NEOLITHIC, BRONZE, AND IRON AGES. 375 



taming to the Bronze Age are certain crescents of earthenware 

 which are supposed by Dr. Keller to be sacred emblems of the 

 moon, "by means of which, as with the branches of the mistletoe, 

 they imagined they were able to avert and to cure diseases. 

 This panaceum was probably erected in some open space, perhaps 

 over the doors of the dwellings, so that the ornamented side was 

 exposed to view." Sir John Lubbock, however, thinks it is 

 more probable that they were pillows. " Though this," he says, 

 " seems at first very unlikely, and they must, one would think, 

 be very uncomfortable, still we know that several barbarous 

 races at the present clay use wooden pillows or neck-rests of the 

 same kind, as, for instance, the Figians, who, having enormous 

 heads of hair, sacrifice comfort to vanity, and use a mere wooden 

 bar for a pillow. The very long bronze pins found with these 

 ' crescents ' indicate that during the Bronze Age the hair was 

 worn very long, and was carefully arranged." 



The lake-dwellings continued in use down to the Iron Age, 

 and even to the times of the Eomans, as we know from the fact 

 that Boman implements have been found commingled with those 

 of stone and bronze on not a few of the old sites. 



Memorials of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages are scat- 

 tered plentifully over Europe. Amongst the most striking of 

 these are the barrows, cromlechs, standing -stones, and other 

 " rude stone monuments." An examination of the barrows has 

 shown that these in the great majority of cases are sepulchral 

 mounds, the contents of which have yielded to archaeologists 

 much interesting information as to the various people who have 

 successively occupied the land. It has been shown that those 

 ancient tumuli belong to very different ages, some of them dating 

 back to Neolithic times, many pertaining to the Bronze Era, 

 while not a few have been assigned to the Iron Age, and even 

 to the post-Boman period. In Britain there are two kinds of 

 tumuli, the long barrows and the round barrows, the former of 

 which are of Neolithic Age, while the latter are referred partly 

 to the Bronze Age and partly to more recent times. The people 

 who constructed the long barrows were a dolichoccjyhalic or 



