PROFESSOR NILSSON'S STONE AGE.*
PROFESSOR Nu.ssoN's book does not pass over so wide a range of archaeology as Sir John Lubbock's Prehistoric Man, being devoted entirely to the period called by Sir John the Neolithic or " new " stone period, a title which Professor Nilsson himself is evidently by no means willing to adopt. It is very natural that a Scandinavian archae3logist should object to a classification which excludes his own country entirely from any share in the oldest records of human existence on the Continent of Europe, and one can see that Professor Nilsson's prepossession in favour of an extreme antiquity for the Scandinavian Stone Age runs through the whole volume, and especially its last chapter. All danger of misinforming the general reader as to the actual condition of antiquarian opinion has, however, been avoided by Sir John Lubbock's very terse and able introduction, in which he has summed up the arguments for a double Stone Age, distinguish- able from each other as much by the nature of the contemporary animal life as by the character of the Stone weapons in use, and shown that the first Stone Age dates from the prevalence of an Arctic climate even in the South of France, and is anterior to the invention of pottery, while the second, the age of polished stone weapons, shows plenty of evidence of the use of pottery, and little, if any, of the contemporary existence of the great Arctic mammalia. In all probability, at the time of the Palaeolithic or old Stone period Scandinavia was uninhabitable by man,—at least if France itself had only an Arctic climate. No wonder a Swedish antiquarian who has only in his old age made acquaintance with the evidences of a still greater antiquity than any of which his own country preserves the traces, feels disposed to depreciate to a cer- tain extent the value of distinctions which remit to a less remote era, what he has always regarded as the signs of man's earliest activity on the earth. For Professor Nilsson was one of the first antiquarians to interpret adequately the indications of any Stone age (anterior to the use of the metals) in Europe. The treatise now edited by Sir John Lubbock was first written in 1838, when the author's conclusions were greatly in advance of those of the archaeologists of that day. He has therefore the credit of the highest originality for the interpretation he has given to the remains of the life of the Stone age of Scandinavia, and this book will rank with English archaeologists as the book of a great pioneer of their science. For the general reader,—and the present writer is one of that class, with no sort of pretension to assume any attitude but that of a learner towards the accomplished author and editor of this interesting book,—the best use we can make of our study of the work before us, is to state the general argument on which its inferences are founded, and recount some of its more interest- ing details.
The reasoning on which the evidence of a Stone age is grounded is of a very simple and, we imagine, also of a very cogent nature. It is obvious that if, on the disentombment of Herculaneum, the city had been found without any trace of metallic instruments in it, the evidence that the metals were unknown to the people whose complete daily life was thus suddenly entombed, would be irresisti- ble. No argument quite so complete as this can be produced to prove that there was ever a life in Western Europe from which the knowledge of the metals was excluded, simply because the very fact of the absence of that knowledge must itself have prevented human life from attaining so much artistic completeness and such perfect physical organization as would be needful for the existence of cities like Herculaneum or Pompeii. But Lake villages have been exhumed in Switzerland with as many as 1,600 distinct objects of human art in them, none of which have been metallic, though a large proportion of these objects have been atone axes. Again, in
• The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia. An Essay on Comparative Ethnography, and a Contribution to the History of the Development of Mankind, containing a Description of the Implements, Dwellings, Tombs, and Mode of Living of the Savages of the North of Europe during the Stone Age. By Sven Nilsson. Third Edition, revised by the Author, and translated from his own Manuscript. Edited, and with an Introduction, by Sir John Lubbock, Bart., F.R.S. London : Longman. 1868. Denmark shell-mounds have been found representing the dust heaps of former villages, with thousands of household implements in them, of bone or stone, but none of metal. The same may be said of the gallery graves and huts of Scandinavia which Professor Nilsson believes to have been all of them either disused huts turned into sepulchres, or, where there are no skeletons found there, simply those huts themselves. In these are found numbers of stone, and bone, and earthenware utensils, often scattered round the fireplace,—of which there is generally some trace,—also amber beads and other amber ornaments occasionally still fastened to the wrists or necks of the skeletons of women, but never similar orna- ments of iron or any other metal. Now, when it is considered that directly any trace of the knowledge of bronze and finally of iron appears, the metals immediately take the place of stone for the purposes to which they are obviously so much better adapted,— fish-hooks, for example,—and are found in great numbers, exactly where the stone implements are found in the corresponding villages of the Stone Age, it is not easy to resist the inference that where only stone axes and knives are found, and found in numbers, there can have been no knowledge of iron. In any but or even coffin of modern times, the traces of our knowledge of the metals would be, of course, ample. The nails, the screws, the hinges, the commonest utensils would show it, and though, of course, it would be some time after the introduction of the metals before these would entirely supplant stone and bone, yet when you find a man buried with his para- phernalia about him,—axes, knives, harpoons, arrow-heads, orna- ments, and pottery,—and find no trace of iron, it is not easy to conceive that iron had any practical place in his life. When this happens not once only, but in many exhumed villages, and many exhumed huts and graves over a great breadth of Europe, while in all where the metals are found at all, they are found in plenty, and found to form parts of the commonest objects, it seems to us something very like a moral certainty that communities existed at one time spread over that area to which the use of the metals was unknown. It is rather a defect of Professor Nilsson's book that he gives us no idea of the number of Stone-Age antiquities actually discovered in Scandinavia,—of the number of gallery huts or graves which have been examined, and of the number of articles of different kinds of stone and bone discovered therein, without any admixture of iron or bronze, implements. Professor Nilsson's sole object seems to have been to identify the special use of each class of implement which has been discovered, by comparing it with similar objects recently in use amongst the savage tribes of Tierra del Fuego, or New Zealand, or other primitive races. He has made no attempt to treat his subject statistically even for Scandinavia. Sir John Lubbock, who sees the full importance of the statistical view in relation to the general argument, has given us some important tables with relation to the Swiss lake villages. But Professor Nilsson gives us no idea of the extent over which his Scandinavian researches extend. The interest of this book, therefore, consists chiefly in his careful ap- plication of the comparative method of dealing with the Stone antiquities. His great effort is to identify, if possible, each of the objects exhumed with objects of the same kind used amongst savages in the very same phase of civilization (or barbarism), and for the special use of which he can find positive testimony. By pursuing this method he has shown that a great number of the supposed weapons of war made of stone have really been fashioned and used for the ordinary purposes of living,—for the chase, for fishing, for cutting down trees, for building boats, for sharpening stone knives, for rudely scratching the surface of the soil, and so forth. Of course, in a state of life in which the chase is nearly the sole means of living,—in which, as Sir John Lubbock roughly calculates, a thousand head of game must exist at any one time for every human life supported,—there can have been no population at all thick enough to make fighting with fellow men an important element of life. The great fight, at a time when stone or bone arrows and stone javelins and sling stones were the chief weapons in use, must have been between man and nature, not between man and man. Accordingly Professor Nilsson very early rejected the idea that the vast number of stone axes, spears, harpoons, arrow-heads, and so forth were evidences of the warlike habits of the people who used them, and turned his attention to identifying these instruments with the implements in actual use by savages still unacquainted with the use of metals. He points out that many of these stone weapons,—all those which like spears and axes need a hand-to-hand fight,—though very effective against creatures which have none such to defend themselves with, would be all but absolutely useless against men who bad. The stone axe or spear would be broken at the first onset, and would never give evidence of such constant and steady use,—of being ground
down by habitual wear,—as numbers of these weapons give ample evidence of. It is clear that numbers of these axes, and chisels, and gouges, &c., have been used up in working wood, and repeatedly sharpened again as they dwindled down,—a pro- cess not at all compatible with the hypothesis that they were intended only for violent affrays. Indeed, the more ineffective the flint or trap axe was, the more rapidly would it wear away with use. Nine or ten blows or more from a stone axe would pro- bably be needed to do, even badly, the work which one blow from a good steel axe would do well. Professor Nilsson has been very happy in showing that scarcely a single stone implement found can have been meant for war in the first instance,—so closely do they all resemble the very instruments by which savages still get their living in other quarters of the world. He remarks, after a very careful review of all these various fishing, hunting, and building instruments :—
" A remarkable fact in this branch of ethnography is the great resem- blance that exists amongst the atone implements of nations of different tribes, during very different periods, and in the most distant countries of the earth. If the question were asked, whether we could infer from the resemblance of tho implements that they had belonged to one and the same tribe, we must, after a strict examination, answer No ; they only indicate the same degree of civilization. To give a few decisive proofs of this thesis, I have here, on Pl. V., figs. 99-103, 106-411, sketched similar stone arrow-beads, with a tongue for the shaft, from various distant parts of the world ; also (fig. 113) a triangular arrow-head from Scania, and (fig. 114) a similar one from Pennsylvania. But above all, the small heart-shaped arrow-beads (fig. 106) of flint, from Scania, and (fig. 107) of obsidian, from Tierra del Fuego, both of which are, with regard to shape and mode of construction, even in the most minute details and when closely viewed with a microscope, surprisingly similar, as if they had been made by the same hand and on the same day. And yet there is between their places of origin such a vast distance as the space between Sweden and Tierra del Fuego ; and such a gulf of time, that the one was made about twenty years ago, and the other is at least from 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Indeed, it is hardly possible to explain the close resemblance between the fishing tools and hunting weapons of the most distinct savage nations, as to time, place, and origin, without assuming that all of them, in one and the same low degree of civilization, contrived these hunting weapons instinctively, and in consequence of a sort of natural necessity. We are urged to this supposition, as we find even very complicated fishing and hunting implements of exactly the same kind with all savage people from pole to pole."
" Instinctively" is, no doubt, a very strong word to indicate that the very same purposes are effected in different ages and countries by the very same means out of the different materials at hand. We might almost as well call the invention of the sun-dial or of earrings and necklaces and other ornaments " instinctive," as call the invention of gouges and chisels, or harpoons and plummets and fish-hooks so, because they are made in the same way for the same end by very different races in very different lands. No doubt the power to adapt means to ends is one which in a greater or less degree belongs to all the races of men, and so is the love of beauty, and the wish to add beauty to the person by means of decoration. But we do not see why the likeness between the stone arrow-heads of Scandinavia and those of Tierra del Fuego is more remarkable than the tendency of all races to ornament their women, and sometimes their men, with beads of amber, or of seed, or of other precious stones. Men show little less resemblance to each other all the world over in their conscious and reflective, than in their strictly instinctive and unreflective life.
Professor Nilsson seems to us rather less instructive when he leaves the actual remains of the Stone Age to argue on its tradi- tions. He adduces some ingenious reasons for identifying the dwarfs of the Sagas with the Laplanders, and the giants with the Gothic or Celtic races,—inferring that all the stories in which the giants are treated as monsters are of Lapland origin, and that all in which the dwarfs are treated as preternatural beings are of Indo-Germanic origin. This portion of his argument strikes us,
however, as very much more conjectural than the opening part of his book ; nor do we find anything very trustworthy in the theory of his closing chapter as to the alterations in the level of the surface of Scandinavia which caused, as he supposes, the vast climatic changes which have probably taken place there. The value of the book consists mainly in its minute and learned analysis of the vari- ous stone and bone and building antiquities of Scandinavia,—illus-
trated as they are by numerous and beautifully executed plates. To
be conveyed back to the tangible remains of a period many cen- turies at least prior to the time when the Romans invaded Gaul and Germany,— for a bronze age had passed away between the new Stone Age and the iron age,—and to know that even this was a new era as compared with that when man and the mammoths of the Arctic period were coeval,—must always have an imaginative charm for thinking men. And there is a curious sort of pathos about these blunt, half-worn stone knives and axes which seem to us so utterly unequal to the duty assigned them, and which still bear
as freshly as ever the marks of the comparatively fruitless and painful labour of their owners, in a day when the earth was in- definitely more sterile of human food, and even that which it did contain was indefinitely less accessible to the hand of man, than it is now.
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