakes, and cores, being turned out during 

 excavations which the Mai-chioness of Downshire afterwards had made in Dundrum 

 Sandhills, and he believed that the anvil-stone was just as necessary a part of the 

 stock-in-trade of the flint implement-maker as the hammer-stones and cores. _At 

 Ballintoy, on a subsequent occasion, he obtained another of these anvil-stones, which 

 had been split, and both in this one and several other broken specimens in the author's 

 collection the split ran through the centre of the depression. In making an experi- 

 ment to see the effect of repeatedly hammering at a core resting on a stone anvil, 

 the author produced a pit in the anvil-stone identical in appearance with that on 

 the tool-stones, but on continuing the operation the stone split exactly through the 

 centre of the pit. He therefore believed that it was owing to repeated blows on 

 the same spot that the stones had split through the centre. 



In the author's collection of tool-stones the pits vary from mere roughening of 

 the surface to deep cup-shaped hollows nearly meeting in the centre. In one speci- 

 men, which had been excavated and found to be in connection with flint flakes and 



