Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/114

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ANTHROPOLOGY

found also fragments of charcoal and a small flint, the edges of which had been chipped off, as if by striking a light" (loc. cit., p. 83). Close to a skull and tusks of a mammoth, nearly the entire left side of a human female skeleton lay stretched under a shallow covering of 6 inches of earth.

"The skull and vertebræ," writes Dr Buckland, "and extremities of the right side were wanting: the remaining parts lay extended in the usual position of burial, and in their natural order of contact, and consisted of the humerus, radius, and ulna of the left arm, the hand being wanting: the left leg and foot entire to the extremity of the toes, part of the right foot, the pelvis, and many ribs; in the middle of the bones of the ankle was a small quantity of yellow wax-like substance resembling adipocere. All these bones appeared not to have been disturbed by the previous operations (whatever they were) that had removed the other parts of the skeleton. They were all of them stained superficially with a dark brick-red colour, and enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle, composed of red micaceous oxide of iron, which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch around the surface of the bones. The body must have been entirely surrounded or covered over at the time of its interment with this red substance."

Dr Buckland then goes on to describe the grave-goods which consisted of the following objects:—"About two handsful of small shells of the Nerita littoralis, in a state of great decay and falling to dust on the slightest pressure," were near the thigh-bone. Near the ribs were forty to fifty fragments of small ivory rods, nearly cylindrical, and varying in diameter from ⁠1/4⁠ to ⁠3/4⁠ of an inch, and from 1 to 4 inches in length. Along with these rods were fragments of rings, made of the same ivory, and 4 to 5 inches in diameter—"nearly of the size and shape of segments of a small teacup handle." In another place were three fragments of the same ivory roughly "cut into unmeaning forms by a rough-edged instrument." One fragment was "nearly of the shape and size of a human tongue, and its surface is smooth, as if it had been applied to some use in which it became polished. An instrument made of the metacarpal bone of a wolf, flat, and shaped to an edge at one end, and terminated at the other by the natural rounded condyle of the bone."

According to Dr Buckland, "the ivory rods and rings, and tongue-shaped fragment, were certainly made from part of the antediluvian tusks that lay in the same cave ; and as they must have been cut to their present shape at a time when the ivory was hard, and not crumbling to pieces as it is at present on the
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