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The Technique of the Boyne Carvings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2014

O. G. S. Crawford
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Extract

The prudent contributor to a Festschrift will select some subject about which he thinks he knows as much as the professor who is to receive it. That is peculiarly difficult here because of the vast range of Professor Childe's knowledge, both in time and space, far exceeding the present contributor's. This Note is offered as a grateful tribute from one of the many who have been intellectually enriched by his writings and encouraged by his devotion to scholarship. It is little more than an amplification and criticism of the Abbé Breuil's classic Presidential Address to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, delivered in 1934; but on the strength of observations made in August and September, 1955, I have come to different conclusions.

The Abbé Breuil detected five successive techniques, all of them found on the stones of the Boyne Tombs:

(1) Incised thin lines (pl. XIX, B).

(2) Picked grooves left rough (pl. XVIII).

(3, a) Picked grooves afterwards rubbed smooth; in this and the preceding group ‘it is invariably the line (groove) itself on which the pattern depends, which gives and is the design’.

(3, b) Picked areas which ‘only define the limits of the pattern, the surface, left in relief by the cutting down of the background, constituting the actual design’ (pl. xx, B).

(4) Rectilinear patterns where also the pattern is residual, consisting of raised ribs, forming triangles or lozenges, left standing by picking away the surrounding surface (pl. xx, A).

Type
Bronze Age
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society , Volume 21 , July 1956 , pp. 156 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1956

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References

page 156 note 1 Proc. Preh. Soc. E. Anglia, VII, 289–322Google Scholar. The system of classification there set out was foreshadowed by the Abbé in 1921; see Proc. R. Irish Acad., XXXVI, Section C, No. 1.

page 156 note 2 The interpretation of the signs is a different matter which I hope to deal with fully elsewhere. I take this opportunity of admitting the justness of M. Breuil's remarks on p. 291, note 2. The Ty Illtyd carvings must surely be prehistoric, as he says, not Christian, as I thought in 1921.

page 157 note 1 This is certainly meant for an eye. It is almost identical with a Portuguese example (originally a pair) on a round-bottomed pot from the ruined passage-grave of Olival da Pega; see Leisner, , Antas do Concelho de Reguengos de Monsaraz (Lisbon, 1951)Google Scholar, pls. xxx, 14, and LXII, 15–17. The Irish eye lacks only the central dot. The fine row of eyes on one of the Dowth curb-stones is similar.