524 Reviews — Grimes Graves. 



these celt-like forms are actually neolithic celts, made as blanks for 

 trade, exported as they stood, and used either rough or after more 

 or less grinding by their ' purchaser '. That such a type of trade is 

 not only possible but probable will be obvious to anyone who will 

 examine in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, 

 or in the Field Museum at Chicago, the immense series of Indian 

 implements which show all stages, from the rough blanks sometimes 

 found in Illinois and Wisconsin in enormous caches of several 

 thousand, to well-finished knives or spear-heads. 



Yet in the face of this evidence (which has been available for 

 years) and of the fact that this celt-like form with more or less 

 parallel sides and a segmental edge cannot be matched in cave 

 series, although they are the dominant type at Cissbury and Grimes 

 Graves, Mr. Smith obviously inclines to the idea that the whole 

 series are of an age intermediate between Le Moustiers and Aurignac 

 This remarkable view is really founded on the occurrence at the 

 Graves (and also at Cissbury) of disc-like flints, very like lata 

 Acheulian types and of others resembling ' hand-axes'. The extra- 

 ordinary implement mentioned above with a neolithic ground axe-head 

 at one end and the point of a Chelles ficron at the other, both 

 obviously of the same age, show that supposititious river-drift type 

 did continue into the age of polished stone. The idea that the 

 industry (for it is obviously only one industry) is of Mousterian age 

 is founded largely on the occurrence of a tortoise core and a couple 

 of flakes of ' Levallois type ', a type by the way which was probably 

 not used in later Mousterian time, but surely the great cores of 

 Pressigny are nothing but tortoise cores, rather better made and 

 of post- Palaeolithic date? Apart from these the whole argument 

 rests on a series of often unique pieces which may be paralleled in 

 various cave cultures. Argument of this type, the comparison of 

 exceptional tools of one site with exceptional tools of others (of 

 various ages) when the general series are totally different, is surely 

 reducing the study of the cultural stages of stone-using man to an 

 absurdity. Messrs. Mahoney & Kenyon have exhibited in the 

 Melbourne Museum a series of stone tools from modern Australian 

 camps which exactly match the European implement of all the 

 Palaeolithic stages placed alongside them; sporadic resemblances of 

 occasional implements to earlier and far removed types are very 

 common ; only a few months ago the present writer picked up. 

 a typical though small Mousterian point, associated with Indian 

 arrow-heads in Texas. 



Mr. Smith asks if the Graves are neolithic, why do we not find 

 polished axes and arrow-heads ? Why should we do so ? Does the 

 modern flint knapper go to his work accompanied by an axe and 

 a shot-gun ? Why should the prehistoric artisan take with him an 

 expensive polished stone axe when a crude unpolished one or a deer 

 horn pick will do his work equally well, and why should he leave 

 arrow-heads, also comparatively expensive, amongst the waste 

 material of his workshop? As these very excavations have shown, 

 polished axes were in existence whilst this industry was flourishing, 

 and until Mr. Smith can produce a polished axe found by a reliable 



