456 Archceologia. 



ABCHiEOLOGIA. 



Dueing the past month, considerable interest has been excited by 

 the accounts of discoveries of early remains of the primeval inhabi- 

 tants of the extreme northern parts of Scotland. At the meeting 

 of the Ethnological Society, on Tuesday, December 13, Mr. S. Laing 

 exhibited and described the result of his researches among the 

 kitchen-middens of the county of Caithness. The remains thus 

 brought to light consist of shells and bones of fish, bones of animals, 

 human bones, rude implements in stone and bone, a few implements 

 in metal, and a quantity of pottery. The metal implements con- 

 sisted chiefly of a pair of shears, of the form which is Roman and 

 Anglo-Saxon, and which has been preserved from that time, the 

 spring of which is made of bronze, and the blades have been of steel ; 

 and of several large nails, which may be Roman. Of the pottery, 

 the rudest examples are not necessarily older than the Roman period, 

 others are apparently mediaeval, and some are comparatively modern, 

 among which is a piece of glazed ware, not older than the sixteenth 

 or seventeenth century. Among the stone implements the most 

 numerous class consisted of whirles for spinning, and other articles, 

 which were considered by Mr. John Evans and others to have been 

 made for no particular object. According to Mr. Laing's account, 

 the people who formed these kitchen-middens proceeded as follows : 

 They inclosed a place for their residence with a circular wall, and, as 

 they sat, they threw all the refuse — shells, bones, broken pottery, 

 etc., and other refuse — on the floor, which thus gradually rose in 

 elevation, perhaps through several generations, though we all know 

 well how rapidly such a " midden" accumulates. It appears that, 

 at distant periods of time, either the same or succeeding occupants 

 got rid of the inconvenience of the old accumulation by forming a 

 new floor upon it, after which, the same process of throwing down 

 the refuse was carried on again. Mr. Laing, who ascribes the origin 

 of these formations to the remote age of the early Stone period, 

 seemed to think that these successive floors marked the arrival of so 

 many new races upon the soil ; though it seemed to be the general 

 opinion of the men of science who spoke on this occasion, that there 

 was nothing among the objects exhibited to show a greater anti- 

 quity than several centuries after Christ. Professor Huxley, who 

 described the human skulls and other remains at great length, and 

 who thought that they marked the existence in this part of the 

 island of two distinct races of men, did not appear to give them any 

 great antiquity. Of these two races, one was much lower than . the 

 other, and he described it as resembling very closely the Australian 



tyV 6 ' ... 1 



There was one peculiaiity believed to exist in these remains, 



which is worthy of especial remark. At least ono of the bones, the 



jaw-bone of a child, found in the midden, was damaged in a manner 



which seemed to show that it had been broken in order to obtain the 



nerve-pulp or soft substance inside, and this was supposed to show 



that the people who formed the earlier part of these kitclicn-iniddens- 



werc cannibals. This seems to be considered as evidence of an 



extreme degree of barbarism which can only have existed at a very 



