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The Antiquity and Function of Antler Axes and Adzes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

V. Gordon Childe
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Extract

The inhabitants of the wooded plain of northern Europe that in early post-glacial times extended almost uninterrupted from the Pennines to the Urals were distinguished from their meso-lithic contemporaries, the Azilians and Tardenoisians, as well as from their best-known palaeolithic precursors, by the possession of a kit of heavy tools suitable for wood-working. This distinctive equipment was an adaptation and response to the dominant feature of the northern environment of those days—the great Boreal forest. So I have termed the cultures characterized thereby (Duvensee, Maglemose, Kunda, Broxbourne, etc.) the Forest Cultures. From this point of view the most significant diagnostic traits in all of them are not their fishing and hunting tackle that form the most spectacular among their relics, but their heavy tools of bone, antler and stone. In 19311 I discussed the development of this heavy industry in the central area round the Baltic as an adaptation to the forest environment, a manifestation of a distinctively woodland culture-pattern, to use an American expression. In 1937, thanks to fresh discoveries in England, Esthonia and the U.S.S.R. I was able to trace the same wood-working equipment throughout the whole woodland-zone from Russia to England. But all these studies of adaptation were in fact inspired by a hint from Dr Schwantes (then of Hamburg); for to him belongs the credit of first recognizing the antler objects I discussed as wood-worker’s implements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 16 , Issue 63 , September 1942 , pp. 258 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1942

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References

1 ‘The Forest Cultures of Northern Europe : a Study in Adaptation and Diffusion’, J.R.A.I. (1931) LXI, 325-48.

2 ‘Adaptation to the Post-glacial Forest’, Early Man (Philadelphia, 1937), 233-42.

3 ‘Das Beil als Scheide zwischen Paläolithikum und Neolithikum’, Archiv. für Anthropologie, XX, 13 ff. The German term ‘Beil’ can be used of either an axe or an adze-head, an advantage possessed by the somewhat discredited English term ‘celt’, which is accordingly here used in this general sense.

4 Clark, ANTIQUITY (1938), XII, 154-71.

5 Clark, The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe, 84.

6 Dacia, V-VI, 17.

7 e.g. from Gourdon, Combe Capelle and Mas d’Azil.

8 Pervobytnoe Obshchestvo (1940), 401.

9 Kratkie Soobshcheniya (Inst. Istor. Mat. Kultury, Mad. Nauk), 1940, IV, 38.

10 Die altsteinzeitliche Kultursfätte von Petersfels, 43, pl. XII, 1.

11 American Mus. Nat. Hist., Anthropology Memoirs, 11, 474.

12 Mesolithic Settlement, loc. cit.

13 It was Sir Lindsay Scott who first pointed out to me my academic mistake.

14 American Museum Nat. Hist., Anthrop. Memoirs, 1, 183. (See fig. 2, p. 261).

15 Curwen, Archaeology of Sussex, 113.

16 Offa, 1936, 1, 11.

17 Archives de l’Institut de Paléontologie humaine, X.

18 E.S.A., IX, 158-62.

19 Wiadomosci Archeohgiczne, 1938, XV, 1-105.

20 Sovietskaya Arkheologiya, 1940, V, 242.

21 E.S.A., IX, 17.

22 Finds enumerated and mapped in my article in Early Man, cited in note 2.