with a round-headed nail in the middle to attach it to the wood. The fracture exposes the wood inside the plates, which has been preserved by the salts, or oxide, of copper. It has been thought to be oak. On the blade of the celt are some flakes of oxide of iron, as if it had lain in contact with some articles made of that metal. Indeed, from the form, as well as from the objects found with it, the presumption is that this instrument belongs to quite the end of the Bronze Age of Italy, or to the transitional period between bronze and iron.
It may be well here to mention that celts of iron of the flat form, with projections at the sides like Fig. 45; of the palstave kind, with the semicircular side sockets; and of the socketed form, have been found in the cemetery at Hallstatt, in Austria, the researches in which of Herr Ramsauer have been described by Baron Von Sacken.[1] These discoveries seem to show that all three varieties were still in use at the close of the Bronze Period. In the same cemetery celts of the two last-mentioned forms were found in bronze, and palstaves occurred with the wings formed of bronze and the blade of iron.
In 1866 I exhumed from this cemetery with my own hands, when in company with Sir John Lubbock, a socketed celt of iron, with a portion of the haft still in it. The celt is attached to a branch of the main handle, which projects at an angle of about 80°. This has been split off from the handle, only a small part of which remains attached; and it is this portion only of the wood which has been preserved by the infiltration of some salts of iron, while the rest, which was detached from contact with metal, has disappeared. The wood of which the handle was made appears to be fir. On an iron palstave from the same spot it seems to be oak. On two bronze palstaves from France in my own collection, one from Amiens and the other from the Seine, at Paris, the portions of wood which still remain attached to the blades appear also to be oak.
In the Hallstatt specimen the inclination of the blade seems to have been towards the hand, and the part of the handle beyond the branch which enters the socket presents some appearance of having been bound with an iron ferrule, probably with the view of preventing it from splitting. The projection is somewhat longer proportionally than that in Fig. 185, and the end appears to have been truncated, and not rounded.
- ↑ "Grabfeld von Hallst.," p. 38.
