648 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
The boiling-vessel was a cauldron-shaped hole in the ground, lined with a raw 
hide; or a hide suspended like a hammock ; or a large wooden box, trough, tub, or 
bowl; or a closely-woven basket of vegetable fibre. Captain Cook found the 
process in use among the Polynesian islanders, and other travellers have wit- 
nessed it, e.g., among the New Zealanders in 1816; among the Esquimaux in 
1826; in Australia in 1856; and also in Kamtschatka and South America. A 
summary account of these extra-European methods was published in 1865 by 
E. B. Tylor, who pointed out that several limited applications of the principle 
in comparatively modern times had been recorded in Europe also, viz. in the 
Hebrides by George Buchanan in 1528; in Ireland in 1600; in East Bothland 
by Linné in 1732; and in Carinthia by Morlot. 
Throughout the British Isles few ancient sites have been explored that have 
not yielded occasional burnt stones, which have no doubt rightly been regarded 
as pot-boilers, or as heaters employed in some form of oven. But large heaps of 
burnt, cracked, and broken stones, mingled with charcoal-dust, although fre- 
quent near springs and streams in districts devoid of other evidences of ancient 
occupation, such as camps, villages, or hut-circles, have seldom been recorded, 
and, if noted, have not always been understood. To the Irish archeologists 
belongs the credit of being the first to recognise the origin and meaning of these 
heaps, though from the Irish records it is probable that there the clue was fur- 
nished by tradition. As early as 1815 Horatio Townsend found heaps of burnt 
stones in co. Cork and regarded them as primitive cooking-places; and since that 
date similar heaps have been discovered near springs and streams in many parts 
of Ireland, and in several instances have proved to contain a wooden or clay 
trough in which the boiling was performed. 
In Great Britain a growing volume of evidence supports the view that the 
practice of stone-boiling once ranged from the Shetlands to the English 
Channel. In 1865-6 James Hunt and Arthur Mitchell described certain ‘ tumuli’ 
in Shetland, of wholly abnormal character, which were composed of small, 
broken, and burnt angular stones and black earth. No interments were found 
in them, but fragments of burnt pottery were seen, and near—but not within— 
several of the mounds were found small stone cists. Dr. Mitchell remarked as a 
peculiarity that most of the Shetland ‘tumuli’ have one side flattened and 
depressed. Jn the particulars recorded of these Shetland remains it is now easy 
to recognise some of the characteristic features of the Irish cooking-places, and I 
have no doubt that the supposed tumuli were heaps of pot-boilers, and the cists 
the boiling-troughs of ancient cooking-places. Traces of stone-boiling have been 
detected also in Sutherland, in Berwickshire, and in East Lothian. 
In the Isle of Man several ‘tumuli’ of burnt stones have been recorded, but 
without any suggestion as to their origin. A dug-out oaken trough associated 
with one of these masses of burnt stones has been described as a canoe; but it is 
perhaps more likely to have been a boiling-trough, or else a derelict canoe turned 
to account for cooking-purposes. 
The Dartmoor Exploration Committee have detected traces of stone-boiling 
among the hut-sites of Grimspound and elsewhere; and although no heaps of 
pot-boilers are recorded in the Reports of the Barrow Committee of the Devon 
Association, the descriptions of certain cairns of unusual character but showing 
signs of fire are strongly suggestive of the stone-heaps associated with the Irish 
cooking-places. In Eastern Devon, the late P. O. Hutchinson in 1862 recorded a 
case where an accumulation of burnt flints at Blackbury Castle, a camp near 
Colyton, was removed in 1827 and supplied seventy cart-loads of material. In 
Hampshire, also, similar deposits have been reported from the Forest of Bere; 
and Mr. Clement Reid, lately my colleague on the Geological Survey, informs me 
that while quartered in the New Forest he found numerous heaps of burnt flints 
between Ringwood and Brockenhurst, though he had accounted for them as the 
relics of prehistoric turf-fires, the stones that were entangled in the fuel having 
given rise in time to a heap of burnt flints. 
In Central and South Wales,! with the assistance of several of my colleagues, 
I have located and described over 270 cooking-places, several of which have 
yielded worked flints. The mounds range from six to sixty feet in diameter, 
1 T. C. Cantrill and O. T. Jones, in Archeologia Cambrensts, 1906, pp. 17-34; 
1911, pp. 253-286, 
ee 
