SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



3°9 



PREHISTORIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS. 



By C. A. Mitchell, B.A. (Oxon.) 



'HPHE town of Thetford, in the extreme south of 

 Norfolk, is the centre of a district in which 

 worked flints are abundant, and where anyone who 

 takes the trouble to search cannot fail to find a 

 number of rough flakes, though 

 arrow - heads and other finely- 

 worked implements are of much 

 rarer occurrence. Flint of a good 

 quality is most abundant, and at 

 Brandon, seven miles from Thet- 

 ford, the gun-flint makers or 

 " flint knappers," as they are 

 called, may still be seen at work 

 — probably the only place in 

 England where the trade survives. 

 It has been asserted that there are 

 good grounds for supposing that 

 the working of flints for one pur- 

 pose or another has been continu- 

 Fig. i. ously carried on there from pre- 



historic times down to the present 

 day. There is certainly good evidence for the 

 assumption that the ancient workers of flint made 

 this place one of their manufacturing centres. In 

 a wood close to the town there are a number of 

 large depressions in the ground, which are known 

 as "Grime's Graves." A few years ago, the Rev. 

 W. Greenwell, the antiquary, obtained permission 

 to explore one of these, and made the interesting dis- 

 covery that the hollows were disused pits from which 

 the prehistoric men had dug the flint for their 

 weapons. There were upwards of two hundred and 

 fifty of these hollows, and the one selected for ex- 

 ploration was about twenty-eight feet in diameter. 



Fig. ii. 



At the bottom of the pit was found the stone known 

 as " floor flint," which is still used in the manufac- 

 ture of gun-flints. For the purpose of obtaining this, 

 various galleries had been cut horizontally in the 

 chalk, and the general plan of the pit showed a 

 strong resemblance to that of the modern pits. 

 Picks made from the horn of the red-deer had been 

 used for excavating, and some eighty of these were 

 February, 1896.— No. 24, Vol. II. 



found. Where the hand had grasped them they 

 were worn quite smooth, and the marks left by 

 them on the walls of the gallery were as fresh as if 

 they had only just been made. Curiously enough, 

 the pick used by the modern flint workers closely 

 resembles its ancient prototype in form. Flint 

 chips, arrow-heads, and the bones of various 

 animals were found in abundance, and, as will be 

 noticed by anyone visiting the spot, the fields all 

 round are covered with the broken bits of flint. 

 The gamekeepers of the district occasionally find 

 beautifully worked arrowheads or polished axes, 

 and as such command a price varying from three 

 shillings to fourteen shillings, many of them, in this 

 way, make substantial additions to their incomes. 

 Fortunately, it is extremely difficult to imitate 

 flint weapons so as to deceive an expert, or fraud 

 might be more frequent than it is. The flint 



Fig. iii. 



knappers in Brandon showed the writer some of 

 their attempts to imitate the old arrowheads, and 

 confessed they were unable to produce work so 

 finished. This is the more remarkable as their 

 tools must, of course, be superior to those of their 

 predecessors in the art, who probably used one 

 piece of flint to chip another. 



Most of your readers know that the period when 

 these stone implements were used is called the 

 stone age, and it is the general opinion that this 

 was followed by an age of bronze, which, in its 

 turn, gave place to one of iron. The evidence of a 

 separate age has, however, been denied by some 

 archaeologists, but since the working of metals 

 requires some metallurgical skill, w : hich the earliest 

 ancestors of man were unlikely to have possessed, 

 a separate stone age appears probable. The fact 

 that stone and metal implements are often found in 

 •the same barrows may be explained by looking 

 upon them as instruments of a transition period. 



