14 PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 



imagination of Piette saw in them the actual characters of a primeval 

 alphabet ! 



The little flakes with a worked edge often known as ' pygmy flints,' 

 which were most of them designed for insertion into bone or horn har- 

 poons, like some Neohthic examples, are very characteristic of this 

 stratum, which is widely diffused in France and elsewhere under the 

 misleading name of ' Tardenoisian. ' At Ofnet, in Bavaria, it is 

 associated with a ceremonial skull burial showing the coexistence at that 

 spot of brachycephalic and dolichocephalic types, both of a new 

 character. In Britain, as we know, this Azilian, or a closely allied 

 phase, is traceable as far North as the Oban Oaves. 



"What, however, is of special interest is the existence of a northern 

 parallel to this cultural phase, first ascertained by the Danish investi- 

 gator. Dr. Sarauw, in the Lake station of Maglemose, near the "West 

 coast of Zealand. Here bone harpoons of the Azilian type occur, with 

 bone and horn implements showing geometrical and rude animal en- 

 gi'avings of a character divergent from the Magdalenian tradition. The 

 settlement took place when what is now the Baltic was still the gi'eat 

 ' Ancylus Lake,' and the waters of the North Sea had not yet burst 

 into it. It belongs to the period of the Danish pine and birch woods, 

 and is shown to be anterior to the earliest shell mounds of the Kitchen- 

 midden People, when the pine and the birch had given place to the oak. 

 Similar deposits extend to Sweden and Norway, and to the Baltic 

 Provinces as far as the Gulf of Finland. The parallel relationship of 

 this culture is clear, and its remains are often accompanied with the 

 characteristic ' pygmy' flints. Breuil, however,' while admitting the 

 late Palaeolithic character of this northern branch, would bring it into 

 relation with a vast Siberian and Altaic province, distinguished by the 

 •widespread existence of rock-carvings of animals. It is interesting 

 to note that a rock-engraving of a reindeer, very well stylised, from 

 the Trondhjem Fjoi"d, which has been refeiTed to the Maglemosian 

 phase, preserves the simple profile rendering — two legs only being 

 visible — of Early Aurignacian tradition. 



It is worth noting that an art affiliated to that of the petroglyphs 

 of the old Altaic region long survived in the figures of the Lapp troll- 

 drums, and still occasionally lingers, as I have myself had occasion 

 to observe, on the reindeer-horn spoons of the Finnish and Eussian 

 Lapps, whose ethnic relationship, moreover, points east of the Ural. 

 The existence of a Late Palaeolithic Province on the Eussian side is 

 in any case now well recognised and itself supports the idea 

 of a later shifting North and North-East, just as at a former period 



' ' Ees subdivisions du paleolithique siiperieur et leur signification.' — Congres 

 intern. d'Anthrop. et d'Arcfieol. ■prihist., XlVme Sess., Geneve, 1912, 

 pp. 165, 238. 



