PIGMY FLINT IMPLEMENTS IN NORTH DEVON.

BY THOMAS YOUNG, M. R.C.S.

(Read at Lynton, July, 1906.)

MORE than forty years ago Mr. Townshend Hall collected flint flakes in North Devon, and these are to be seen in the Athenæum at Barnstaple.

Those who have studied the Transactions of the Devonshire Association will have read papers by Mr. Burnard, Mr. Francis Brent, and Mr. Spence Bate, in which mention is made not only of the finding of mere flint flakes, but also of the discovery of others-flints trimmed to a cutting edge, borers and awls with sharpened points, scrapers and arrowheads, and an occasional axe-head ground to a sharp edge.

Mr. Hall's collection consists only of flakes and cores. These other gentlemen have succeeded in finding definite flint instruments on Dartmoor and in other localities in the county of Devon. In 1903 I first visited the site of Mr. Hall's discoveries near Croyde, finding, as he did, abundance of flakes and cores. Among them was a tiny flake which, though it lay for two years unnoticed, had some secondary chipping along one edge. I showed some of my specimens to Mr. Charles H. Read, one of the curators of the British Museum. He drew my attention to the discovery in different parts of the world of certain minute flakes of very delicate workmanship-the so-called Pigmy Implements. They are figured and described by Mr. Read in his Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age, 1902, also in more detail by Sir John Evans and Professor Windle. But I believe there is no record among the Transactions of the Devonshire Association of any discovery of the kind in this county.

Mr. Read encouraged me to continue my investigations, and I determined to keep a good look out for the "pigmy flints."

Between Morthoe and Croyde, from time to time I found a number of flakes of little or no interest-I never missed

picking up all I could see. But it was not until the winter of 1904 that among these flakes I began to recognize the rare and occasional occurrence of pigmy implements.

Six specimens are illustrated by Sir John Evans in his book on "Stone Implements "-three of them came from a kitchen-midden at Hastings, and three from the Vindhya Hills of India. Their shapes are seen at a glance to be identical.

"Curiously enough," he remarks, "identical forms have been found in some abundance on the Vindhya Hills and the Banda district, India; at Helouan, Egypt, in France, and in the district of the Meuse, Belgium. Such an identity of form at places geographically so remote does not imply any actual communication between those who made the tools, but merely shows that some of the requirements of daily life, and the means at command for fulfilling them being the same, tools of the same character have been developed irrespective of time or space."

One is quite willing to admit the truth of this in regard to instruments the general utility of which is sufficiently obvious, such as arrow-heads, scrapers, and celts. But when applied to instruments whose uses are hidden in such obscurity as is the case with these we are considering, the statement may require some modification.

Professor Windle, in his "Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England," gives an engraving of fifteen of them. He divides them into four classes:

Crescent.
Scalene.

Rounded and pointed.
Rhomboidal.

"Of the so-called Indian varieties, the remarkable point is that the forms in India and the forms in England are identical—a fact which some have thought points to a communication between these countries at a very early period. Others, on the contrary, only see in the resemblance a common result of a common need."

In France they have been discovered at Bruniquel and Garancières (Seine et Loire), and have been divided by M. Thieullen into triangular or amygdaloid, concavecrescentic, bevelled, and other varieties.

"The localities in which they have been found are not numerous in this country [England], but where they have been discovered they seem to exist in great numbers, and when accompanied by other implements, these implements belong rather to early than late types of Neolithic manufacture" (Ibid.).

Mr. Gatty has found these little tools on the sand dunes in North Lincolnshire, and many thousands of them in the valley of the Don in Yorkshire. Dr. Colley Marsh has found them far from the sea on the Pennine range at an altitude of 1300 ft., and has presented a series of them to the British Museum.

They have also been found at Lakenheath, Suffolk. They occur, no doubt, in other districts, but owing to their diminutive size they may readily escape observation.

The probable utility of these little implements, which have been produced in such large numbers and at the expenditure of so much time and trouble, is still an open question. I do not consider as satisfactory any of the suggestions that have been made as to their use. That they appear to be connected with the early development of IndoEuropean races gives the study of them a peculiar interest to ourselves.

All we can say at present is that the free sharp edge of the flake was probably let into wood in such a manner that the worked portion may have formed part of the armature of some kind of implement in common use among Neolithic peoples. The rhomboidal flints seem specially adapted for such a purpose.

The method of mounting a series of flint flakes in a wooden handle dates from the time of the early Egyptians (Falcé de Selco), and a sharpened flint let into wood has been found in the Swiss lake dwellings. Evans suggests that

"the insertion of one edge of a flake of flint into a piece of wood involves no great trouble, while it would shield the fingers from being cut, and would tend to strengthen the flint."

He also endeavours to prove that the curious little bevelled flakes from Kent's Cavern, which bear such a close resemblance to the larger kind of Pigmy Implements, were employed in a similar manner during the later part of the Paleolithic Age. These are manufactured from simple triangular or polygonal flakes. The thin edge of the flake is left free, and the thick edge is worked throughout. In one form the edge of the flake is bevelled off, and in another, and rarer form, both ends are bevelled. One or two specimens of much the same character were found at St. Madelaine; and in other French caves some extremely slender flakes have been found with one edge worn away and the other left untouched, which points to their having

opposite the pot-works. An important manufacture there was plates and dishes of various size and section, and generally decorated, sometimes elaborately, in sgraffito, i.e. mostly covered with white clay slip and with incised patterns; large quantities of fragments, both in the biscuit state and glazed, plain and slipped, were found in the refuse-heaps from the pottery, on the banks of the river, where the broken and imperfect pieces were thrown away. A few more fragments of similar dishes were found in the Rackfield close by, at a small depth below the surface of old pasture. Extensive as the demand for these dishes must have been, judging from the heap of fragments, not a single piece has to my knowledge been found above ground.

Eight or ten years ago butter-steans at Crocker's, Bideford, were quite different in shape from the degenerate butter-pots of Fremington and Barnstaple. At East-the-Water Pottery money-boxes and pipkins, the latter different in type from those of Barnstaple and Bideford, were made within my recollection, as were also oven pitchers or potato-pots at Fremington, specially for the South Molton bakers; also from the same pottery came owl's heads, for whitepot, an oldfashioned dish, now still made, but not as cooking pots, but as art pottery.

An old domestic implement was the earthen lamp, of two different types from Barnstaple and Fremington, said to have been still used at the latter place half a century ago.

The great crock of 1724, for some home-brewed liquor, passed through the form of the degenerate pilchard-pot for the Cornish fishermen, and has now ceased to be made.

Of posset-pots, one with a seventeenth-century date is in the possession of a Barnstaple potter. Porringers may still sometimes be seen in the markets, as paint-pots.

Fremington clay was universally used for the body of the ware, never Bideford pipe-clay; pipe-clay very generally as a slip covering part, or the whole, of the surface, rarely in splashes, as in the pie-dishes or spirals poured on the revolving dish; it is strange this process should never have extended to other decoration in poured-on slip, as it did in the Midlands. For ovens, tiles, pipkins, etc., Bideford gravel was mixed with the clay, to harden the ware, always the galena native sulphide of lead for the glaze, no doubt originally dusted on to the ware, as with the older potters elsewhere. Decoration in sgraffito, i.e. scratched through the slip of pipe-clay to produce the pattern. In Fremington only, of the time of George Fishley, manganese-brown

and the addition of modelled or cast ornament in pipe-clay or mixed red and white clay, giving this ingenious craftsman a scale of colour similar to Toft ware.

The galena glaze, though decidedly objectionable from the sanitary point of view, is probably the secret of the exceedingly deep and rich colour on some of the old wares. The efforts of the modern potter to produce variety of colour and whiteness of body being hindered by the intensely yellow colour of the galena glaze, has led to the use of red lead and other glazes, and even leadless glaze, and the depth and rich quality of glaze of the old ware is lost to us for ever. The old churches of the neighbourhood still contain large numbers of embossed tiles, and no doubt a careful examination of those still in situ would afford information as to dates. Few fragments of them have been found underground on or near pottery sites, but a mould in wood for stamping them was found in the North Walk, a carved wood block, which is shown, together with tiles pressed in it, and made of Fremington clay and Bideford gravel, and glazed with galena, showing what these tiles were like when fresh from the potter's kiln; most of these tiles are much the worse for wear, but the admixture of gravel in the clay has given them considerable hardness compared with the unmixed clay, which bears out the character for softness given it by the Geological Museum. The ware generally was very badly fired, though hard-fired pieces are considerably the best. From the fragments it can be seen that the firing was most unequal, parts of the body being grey in colour instead of a rich red, as the well-fired portions are. I am told that the kilns originally were open at the top like limekilns and the contents roofed over with old crocks.

A further evidence of the manufacture of these embossed tiles in Barnstaple is found in certain roughly shaped bats of clay (and gravel), with the pattern of such a mould partly impressed on the top, sides, and front; one of these bats of clay in the possession of Mr. Brannam was found in pulling down the North Walk Pottery, another with marks of subsequent use in the fire is from an old closed-up fireplace in an old house in the High Street, Barnstaple, and two in the North Devon Athenæum were excavated when the Long Bridge was altered: these are dated 1655, the earliest date I can produce. Still another of these clay fire-dogs is in the Free Library at Bideford, and is slipped with pipe-clay, glazed, and has a roughly modelled head applied on the front.

Some of these tiles from Bristol Cathedral and Bitton