were acquainted, though in that settlement but slight traces of a knowledge of metal are exhibited.
Although needles of bone, carefully smoothed all over, and having a neatly-drilled eye, have been found in the cave-deposits both of Britain and France, but few such implements have, as yet, been discovered in these countries associated with objects of the Neolithic and Bronze Periods.
A bodkin or needle of wood, 6 inches long, and of the ordinary form, was, however, found in company with a small bronze dagger-blade, in an urn containing burnt bones near Tomen-y-mur,[1] Carnarvonshire.
Needles of bone, both with the central hole (like some of those of the Bronze Age) and with the eye at the end (like those of the present day), have also been found in the Swiss Lakes.[2] One of the latter class was discovered in the Genista Cave at Gibraltar.[3] It is hard to say to what period it belongs. Needles of both forms have been found with arrow-heads and other articles of flint, in Danish grave-chambers.[4]
The pins or awls, already described, are so rude and clumsy, and so large at the perforated end, that they could never have been intended for use as needles; and when we consider that the principal material to be sewn must have been the skins of animals, and that, even at the present day, needles are hardly ever employed for sewing leather, but bristles are attached to the end of the thread, and passed through holes prepared by an awl, it seems possible that needles, if ever they were used for this particular purpose, may have been superseded at a very remote period. The small bronze awl, so frequently found in barrows, is singularly like the "cobbler's awl" of the present day, though straight and not curved.
Among the Danish[5] antiquities of bronze, we find a remarkable form of needle or bodkin, about 212 or 3 inches long, bluntly pointed at each end, and provided with an oval eye in the centre, so that it could be passed through a hole in either direction. This, with a bronze awl for boring the holes, and a pair of tweezers to assist in drawing the needle through, appears to have constituted the sewing apparatus of that day. I mention this form of needle because in Ribden Low,[6] Staffordshire, together with a burnt interment, and some barbed arrow-heads of flint, were bone implements "pointed at each end" and "perforated through the middle," which may possibly have served such a purpose. No dimensions are given by Mr. Bateman, but a bodkin of the same kind from a barrow at Stourpaine, Dorset, is 4 inches long. It is in the Durden collection in the British Museum. In a barrow, at Bailey Hill,[7] some calcined bones were accompanied by a pair of bone tweezers, neatly made and perforated for suspension.
Some of the needles of horn or bone in use among the Indians of North America[8] were in shape much like miniature elephants' tusks.
Another bone implement appears to have been a chisel, of which a good specimen was found by the Rev. W. C. Lukis, F.S.A., in a- ↑ Arch. Journ., vol. xxiv. p. 17.
- ↑ Le Hon, "L'homme foss.," 2nd ed., p. 186.
- ↑ Trans. Preh. Cong., 1868, pl. ix. p. 126
- ↑ Madsen, "Afbild.," pl. xvii.
- ↑ Worsaae, "Nord. Olds.," No. 275.
- ↑ "Ten Years' Dig.," p. 127.
- ↑ Ib., p. 169.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, "Ind. Tribes," vol. i. pl. xxxvii. "Anc. Mon. of Miss. Vall.," p. 220.
