522 Reviews — Grimes Graves. 



REVIEWS. 



I. — A Review of Report of the Excavations at Grimes Gkaves, 

 Weeting, Norfolk:. 8vo ; pp. 254. Prehistoric Society of East 

 Anglia. London: H.K.Lewis, 1915. Price 5s. 



TjlHE prehistoric flint mines known as Grimes Graves recently 

 X acquired new interest from the suggestion that they might be 

 of Palaeolithic age, contemporary with the Cave deposits of England. 

 The fact that this conclusion, if justified, would completely upset all 

 our ideas as to the history of Britain in late Pleistocene time makes 

 it necessary for geologists to take notice of the important work of 

 which this is a review. 



Two pits and their associated galleries were almost completely 

 cleared by a committee financially assisted by many institutions and 

 individuals. 



The excavations were supervised by Mr. A. E. Peake, who gives 

 an admirably clear account of them, followed by an equally excellent 

 description of the cleared pits and a discussion of the mode of infilling. 

 These diggings, obviously carried out with great skill and care, 

 reveal the following facts, which in the main merely confirm Canon 

 Greenwell's results of forty years ago. The mines consist of shafts, 

 about 30 feet deep, widely funnel-shaped above but with more vertical 

 sides below, of rather accurately circular form, and with a minimum 

 diameter of about 12 and a maximum of about 30 feet. The bottom 

 of the pit is supported by a ' shaft pillar ' pierced by about half 

 a dozen galleries which lead into an irregular series of chambers, or 

 perhaps more accurately a general excavation, in which the working 

 faces are so arranged as to leave pillars, as in the pillar and stall method 

 of coal-mining. 



The flint worked occurs as a layer of nodules lying on the bed 

 which forms the floor of the galleries. The immense amount of 

 debris from the shaft and galleries was disposed of either by 

 dumping into a neighbouring disused pit, having been hoisted out of 

 the hole by a rope which cut grooves in the side walls at various places, 

 or in later stages by packing it away in disused galleries. The work 

 of excavation was almost entirely performed with picks of red deer 

 antler, whose marks are shown in the chalk, and of which a very 

 large number of broken and worn-out specimens were found in the 

 galleries and fillings. 



Some of the cuts in the walls of the galleries were not made by 

 bone picks but by both chipped and ground axes, an observation which 

 confirms Canon Greenwell's discovery of a ground basalt axe in his pit, 

 which has been quite gratuitously questioned. These axes, however, 

 were only used to a slight extent. The flints when extracted were 

 broken up by blows from the back of the picks or from an isolated 

 flint hammer. 



Between and round the pits are floors where the blocks of flint 

 were worked up ; these are marked by the great mass of scraps and 

 roughly chipped blocks. The animal remains, both mammals and 

 molluscs, belong entirely to living species, and include sheep and oxen, 



