MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 101 



the edges show secondary working. A scraper of about 

 the same size from one of the huts shows almost no trace 

 of secondary working. An awl, or perhaps a knife, from 

 the huts resembles one figured in Evans' " Ancient Stone 

 Implements," figs. 235 and 239, but is smaller and broader 

 in proportion. The point and the butt are rounded and 

 both edges sharpened, but it shows very little trace of 

 secondary working. 



A much larger flint implement than any of those we 

 found in the stone circle or the hut village, and which 

 might be called an adze (fig. 13), was picked up a 

 few years ago by Mr. Nixon on the Meayll Hill near 

 Cregneash. 



In conclusion, these remains seem to show that 

 the people who inhabited the ancient villages on the 

 Meayll and who erected and used the stone circle, were 

 in the last days of the Neolithic or the beginning of the 

 Bronze Age, living in small communities of 1 to 16 

 families, that they occupied the locality over a lengthened 

 period, and were there when the later Celtic population 

 settled in Man. They used pottery of a rude kind, made by 

 hand, of materials obtained from the spot, for domestic 

 purposes and as urns in which they deposited the ashes 

 of their dead. The stone circle on the hill above the 

 villages was used by them as a place of sepulture, and the 

 only mode of burial there was by means of cremation. 

 They hunted and fought with flint-tipped arrows, used 

 flint scrapers to clean and prepare the skins of animals for 

 their clothing, and the flint knives no doubt for various 

 other purposes. In regard to the ceremonies of burning 

 their dead and the burying of the ashes we can only con- 

 jecture, but the size and nature of the cists, the presence 

 of the numerous quartz pebbles, the buried weapons and 

 implements deposited with the ashes, all would seem to 



