THE BRONZE AGE IN SWEDEN 



781 



could not have been used as battle-axes, and "were too frail to 

 stand the shaking of being carried ceremonially in processions. 

 It is therefore suggested that they were fixed somewhere as stand- 

 ing ornaments. The art of soldering being unknown, joining or 

 repairing was done by pinning the pieces together or by casting 

 bronze over the joint, often in a very clumsy way. Inlaying was 

 practiced, with amber, or with a dark-brown material like resin, 

 which must have produced an effective contrast with the yellow 

 bronze. The art of gilding was not known, but objects were some- 

 times overlaid with thin plates of gold. 



No traces remain of Bronze-age houses, and no representa- 

 tions of them occur among the rock-carvings. The tools were 

 substantially the same as those known to the Stone age, but were 

 more usually — not always — made of bronze. The most common 

 tool was a kind of axe or chisel, known as a " celt." The celts 

 were originally copies of the stone axes, and were " socketed " and 

 not socketed. The socketed celts had a handle inserted into a 

 socket, and were bound to it by a little loop that was provided in 

 the casting. The non- socketed celts were 

 fixed, like the flint axes, into one end of a 

 cloven haft. " Of sewing implements there 

 have been found especially needles, awls, 

 tweezers, and knives. They are almost al- 

 ways of bronze ; but a few tweezers and one 

 awl of gold have been found in Sweden and 

 Denmark." The awls were fixed in a haft, 

 of which specimens made of bronze, bone, 

 and amber are preserved. The needles were 

 used in making woolen clothes, and the other 

 implements for sewing leather or skins. Nar- 

 row strips or threads of skin were cut out 

 with the knife, holes were bored with the awl, 

 and the leather thread was drawn through 

 the holes with the tweezers. " These imple- 

 ments are much more frequent than the nee- 

 dles, which partially indicates that clothes of 

 skin were far more generally worn than those 

 of wool during this period." Scissors were fk 

 unknown. 



The specimen of woolen cloth represented in Fig. 4 is part of a 

 piece, five feet long and two feet wide, which was found in a bar- 

 row at Dommestorp, in Holland, in 1869, and of which the larger 

 pieces are preserved in the National Museum. It is now brown, 

 and had a yellow border at the narrow ends. A coffin made 

 of a cloven and hollowed trunk of oak, found in the "Treen- 

 hoi" barrow at Havdrup, in Denmark, in 1861, contained the 



4. — Piece op Wodlen 

 Stuff of the Bronze Age. 



