beat their linen, is still called a battling-stone,[1] and the club is called a batter, batlet, battledore, or battling-staff. Such clubs may also have been used in the preparation of hemp and flax.
Fig. 179.—Shetland.
A stone club, from St. Isabel,[2] Bahia, Brazil, is described as 1338 inches long, 212 inches wide, and 114 inch thick. It may, however, be a celt, like the supposed clubs from Lancashire[3] and Cumberland.
There can be no doubt of several of the pestles, though probably not all, belonging to the same period as stone implements of other forms. The mortars in which they were used, were probably merely depressions in blocks of stone, or even of wood. Some rude mortars have, as already mentioned, been found in Holyhead Island, and Anglesea, but it is uncertain to what age they belong. A portion of a mortar of granite, with a channelled lip, found with fragments of urns and calcined bones in a grave at Kerris Vaen, Cornwall, is engraved in the Archæologia Cambrensis.[4]
Very similar stone pestles to those from Orkney were in use among the North American Indians[5] for pounding maize, and some are engraved by Squier and Davis.[6]
They also employed[7] a small form of mortar for pounding quartz, felspar, or shell, with which to temper the clay for pottery. Stone mortars and pestles were in use among the Toltecs and Aztecs in making tortillas, and are found in South Carolina,[8] and elsewhere in the United States. Among the ancient Pennacooks[9] of the Merrimac valley, the heavy stone pestle was suspended from the elastic bough of a tree, which relieved the operator in her work; and among the Tahitians[10] the pestle of stone, used for pounding the bread fruit on a wooden block, is provided with a crutch-like handle.
Some large circular discs of stone, apparently used for grinding, and others with deep cup-shaped depressions in them, found on Dartmoor, and probably connected with some ancient metallurgical operations on the spot, have been engraved and described in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association.[11]
- ↑ Wright's "Prov. Dict.," s.v. Cotgrave translates the word Baton "a laundress's batting-staff."
- ↑ Arch. Assoc. Journ., vol. xxiv. p. 65.
- ↑ Op. cit., vol. xv. p. 232.
- ↑ 3rd S., vol. iii. p. 358.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, "Ind. Tribes," vol. i. p. 80.
- ↑ "Anct. Mon. of Mississ. Val.," p. 220.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, "Ind. Tribes," vol. i. p. 90.
- ↑ Op. cit., vol. ii. p. 89.
- ↑ Op. cit., vol. iv. p. 175.
- ↑ Cuming in Arch. Assoc. Journ., vol. vii. p. 83, where some interesting information relating to mortars will be found. Ratzel, "Völkerk.," vol. ii. p. 179.
- ↑ Vol. iv. p. 136. See also a paper by Mr. R. N. Worth, on the progress of mining skill in Devon and Cornwall, in the Trans. Cornw. Polyt. Soc.
