DR. C. B. PLOWRIGHT ON NEOLITHIC MAN IN WEST NORFOLK. 255 
more important must it have been to our ancestors to provide 
themselves with such material as could be worked into implements 
of far more complicated structure, and this, too, with such simple 
tools as they possessed for the purpose. 
From the explorations of Canon Greenwell at Grimes’s Graves, 
we now know that they did mine for their material — and mine too 
in a very systematic manner, by sinking perpendicular shafts some 
forty feet deep, through sand and chalk ; even passing through a 
bed of inferior Hints, which were neglected as not being good 
enough for their purpose, until they came to a bed of suitable 
Hints — the “ floor- stone,” as it is called — and for obtaining this 
they further worked galleries into the chalk at right angles to the 
shaft. The tools with which these excavations were accomplished 
were mainly antlers of the red deer, both used as spades and also 
trimmed into picks ; they probably also employed some of the 
more rudely chipped Hints, either held in the hand or hafted. 
The disused shafts and galleries at Grimes’s Graves were filled up, 
when they were no longer worked, with rubblo chalk from the 
more recent excavations. The Hints obtained were worked on the 
spot, so that the whole surface of the land is now covered with 
Hakes, cores, hammer-stones, and wasters. 
To a less extent the same holds good at Massingliam. We have 
on the surface of the surrounding land Hakes in abundance ; we 
have in the pit evidence that the chalk has been disturbed, and 
that the holes made in the ground were filled up with rubble and 
Hakes ; we have the deer antlers deeply buried in this rubble, as 
deep as large blocks of flint. More than this, however, we find 
numerous exceedingly rough and rude flints, that have evidently, 
by a' few blows, been artificially trimmed into a definite shape, and 
which would constitute suitable implements for working the chalk. 
2s ot only their extreme roughness, but also their shape, preclude 
the idea that they were ever destined to receive further working 
on the lines of celt formation. 
Mining Tools. — When our ancestors came to recognise the fact 
that the most suitable flint for them to work was not that on the 
surface of the ground, but the larger blocks buried in the chalk, 
at a depth of from three to six feet at Massingliam, they had by no 
means an easy problem to solve. Although they were much more 
advantageously circumstanced than were their Brandon neighbours, 
