During the past few years discoveries of flaked flints of various kinds have been made in certain pre-river-valley deposits in Suffolk and Norfolk, and the discoverers of these specimens have had to meet, from some quarters, a very determined opposition to the view that these stones have been fashioned by man at periods long anterior to those in which the earliest Palæolithic implements were made. The details of the discovery of these flaked flints have already been made public in various scientific publications, and papers have been published giving the discoverers' reasons for believing them to be of human manufacture, and their opponents' reasons for looking upon them as purely natural productions.

In the last part of our Proceedings I gave an account of the series of experiments I had carried through with flints subjected to natural pressure and percussion, and endeavoured to show how the flaking produced by these experiments differed from that seen upon undoubted examples of human handiwork. The chief objection brought against my conclusions was that it is impossible to imitate the forces of Nature which act upon flints by shaking stones in a sack and fracturing them by pressure in a screw-press, and I confess that at first sight this appears to be a very weighty argument and one difficult to refute. But a close and searching examination of these “mighty forces of Nature,” a phrase often used with marked effect upon an uncritical audience, will, I think, show that they are largely inoperative upon flints, and that if they are too “mighty” the flint succumbs and is shattered to fragments.

Since reading a paper before the Archæological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in February, 1913, on the two factory sites at Peppard, Oxon, we have carried out further excavations, and I propose to give a brief account of the new implements found there, and to discuss the evidence as to the date arrived at as a result of the whole work. Sections of the sites and a map showing their position were given in that paper, and 28 of the implements illustrated.

The deeper site (Site 1) was re-opened by Mr. Reginald Smith, F.S.A., of the British Museum, in October, 1913, and some of the problems connected with it cleared up. This site was then found to be an open pit, similar to a modern chalk pit, with a pathway leading into it from the lowest level, 8 ft. across and 7½ ft. long. The floor of this adit formed a gently inclined plane to the bottom of the pit, being covered at the entrance with 2½ ft. of rainwash. This method of approach to the mine is what one would expect from its situation on the slope of a hill. It differs thus from the mines at Cissbury and Grime's Graves, where the circular cups were much deeper (40 ft.) and must have been entered by some form of ladder, such as a tree trunk with the branches cut short to form steps or a rope made of hide.

Grimes' Graves and the peculiar type of implements associated with them being very much discussed at the present time, our Hon. Sec. has invited me, as the finder of a good many of these implements, to give a short paper describing them and some details of the localities.

My first two visits to the “Graves” were practically fruitless as far as implements were concerned. However, I stumbled across the pit excavated by Canon Greenwell and brought back a large bone from the debris surrounding it. Subsequent visits showed the best place to search was on the arable land. Every year since then, by the kindness of the agent for the Weeting Estate, I have been enabled to spend several days searching, and have brought away some heavy loads of spoil.

It is difficult to prove that a road is prehistoric—in many cases more difficult to prove that it is not—but the fourteen miles of the Norfolk “Drove,” “Droveway,” or “Harling Drove,” which connects the fenland at Blackdike, Hockwold, with Peddar's Way on Roudham Heath, have certain claims to: that distinction. Though not so well known as the Northumberland “Drove Way” or the Surrey “Drove. Road,” and probably a favourite route in mediæval times for flocks and herds to and from the fens, its origin must be sought in a much more remote period, and as for the greater part of its course its primitive condition is still retained, it is easy—possibly with the mental elimination of all trees from the landscape—to picture it as it was in its early days.

In former parts of these “Proceedings” Dr. W. Allen Sturge, M.V.O., has put forward views concerning the striæ on surface implements, views which are so opposed to the canons of geology and archæology, and involve so great an upheaval of accepted beliefs, that but for the skill with which the facts and conclusions were marshalled, they would not have received a moment's consideration. Few archæologists have the material on which to form a reliable judgment, and fewer still are prepared to accept the upheaval of current views rendered necessary by the adoption of the theory that minor glaciations occurred after the deposition of the chalky boulder clay. Even more revolutionary was the view as to the occurrence of a glacial period at all and this was strenuously fought for many years, and even now is by no means accepted by all geologists. The drift deposits were referred to by old writers as “Extraneous Rubbish,” and were sometimes divided into Diluvium and Alluvium. It was not until 1840, when Agassiz read his paper before the Geological Society on “Glaciers, and the Evidence of their having once existed in Scotland, Ireland, and England,” that this momentous explanation of a vast and difficult problem was given to geologists, and years elapsed before it was generally accepted.

A paper in Vol. I., Part III., of the “Proceedings,” on “Pygmy Implements from Cornwall,” by E. L. Arnold, has spurred me on to place on record my discoveries on the same spot.

During the years 1898 to 1903 I paid numerous visits to the western side of Trevose Head, Booby Bay, Constantine Island, and also to the Late Celtic Cemetery at Harlyn Bay, one mite N.E. Flint flakes and cores or cones lay on the surface of the ground, at the cliff edge, all the way from Dinas Head (the western-most corner of the Trevose promontory, and a splendid look-out place), down to Booby Bay and Constantine Island. They had evidently once been covered with soil and are now exposed by the wastage thereof near the cliff edge. Some I dug out from the banks of tiny runlets formed after heavy rain.

Mr. Arnold says that “the artificers appear to have turned out immense numbers of barbs and arrow-points, but practically nothing else.” Like him, I found many hundreds of chipped flints, leaving quantities of them where I found them, after examination. But I found no true arrow-head. None of the pygmy tools were of especial smallness, but some were straight and sharply pointed, and I suggested, in “Man,” Vol. VII., No. 9, 83, their possible use as barbs to harpoons and also as fish hooks.

One flake, however, has been cleverly snicked from the base to half-way up its length, on each side, so as to leave two projecting shoulders as barbs, and a tang. It is carefully retouched round the edges on one face only. It has curved edges and a narrow, sharp chisel end.

During the successive Glacial periods which seem to have occurred at regular intervals and of increasing or diminishing intensity, what were the climatic conditions in the present tropical regions?

This is dated from Southern India, where I am endeavouring to visualise and imagine some of the climatic conditions in which ancient man at some of these periods may have lived, and in which the implements, of which I am finding some beautiful examples, may have been made and used and subsequently abandoned, being now found in certain positions and horizons.

Cuddapah is the chief town of a district where I have found most of the implements of palæolithic type of which I have given series to, I suppose, more than a hundred museums. If I include African and Egyptian implements, then the number of museums and institutions is 246 in all. Cuddapah is pretty well searched out now as regards implements, as there is a native whom Mr. McLeod, the late Collector of Cuddapah, trained as a searcher, and who has usually been with me and who is with me on the present occasion, who has searched most of that district in my company. Dr. Sturge has very beautifully and clearly applied the Draysonian theory to certain questions in prehistorics. While man in Northern Europe was being driven backwards and forwards, and alternately scorched and frozen for thousands of years, alternating with long periods of comparative climatic repose such as we are now enjoying, what, I ask, was happening to his confrère in India? As far as I can ascertain from the evidential positions and surroundings of such palæolithic implements as I have myself picked up, the climate in this part of the world was devoid of those catastrophic floods and alternating Arctic and Tropical climates which must have made life so exciting in other latitudes.

It is my purpose in this paper to tabulate and describe some of the details of flint fracture, which, in my opinion, are very necessary for the prehistorian to understand and recognise, and a knowledge of which makes the study of flint implements much easier and more entertaining. The correctness of some of my explanations of these various details may be challenged, but the majority of them are, I think, in accord with the views of most investigators and will be generally accepted.

A part of the ground which will be traversed in this paper has already been gone over, but I am anxious to put all the facts at present ascertained regarding the fracture of flint into a compact form which can easily be referred to and may be of use to serious prehistorians. I hope that this will be considered sufficient excuse for recapitulating some of the facts which have already been brought forward.

Striking Platforms. When an ordinary rounded nodule of flint is selected with a view to produce an implement from it by flaking, it is necessary, owing to the difficulty of removing flakes from a rounded or irregular surface, to break off a portion of the nodule so that a flat surface is produced from which flakes can be struck with precision. The flakes which are removed will exhibit, just above the point where the blows fell which detached them (known as “the point of impact”), a portion of this flat surface, and this is termed the “striking platform.”

I have read with much interest the Report of the Committee appointed on 12th February, 1913, to examine such evidence as exists bearing upon the question whether the shell from the Red Crag of Walton-on-the-Naze (a single valve of Pectunculus glycimeris which belonged to the late Mr Henry Stopes, and has rude human features engraved upon it) is a genuine work of art of the Crag or pre-Crag period or a modern fabrication; and I desire to offer a few remarks thereon.

I may say at the outset that I have been familiar with this very puzzling shell for a long period; for I was present, on the 6th September, 1881, in the Anthropological Section of the British Association, during its Jubilee Meeting at York, when Mr. Stopes exhibited the shell and read an account of its known history. As to the Walton Cliffs and the Red Crag sections appearing therein, I knew them well years before.

The Committee has not only examined minutely and discussed fully in its Report the shell itself, the amount of staining it presents, the manner of the cutting of the lines incised upon it, the amount of sand lodged in them, and other points of interest which it presents, but has also enquired exhaustively into the history of the discovery of the shell, so far as this can now be ascertained. It has done all this with an amount of care and thoroughness which deserves high praise.

The flint implements with which we are concerned as prehistoriaus, and to which we look for evidence of the existence of early man and of the degree of culture to which he had attained, may owe their origin either to the agency of nature or to that of man.

It is of the greatest importance to us that we should be able to distinguish clearly between the products of these two agencies, and the problem of differentiating between them can be approached from two distinct directions. Thus, in dealing with the origin of a given group of implements, we may bring to bear upon the problem our knowledge as to the manner in which flint is fractured and fissured by natural forces, or we may seek for traces of humanity in the method exhibited in the flaking of the implement, the contours of its edges, the evidence of specific design, and the traces of the usage to which the tools have been put.

In approaching the problem from the standpoint of natural forces, we are faced with the fact that our knowledge of the character and the magnitude of the natural forces which have acted, or are acting, upon the flints in question is extremely limited.

During the last year or two I have obtained some 1262 flint implements of varying types and patinas from a small area of the parish of Cranwich in South-West Norfolk. The implements may with comparative ease be divided into three groups according to patina, white, blue, and black, the last-named including those having miscellaneous colourings that are neither blue nor white, or with no appreciable patina. According to these divisions I have 351 white, 268 blue, 604 black and 12 implements with totally different patinas on the two sides.

The white patinated implements are found on a rich loam on which water rests in wet weather. This is only from four to eight inches thick, and the subsoil is locally known as “cobbles chalk,” that is, chalk broken into small lumps by glacial action. These lumps are about the size of plums quite white, and in a foot or so pass into undisturbed chalk. The blue patinated implements are mainly found on a sandy area resting on chalk, and the black on a sand and gravel area with chalk as the subsoil, though a few hollows are filled with chalky boulder clay. On the sandy area the surface soil is somewhat deeper, averaging from nine inches to a foot.

I have the pleasure to submit for your information some conclusions which I have arrived at after two years' work among the flints of Hampshire, in a district contained between the Meon, West Sussex, and the south of the Isle of Wight. The point I wish to urge is that in very great probability the earliest pages of the History of the Stone Age will be found written, not in pits of transported gravel but at the fountain head and parent source of these gravels—the Clay with Flints of the chalk downs. That has been my hypothesis, and as I went along I found things fitting into it. I feel convinced that Professor Prestwich had some such idea when he recommended Mr. Benjamin Harrison to devote his attention to the flints of the North Downs at their highest points.

I would ask you to undertake a flight of imagination and to place yourselves in some modern aerial contrivance a few hundred feet above Alton in Hampshire, and to survey the horizon north, south and west. You will find below you the western extremity of the Wealden Pericline in the form of a truncated cone fading away to the horizon of Tertiaries which once wrapped round and spread over it, but which now have shrunk away to form the London and Hampshire Basins north and south of the Pericline. What was once a deposit of Reading Beds became in Eo., Mio, Plio. and Pleistocene time a smear of Remanié over the entire surface, before the excavation of the chalk valleys, a residue which we call Clay with Flints, and which is known in France as the Argile à Silex.

I think all agree that arrow tips would first have been made of (a) hard wood or bone ground to a sharp point (as used to-day in East Africa), later by (b) sharp-pointed unworked splinters or flakes of stone or flint, followed by (c) flakes worked diagonally at one end to a sharp point, and the other end inserted in the arrow shaft.

As the worker's skill improved, these worked flake arrow tips would be superseded by (d) the beautifully flaked barbed and leaf arrows of the Neolithic and Bronze periods.

The whole prehistoric world would obviously not have been at any one time in the same stage of culture. At all periods, and in all districts, tribes would have existed side by side in various stages of culture, the work of the “᾽prentice” hand alongside that of the “master worker.”

It is therefore highly dangerous to assign an age to a worked flint solely by roughness of workmanship.

This communication is to record a prehistoric workshop site at Two-Mile-Bottom Common, near Thetford, Norfolk, containing worked flake tools of a very definite culture.

The series exhibited by Mr. Vachell not only contains some specimens of peculiar interest, but teaches a lesson that will not be lost on prehistorians at the present time. The Downs behind Folkestone are, like most of the chalk area in the South-East of England, very rich in worked flints, though probably no richer than many other localities with the same formation; but surface finds are in the nature of things miscellaneous, and collectors are often at a loss to classify what they pick up in the open. For this deadlock the text-books are largely to blame, for if they do not actually state that surface-finds are Neolithic, they imply that such is the case; and confidence in form is considerably shaken when ovate implements, identical in all but colour with gravel specimens, are attributed to the later Stone Age merely on account of their position. Some authors have protested, but the superstition is still rife, and another object-lesson will not be superfluous.

A few years ago Mr. R. J. W. Purdy, of Foulsham, who is one of our most observant local antiquaries (and to whom is also due the investigation of the very interesting moated mound at Burgh-by-Aylsham), informed me that there was a road called by some a Roman road, and still traceable from East Gate corner at Cawston across the main Norwich and Holt road, about half-a-mile south of the tenth milestone from Norwich, which is about 440 yards from the Woodrow Inn, and then runs across the fields to a little south of the Botany Bay farmhouse, and at an angle across Marsham Heath and the Burnt Plantation practically to Allison Street, and so across the Cromer road through the grounds of the Old Rectory, now known as Marsham Hall. I must own to having been sceptical at first, but after several visits, and after the ground of the Burnt Plantation had been opened in several places, through the kindness of Mr. Wood, the owner, I can no longer doubt that a perfectly straight road or trackway could be traced for a trifle over a mile (shown by double lines on Fig. 19). It only consists of a slight layer of gravel and stones over the natural peaty soil, but it does exist and is very marked, and the portion of it over the field opposite Botany Bay, looking towards Booton, stood up till last year quite clearly from the soil of the field, and the colour of the corn, etc., grown over it was distinctly different from that of the main crop in the field. At sunset, too, one could see the little ridge quite clearly, though it is fast being ploughed away.