530 A Late Celtic Inhabited Site at All Cannings Cross Farm. 



useless to collect them further. They are all either of flint or 

 sarsen ; the former are by far the most common, being apparently 

 in. proportion of about six to one of sarsen.^ The smallest measures 

 6in., the largest 13in. 'n circumference, but these are exceptional, 

 the majority being f jm Sin. to lOin. They vary somewhat in 

 shape, but this may b chiefly due to the amount of usage to which 

 they h ive been put, and it is possible to trace stages in the develop- 

 ment ( u\Q hammerstone, from an angular youth to a rounded old 

 a^ge; In some cases it appears that the flint chosen was first roughly 

 chipped into a form resembling that of a rude Palaeolithic implement, 

 but sometimes a naturally-broken flint was used. It seems that the 

 object of the initial shaping was, at any rate partly, to obtain sharp 

 edges, for it is invariably these sharp edges that are bruised and 

 worn down by the pounding or hammering action to which they 

 have been put. In the same way when a naturally broken flint 

 was used, it seems to have been chosen for the sake of some point, 

 or sharp edge, desirable for the purpose in view. Merely as a 

 result of thus hammering down all the angles, stones that have 

 been much used tend to become rounded in form, and in the last 

 stage when all the sharp angles and points have been knocked off 

 they become almost perfectly round and ball-like. In these ball- 

 like specimens the surface is bruised all over, and this suggests 

 that when the sharp edges were worn away the stones were then 

 put to some further use that caused the bruising of the whole 

 surface. 



The sarsen " hammerstones," on the other hand, have been used 

 for grinding or rubbing on some hard substance, and scarcely, if 

 at all, for hammering or pounding ; their surfaces are not bruised 



^ With regard to the relative frequency of flint and sarsen as a material 

 for " mullers " or " hammerstones " in the county, it seems that about 

 Marlborough and Clyffe Pypard in the north, sarsen examples are found 

 more often than flint, whereas in the south of the county and over most of 

 Salisbury Plain the hammerstones are almost invariably of flint, so much 

 so that the only examples of sarsen hammerstones in the Blackmore 

 Museum come from the north of the county. This may well be cited as a 

 further piece of evidence that sarsens never existed in any numbers on the 

 Plain or anywhere in the south of the county. 



