130 EVIDENCE OF MAX IX GUERNSEY. 



Gaul by Caesar when it disappears utterly and is replaced by the 

 higher civilisation of Rome. Only in Britain it lasted on for 

 another hundred years, and the love for the long curved and 

 interlaced Celtic forms of ornamentation was so firmly rooted in 

 the minds and taste of the Britons that, after the withdrawal of 

 the Romans from Britain in the fourth century, A.D., these old 

 forms revived and were passed on to the Anglo-Saxon invaders, 

 while nearly all trace of the art of Rome vanished. 



All the prehistoric bronze objects found in Guernsey and 

 Sark are now in the Lukis Museum. They are nine in number 

 from seven separate finds. For Guernsey they consist of a small 

 flat copper or bronze celt, a copper or bronze knife-dagger, two 

 small bronze rings, a bronze axe or palstave, a portion of a small 

 bronze bowl and a bronze bracelet ; and for Sark, of a large 

 bronze or copper axe, or hache-plate, and a portion of the cutting 

 edge of a socketed celt. Besides these we are told in a letter of 

 Mr. George Metivier to Mr. F. C. Lukis that a bronze bucket had 

 been found in the peat at Vazon, Guernsey, early in the 

 nineteenth century. 



The small copper or bronze celt (Plate I., fig. 5) was found 

 atLaHougue du Pommier,Catel, early in the last century. It is the 

 earliest form of a metal celt and is in all probability copper and 

 not bronze. It is first type of implement that man accustomed to 

 the use of stone celts would naturally make, being the exact shape 

 of a small flat stone celt. If we turn to Dechelette's Manuel 

 d'Archeologie Prehistorique, T. II, p. 108 we find that this type 

 of copper celt is the earliest form that appears in the iEgean. 

 They are found in the 2nd City of Hissarlik (the supposed site 

 of ancient Troy) in pre-Mycenaean sepulchres in the JEge&n 

 archipelago, in Cyprus, Sicily, Spain and in great numbers along 

 the western coast of France and Brittany, but very sparingly in 

 other parts of France. Hence it is evident that ours must have 

 came to us by the old trade route along the western coast of 

 France from Spain to the North. It is, as we shall see, one of 

 several other objects that have reached us by the same route. 

 It is therefore the oldest metal implement found in the 

 Channel Islands, and it proves the existence of man in Guernsey 

 at the dawn of the Bronze Age, 2,500 to 2,000 B.C. 



The second, the bronze or copper dagger (Plate I., fig. 6) 

 found in the dolmen of Dehus by Mr. F. C. Lukis, in 1847, is of the 

 same period. Mr. Lukis tells us that it was found in the great 

 western chamber of the dolmen, among some stone rubbish that 

 had been disturbed in comparatively recent times. Hence 

 unfortunately it was not found in its original deposit. Our 

 prehistoric archaeologists have hitherto ignored it because it was 

 a metal object, and therefore according to their ideas a recent 

 intruder into a monument of the Neolithic Age, but we have no 

 right to ignore it, for, as we shall see, these copper knife- 



