I propose in this address to give you some account of my work during the past two or three years bearing on the difficult problems of prehistoric chronology. You may remember that to the first number of the “Proceedings” I contributed a paper on this subject. Since that time I have been continuously occupied with it, and I believe I have made some advance, both as regards facts and as regards theory.

It will be within the recollection of you all, that in the paper alluded to, the fact round which everything else pivoted was the striation of certain classes of neolithic flints. The cardinal fact to which I would call attention to-day is the occurrence of other classes of presumably neolithic flints which show the striking peculiarity of being patinated on one side only, or if both sides are patinated, one side is very much more so than the other. My attention was drawn to the peculiarity in this way: For some time past large numbers of flint implements and flakes have been brought to me by the labourers on an estate a few miles from Icklingham.

The discovery which is the subject of these notes was unfortunately rendered incomplete by the fact that the initial exhumation of the bones was not witnessed by me, as I came on the scene after the greater part of the skeleton had been shovelled away by those ignorant of its scientific value.

The gravel-pit in which I found the remains appears to be cut into a Plateau gravel, probably of an age corresponding to the break-up of one of the great glaciations. It is situated near, but not on, the summit of an eminence called Kedington Hill, about 2 miles South-by-East of Sudbury Station. The site was once included under the name of Kedington Common, and is on the North side of the road called Kedington Lane.

The parish of Barnham, in North-West Suffolk, a little over two miles from Thetford, has never been noted for its flint implements, and the few found there have for the most part gone unrecorded. The finding of some implements there in the early part of 1912 induced me to trace as many previous specimens as I could, and by the kindness of Mr. H. Muller (Eltham), Mr. G. J. Buscall Fox (Upper Tooting), Mr. C. F. Newton (Saham Toney), and Mr. H. Dixon Hewitt (Thetford), I have examined a series of implements of more than usual interest on account of the succession of periods which they represent.

Chellean.—In 1882, Mr. A. G. Wright obtained “two flint implements from the gravel near Barnham” (Geological Memoir of Ely, Mildenhall, Thetford,” p. 80). These are now in the possession of Mr. G. J. Buscall Fox. One is the broad end of an ochreous pear-shaped implement (2¾ in. by 2 in.)—apparently Chellean—and probably found in the gravel-pit east of the village.

The Blacks nowadays are tame, but when Fortescue came up in about 1856 exploring, he had considerable bother with them, and even now in the Kimberley district, some 500 miles away, they are still in the Stone Age, and cannot be trusted. To-day at Millstream, stone implements are only used for circumcision and cutting out spears. The spears are made of hard wood and barbed both ways so that it is impossible to pull or push them out, and the blacks cut them out with a hot flake. The fire in which the flake is heated must not be lighted with a match but with a fire stick. By using a stone and not a knife they maintain that they do not get blood poisoning, and that the wound heals sooner. I showed one of my large black flakes to a native woman, and she said, “He good fella stone, he cut'em out spear, he borrow Ian.” Whether she meant a flake was called “borrow Ian,” or the kind of stone upon which the flake was made was “borrow Ian” I could not make out, but on showing her another, a yellow coloured scraper, she said, “He bad fella, he poison.”

Though Sir John Evans described a series of flint implements as “single-barbed arrowheads,” the shape of the majority precluded any such explanation of their use, and it was not until Dr. A. E. Relph put forward the suggestion in “The Antiquary” for September, 1907, that these implements were in reality harpoon-barbs, that students of prehistoric archæology were satisfied that their nomenclature was correct. They are all triangular, the longest edge being thin and unworked, and this, it is suggested, was fixed in the side of a bone or wooden shaft, probably tipped by a triangular or tanged and barbed arrowhead. In most of the specimens the remaining two edges are carefully chipped, the longer being usually straight, and the shorter concave. This curved portion would be fixed pointing to the handle of the harpoon, the long sloping edge enabling the weapon to pierce the object aimed at, while the curved barb would prevent it slipping out.

The Middle Glacial Sands and Gravel which occur over such a large portion of East Anglia are somewhat difficult to explain, and various opinions have been put forward to account for them. In Suffolk they generally occur under the Chalky Boulder Clay, and in some parts of Norfolk between that deposit and the older Contorted Drift. In the neighbourhood of Ipswich these deposits generally rest upon Red Crag, and are covered by the Chalky Boulder Clay. They are best seen where pits have been sunk upon the plateau or where streams have cut into the plateau and exposed the various beds composing it.

Having discovered six years ago that the Middle Glacial Gravel is implementiferous, I have continually searched these deposits, and am led to the following views regarding them.

The greater part of the northern side of the parish of Beechamwell consists of marl and chalk with a top-soil of from one to eighteen feet of gravelly sand. The average depth of this is about eight feet. On the top of it there is a layer of turf or of cultivable soil from three-quarters of a foot to a foot and a-half in depth. There is a narrow strip of boulder clay deposit on which ice-scratched, worked flints are found. There is also a tongue of gravel one and a-half-mile long and half-a-mile wide at its widest part. On this, generally, very few worked flints have been found; fragments of pottery in some numbers have been found all over it however. On the edge of this strip, adjacent on the west to the boulder clay, several worked flints have been picked up, and a hoard of about 200 splinters and flakes was found lying between the sand and the turf, a foot deep here.

The greater part of the worked flints are found in an area of about half-a-mile square. The axes, whole or in fragments, are found scattered over the whole of the northern half of the parish. The first axe, however, I found was lying beside a path through the old fen that lies on the south side of Beechamwell. The worked flints found near the moraine are of a peculiar grey colour, and nearly all scimitar-shaped.

Flints are found in beds in the chalk and are still plentiful on the surface of the soil, although many have been picked off it for building and road-mending. The small area on which the worked flints are so numerous is the highest ground in Beechamwell.

About ten years ago some labourers engaged in excavating gravel from a pit on the estate of Mr. A. Wood Crawshay, J.P., in the parish of Scole, Norfolk, brought to light a number of iron spear-heads, a quantity of fragmentary pottery, a small ornamented object of bronze, and several bones. No effort was made to discover the positions these various objects occupied in relation to each ether, but it was ascertained that they were all deposited in some trenches about six feet long and three feet wide, cut in the surface soil of the ground bordering the pit. Through the kindness of Mr. Crawshay, I was able to exhibit some of these relics at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, held at Norwich, on March 22nd, 1909, and the conclusion come to concerning them was that they represented interments of the Roman period. Six spear-heads were found, two being uninjured apart from corrosion, while the remaining four were broken, one having lost the whole of its blade.

Owing to the continued expression of interest in the Red Crag Shell, which bears a crude carving of a human face upon it, and which my father first described so many years ago, the time seems ripe to collect the evidence regarding it. I wrote a letter to the “Geological Magazine” summarising the facts of the case, and giving the literature of the subject, and this was followed by a later note.

Many geologists and others have expressed themselves as desirous of seeing the shell, round which discussion and more or less heated opinion has revolved for thirty-two years. It was shown at the London meeting of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, when the President, Dr. Sturge, proposed that a committee should be formed critically to examine and report on it. In the present paper, therefore, I shall confine myself to stating its history, and bringing together what little contemporary evidence there is regarding its discovery.

At the suggestion of the President it was agreed to appoint a Special Committee to examine the shell forming the subject of Dr. Stopes' paper, and to report upon it. A Committee was accordingly formed consisting of the President of the Society (Dr. Allen Sturge), the Vice-President (Mr. J. Reid Moir, F.G.S.), the Secretary (Mr. W. G. Clarke), and Mr. W. H. Burrell, F.L.S.; the President to act as Chairman.

By invitation of the President, the Committee met at Icklingham Hall from May 17th to 19th. Dr. Marie Stopes was also present, to be responsible for the safety of the specimen and to give such further information as the Committee might desire.

On the southern shore of Achill Island, Co. Mayo, between the cathedral rocks of Menawn and the village of Keel, lies Keel strand, a flat grass-grown plain of blown sand, some few feet above high water mark. Rather nearer to the village of Keel than to the rocks of Menawn the sand is being gradually removed by the wind, leaving a low cliff three to four feet in height facing the sea, the high water mark when I was there in September, 1911, being some three to four hundred yards away from the cliff.

A few yards nearer the sea than the cliff, numerous fossil or semi-fossil bones were exposed, almost all, as far as I could tell, being of horse with a few of pig, together with a quantity of shells evidently forming a kitchen midden. A few pebbles amongst the shells showed signs of use as hammer stones. At about the same distance from the sea as the midden, and at a short distance from it, was a low mound of sand and pebbles about 27 feet in diameter, rising about 18 inches above the surrounding sand. In the centre was a boulder standing upon end, but too heavy for me to move, and there were indications that a ring of stones surrounded the mound, but the sand drift made it impossible to ascertain this positively.

The pygmy and small implements shown to-night from Cornwall were found on the landward slope of Trevose Head, near Padstow, on the north coast of the county. The sea end of this promontory rises to some 200 feet, and thence the ground inclines rapidly back to the mainland, the connecting neck being not more than half a mile wide. At the narrowest part the rain-water, constantly filtering through the adjacent peat, wastes down the hard bedrock of slate, comes out as a small spring, which, in the course of ages, has cut a channel of a hundred yards in length to the cliff edge. At the springhead stands a cairn of a massive block of white quartz, obviously of great age, but whether coeval with the prehistoric settlpment it would be impossible to say. This cairn or beacon would be seen from a long way over the adjacent bay, and might have served to guide seafarers of any age to the fresh-water supply. Here, amongst the faint traces of trenching and hut circles, the small implements, and chips made in their manufacture, all of snow-white patina, were lying about in great profusion.

In October last, I was visiting the gravel pits in this neighbourhood, and on reaching one in the parish of Wretton, about half a mile west of Stoke Ferry, one of the men mentioned some bones and an iron spearhead they had found some time previously. I asked to see them, and was taken to another part of the workings, where on a ledge near the surface of the ground was a small hole dug into the face of the pit. Projecting from the hole was a large bone, and stuck into the earth at the side, the spearhead. As they seemed to value their find very lightly, I gave the men a trifle and brought away the articles, asking them to keep any further finds for me.

Some six weeks after, I paid them another visit. Nothing further had been done at this particular spot; two of the men, however, volunteered to dig into the side and see if there was anything else. At the first blow of the pick another large bone was unearthed, a practically complete femur. Soon after this an iron knife blade came to light, then on the right side of the body an iron shield boss, and near the head a small iron knife. No other relics were found beyond a few pieces of bone, all with the exception of the two femurs in a very friable state. Three small pieces of the cranium were all that remained of that part. One arm appeared to have been extended above the head, as part of a humerus was lying upright on the remains of the skull. The spearhead must have been near the feet, as it was found first.

M. Rutot has pointed out that in the centre and south of France all the Palæolithic industries since the Chellean, and up to and including implements of the Neolithic period, lie intermingled on the surface, and in the last part of our “Proceedings” Dr. Sturge has given cogent reasons for considering some of our surface implements in East Anglia to be late Palæolithic, of “cave” types. Mr. Reginald Smith, F.S.A., has also adopted this view, and elaborated it by allotting the well-defined “Cissbury type” implements to the Aurignacian period. In looking through some thousands of Norfolk implements I have been struck by the scarcity—omitting the “Cissbury” specimens—of the types described as resembling those from the French caves, and by their much greater frequency in South-West Norfolk than in other parts of the county, though this applies to practically every industry, and is probably due to a variety of causes, geological and otherwise.

On the Manor Farm, Heacham, Norfolk, there are seven long mounds (one was removed some years ago), roughly parallel and running east and west. They are in a meadow adjoining the road from Heacham to Hunstanton on the west. Ditches border the field east and west, and north of the mounds is a raised roadway connecting the highway to Hunstanton with a farm road. The western half of this meadow (79 yards from east to west) has been hollowed out in irregular shape. The longest mound is 33 yards long; they average 6 yards in width, and 17 yards from the top of one mound to the top of the next.

By permission of Mr. Hamon le Strange, the landowner, and Mr. G. B. M. Brown, the tenant, Mr. Bellerby Lowerison made some excavations in these mounds in January, 1913. The results noted by Mr. Lowerison were as follows:—

“27, 1, '13.—Made longitudinal section in 5th mound from north (not counting road-mound), 7 yds. long, 4 ft. wide. Strata as follow:—1, humus, 6 inches; 2, yellow loam, 2 ft.; 3, clayey loam, 2 ft.; 4, whitey grey clay, 3 inches ; 5, yellow loam like (2), 2 ft.; 6, grey sandy clay (boulder?), 9 inches.

The fullest credit must be given to our members, Mr. Reid Moir, F.G.S., and Mr. S. Hazzledine Warren, F.G.S. (and others also) for their efforts to solve this problem by experiment. This is obviously the right line to adopt, but, after all, experiments (including my own, for I have been experimenting for years on similar lines) are only proof that (given suitable conditions) the sharp edges of split flints will chip under “Force,” whether this is applied by Nature or Man. Experiments can prove the difference between the results of the forces of “Percussion” and “Pressure”: but it is doubtful, in my opinion, if it can be proved by experiments whether Nature or Man has applied the force, as the same forces are used by both Nature and Man, the only difference being the intensity with which the force has been used and the way that force has been applied.