256 DR. C. B. PLOWRIGHT ON NEOLITHIC MAN IN WEST NORFOLK. 
where the suitable stone was thirty or forty feet below the surface 
of the ground, yet the four or five feet of excavation required at 
Massingham to reach the stone would afford a considerable obstacle 
to most men in the absence of picks and spades. True, they might 
and did use the antlers of deer, but even these, which could be 
used for both picking and digging, would afford but awkward 
and inconvenient excavation tools — especially for the purpose of 
picking up the chalk, intermixed as it is here with flint stones. 
It would not take them long to grasp the fact that the very stones 
which were so great an impediment to their excavations, could be 
utilised with but little labour for this very purpose. A consider- 
able number of stones have been found in the pit itself, and in its 
vicinity, which have been constructed in the simplest manner, and 
yet which are evidently suited for 
the above-named purposes. They 
may be grouped under the following 
classes — 
1 . 
2 . 
3. 
4 . 
5. 
Picks. 
Hammer-picks. 
Borers. 
Diggers. 
Hand-choppers. 
Picks . — Any elongated piece of 
flint is capable of being used for 
picking into the ground. The 
stones may have either been held 
in the hand, or hafted by some such 
simple means as a willow or hazel 
twig twisted around their middle ; 
in the same way as one sees black- 
smiths in the present day hold their 
punches and chisels. One of the 
simplest of these stones is shown at 
fig. 5. It consists of an elongated 
piece of flint, six or seven inches 
long by from two to three inches 
wide, which by some half-dozen 
blows has had its angles removed, 
and its end brought to more or less 
Tig. 5. A very rudely trimmed 
flint for use as a pick; it is 
notched on each side towards the 
upper end so as to be hafted with 
a hazel twig. 
