originals.[1] The few which have been discovered in north Germany and Italy are obviously metallic reproductions of forms originally done in stone. The perforated bronze axes (Figs. 148, 149) found in Scandinavia are referred by Worsaae[2] to the Iron age of the south of Europe.
Habitations in Britain in the Bronze Age.
The houses of the Bronze folk in Britain were probably of the same sort as those of their predecessors, but may be assumed to have been larger and better built, because the tools were better. At the present time the round houses of the ancient Celtic inhabitants are represented by the round stone dwellings of the peasants still used in the north of Scotland and in the Orkneys. Sometimes, for the sake of protection, houses were built upon piles driven into a morass or bottom of a lake, as for example in Barton Mere,[3] near Bury-St.- Edmunds, where bronze spear-heads have been discovered, one eighteen inches long, in and around piles and large blocks of stone, as in some of the lakes of Switzerland. Along with them were vast quantities of the broken bones of the stag, roe, wild boar, and hare, to which must also be added the urus, an animal proved to be wild by its large bones, with strongly-marked ridges for the attachment of muscles. The inhabitants also fed upon domestic animals, the horse, short-horned ox,
- ↑ The bronze axes figured by Kemble and Franks in Horæ Ferales, pl. v. figs. 51 to 54, are modelled on well-known types of stone.
- ↑ Worsaae, Primeval Antiquities of Denmark, 8vo, 1849, p. 39.
- ↑ Explored by Rev. Harry Jones in 1867; Suffolk Inst. of Archæology and Natural History, June 1869.
