The actual structures of Langbank and Dumbuck, then, are confessedly ancient remains; they are not of the nineteenth century; they are “unique” in our knowledge, and we ask, what was the purpose of their constructors, and what is their approximate date?
Dr. Munro quotes and discusses [43] a theory, or a tentative guess of Dr. David Murray. That scholar writes “River cairns are commonly built on piled platforms, and my doubt is whether this is not the nature of the structure in question” (Dumbuck). A river cairn is a solid pile of stonework, with, perhaps, a pole in the centre. At Dumbuck there is the central “well” of six feet in diameter. Dr. Murray says that a pole “carried down to the bottom would probably be sunk in the clay, which would produce a hole, or well-like cavity similar to that of the Dumbuck structure.” [44]
It is not stated that the poles of river cairns usually demand accommodation to the extent of six feet of diameter, in the centre of the solid mass of stones, and, as the Langbank site has no central well, the tentative conjecture that it was a river cairn is not put forward. Dr. Murray suggests that the Dumbuck cairn “may have been one of the works of 1556 or 1612,” that is, of the modern age of Queen Mary and James VI. The object of such Corporation cairns “was no doubt to mark the limit of their jurisdiction, and also to serve as a beacon to vessels coming up the river.”
Now the Corporation, with its jurisdiction and beacons, is purely modern. In 1758 the Corporation had a “lower cairn, if it did not occupy this very spot” (Dumbuck) “it stood upon the same line and close to it. There are, however, no remains of such cairn,” says Dr. Murray. He cites no evidence for the date and expenses of the demolition of the cairn from any municipal book of accounts.
Now we have to ask (1) Is there any evidence that men in 1556-1758 lived on the tops of such modern cairns, dating from the reign of Mary Stuart? (2) If men then lived on the top of a cairn till their food refuse became “a veritable kitchen midden,” as Dr. Munro says, [45] would that refuse exhibit bones of Bos Longifrons; and over ninety bone implements, sharpened antlers of deer, stone polishers, hammer stones, “a saddle stone” for corn grinding, and the usual débris of sites of the fifth to the twelfth centuries? (3) Would such a modern site exhibit these archaic relics, plus a “Late Celtic” comb and “penannular brooch,” and exhibit not one modern article of metal, or one trace of old clay tobacco pipes, crockery, or glass?
The answers to these questions are obvious. It is not shown that any men ever lived on the tops of cairns, and, even if they did so in modern times (1556-1758) they could not leave abundant relics of the broch and crannog age (said to be of 400-1100 a.d.), and leave no relics of modern date. This theory, or suggestion, is therefore demonstrably untenable and unimaginable.
Dr. Munro, however, “sees nothing against the supposition” that “Dr. Murray is right,” but Dr. Munro’s remarks about the hypothesis of modern cairns, as a theory “against which he sees nothing,” have the air of being an inadvertent obiter dictum. For, in his conclusion and summing up he writes, “We claim to have established that the structures of Dunbuie, Dumbuck, and Langbank are remains of inhabited sites of the early-Iron Age, dating to some time between the fifth and twelfth centuries.” [46a] I accept this conclusion, and will say as little as may be about the theory of a modern origin of the sites, finally discarded by Dr. Munro. I say “discarded,” for his theory is that the modern corporation utilised an earlier structure as a cairn or beacon, or boundary mark, which is perfectly possible. But, if this occurred, it does not affect the question, for this use of the structure has left no traces of any kind. There are no relics, except relics of the fifth (?) to twelfth (?) centuries.
In an earlier work by Dr. Munro, Prehistoric Scotland (p. 439), published in 1899, he observes that we have no evidence as to the when, or how of the removal of the stones of the hypothetical “Corporation cairn,” or “round tower with very thick walls,” [46b] or “watch tower,” which is supposed to have been erected above the wooden sub-structure at Dumbuck. He tentatively suggests that the stones may have been used, perhaps, for the stone causeway now laid along the bank of the recently made canal, from a point close to the crannog to the railway. No record is cited. He now offers guesses as to the stones “in the so-called pavements and causeways.” First, the causeways may have probably been made “during the construction of the tower with its central pole,” (here the cairn is a habitable beacon, habitable on all hypotheses,) or, again, “perhaps at the time of its demolition” about which demolition we know nothing, [47a] except that the most of the stones are not now in situ.
Several authentic stone crannogs in Scotland, as to which we have information, possessed no central pole, but had a stone causeway, still extant, leading, e.g. from the crannog to the shore of the Ashgrove loch, “a causeway of rough blocks of sandstone slabs.” [47b] If one stone crannog had a stone causeway, why should this ancient inhabited cairn or round tower not possess a stone causeway? Though useless at high water, at low water it would afford better going. In a note to Ivanhoe, and in his Northern tour of 1814, Scott describes a stone causeway to a broch on an artificial island in Loch Cleik-him-in, near Lerwick. Now this loch, says Scott, was, at the time when the broch was inhabited, open to the flow of tide water.
As people certainly did live on these structures of Langbank and Dunbuie during the broch and crannog age (centuries 5-12) it really matters not to our purpose why they did so, or how they did so. Let us suppose that the circular wall of the stone superstructure slanted inwards, as is not unusual. In that case the habitable area at the top may be reduced to any extent that is thought probable, with this limitation:—the habitable space must not be too small for the accommodation of the persons who filled up the eastern third of an area of from twelve to fourteen feet in breadth, and in some places a foot in thickness, with a veritable kitchen-midden, of “broken and partially burned bones of various animals, shells of edible molluscs, and a quantity of ashes and charcoal . . . .” [48]
But Dr. Munro assures me that the remains discovered could be deposited in a few years of regular occupancy by two or three persons.
The structure certainly yielded habitable space enough to accommodate the persons who, in the fifth to twelfth centuries, left these traces of their occupancy. Beyond that fact I do not pretend to estimate the habitable area.
Why did these people live on this structure in the fifth to twelfth centuries? Almost certainly, not for the purpose of directing the navigation of the Clyde. At that early date, which I think we may throw far back in the space of the six centuries of the estimate, or may even throw further back still, the Clyde was mainly navigated by canoes of two feet or so in depth, though we ought to have statistics of remains of larger vessels discovered in the river bed. [49a] I think we may say that the finances of Glasgow, in St. Kentigern’s day, about 570-600 a.d., would not be applied to the construction of Dr. Munro’s “tower with its central pole and very thick walls” [49b] erected merely for the purpose of warning canoes off shoals in the Clyde.
That the purpose of the erection was to direct the navigation of Clyde by canoes, or by the long vessels of the Viking raiders, appears to me improbable. I offer, periculo meo, a different conjecture, of which I shall show reason to believe that Dr. Munro may not disapprove.
The number of the dwellers in the structure, and the duration of their occupancy, does not affect my argument. If two natives, in a very few years, could deposit the “veritable kitchen midden,” with all the sawn horns, bone implements, and other undisputed relics, we must suppose that the term of occupancy was very brief, or not continuous, and that the stone structure “with very thick walls like the brochs” represented labours which were utilised for a few years, or seldom. My doubt is as to whether the structure was intended for the benefit of navigators of the Clyde—in shallow canoes!
The Dumbuck structure, when occupied, adjoined and commanded a ford across the undeepened Clyde of uncommercial times. So Sir Arthur Mitchell informs us. [51a] The Langbank structure, as I understand, is opposite to that of Dumbuck on the southern side of the river. If two strongly built structures large enough for occupation exist on opposite sides of a ford, their purpose is evident: they guard the ford, like the two stone camps on each side of the narrows of the Avon at Clifton.
Dr. Munro, on the other hand, says, “the smallness of the habitable area on both “sites” puts them out of the category of military forts.” [51b] My suggestion is that the structure was so far “military” as is implied in its being occupied, with Langbank on the opposite bank of Clyde by keepers of the ford. In 1901 Dr. Munro wrote, “even the keepers of the watch-tower at the ford of Dumbuck had their quern, and ground their own corn.” [52a] This idea has therefore passed through Dr. Munro’s mind, though I did not know the fact till after I had come to the same hypothesis. The habitable area was therefore, adequate to the wants of these festive people. I conjecture that these “keepers of the watch-tower at the ford” were military “watchers of the ford,” for that seems to me less improbable than that “a round tower with very thick walls, [52b] like the brochs and other forts of North Britain,” was built in the interests of the navigation of Clyde at a very remote period. [52c]
But really all this is of no importance to the argument. People lived in these sites, perhaps as early as 400 a.d. or earlier. Such places of safety were sadly needed during the intermittent and turbulent Roman occupation.
Suppose the sites were occupied by the watchers of the ford. There they lived, no man knows how long, on their perch over the waters of Clyde. They dwelt at top of a stone structure some eight feet above low water mark, for they could not live on the ground floor, of which the walls, fifty feet thick at the base, defied the waves of the high tides driven by the west wind.
There our friends lived, and probably tatooed themselves, and slew Bos Longifrons and the deer that, in later ages, would have been forbidden game to them. If I may trust Bede, born in 672, and finishing his History in 731, our friends were Picts, and spoke a now unknown language, not that of the Bretonnes, or Cymri, or Welsh, who lived on the northern side of the Firth of Clyde. Or the occupants of Dumbuck, on the north side of the river, were Cymri; those of Langbank, on the south side, were Picts. I may at once say that I decline to be responsible for Bede, and his ethnology, but he lived nearer to those days than we do.
With their ladder of fifteen feet long, a slab of oak, split from the tree by wedges, and having six holes chopped out of the solid for steps, they climbed to their perch, the first floor of their abode. I never heard of a ladder made in this way, but the Zuñis used simply to cut notches for the feet in the trunk of a tree, and “sich a getting up stairs” it must have been, when there was rain, and the notches were wet!
Time passed, the kitchen midden grew, and the Cymri founded Ailcluith, “Clyde rock,” now Dumbarton; “to this day,” says Bede, “the strongest city of the Britons.” [54] Then the Scots came, and turned the Britons out; and St. Columba came, and St. Kentigern from Wales (573-574), and began to spread the Gospel among the pagan Picts and Cymri. Stone amulets and stone idols, (if the disputed objects are idols and amulets,) “have had their day,” (as Bob Acres says “Damns have had their day,”) and, with Ailcluith in Scots’ hands, “’twas time for us to go” thought the Picts and Cymri of Langbank and Dumbuck.
Sadly they evacuate their old towers or cairns before the Scots who now command the Dumbuck ford from Dumbarton. They cross to land on their stone causeway at low water. They abandon the old canoe in the little dock where it was found by Mr. Bruce. They throw down the venerable ladder. They leave behind only the canoe, the deer horns, stone-polishers, sharpened bones, the lower stone of a quern, and the now obsolete, or purely folk-loreish stone “amulets,” or “pendants,” and the figurines, which to call “idols” is unscientific, while to call them “totems” is to display “facetious and rejoicing ignorance.” Dr. Munro merely quotes this foolish use of the term totem by others.
These old things the evicted Picts and Cymri abandoned, while they carried with them their more valuable property, their Early Iron axes and knives, their treasured bits of red “Samian ware,” inherited from Roman times, their amber beads, and the rest of their bibelots, down to the minutest fragment of pottery.
Or it may not have been so: the conquering Scots may have looted the cairns, and borne the Pictish cairn-dwellers into captivity.
Looking at any broch, or hill fort, or crannog, the fancy dwells on the last day of its occupation: the day when the canoe was left to subside into the mud and decaying vegetable matter of the loch. In changed times, in new conditions, the inhabitants move away to houses less damp, and better equipped with more modern appliances. I see the little troop, or perhaps only two natives, cross the causeway, while the Minstrel sings in Pictish or Welsh a version of
“The Auld Hoose, the Auld Hoose,
What though the rooms were sma’,
Wi’ six feet o’ diameter,
And a rung gaun through the ha’!”
The tears come to my eyes, as I think of the Last Day of Old Dumbuck, for, take it as you will, there was a last day of Dumbuck, as of windy Ilios, and of “Carthage left deserted of the sea.”
So ends my little idyllic interlude, and, if I am wrong, blame Venerable Bede!
Provisionally, and for the sake of argument merely, may I suggest that the occupancy of these sites may be dated by me, about 300-550 a.d.? That date is well within the Iron Age: iron had long been known and used in North Britain. But to the non-archaeological reader, the terms Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, are apt to prove misleading. The early Iron Age, like the Bronze Age, was familiar with the use of implements of stone. In the Scottish crannogs, admirably described by Dr. Munro, in his Ancient Scottish Lake Dwellings, were found implements of flint, a polished stone axe-head, an iron knife at the same lowest level, finger rings of gold, a forged English coin of the sixth or seventh century a.d., well-equipped canoes (a common attendant of crannogs), the greater part of a stone inscribed with concentric circles, a cupped stone, and a large quartz crystal of the kind which Apaches in North America, and the Euahlayi tribe in New South Wales, use in crystal gazing. In early ages, after the metals had been worked, stone, bronze, and iron were still used as occasion served, just as the Australian black will now fashion an implement in “palaeolithic” wise, with a few chips; now will polish a weapon in “neolithic” fashion; and, again, will chip a fragment of glass with wonderful delicacy; or will put as good an edge as he can on a piece of hoop iron.
I venture, then, merely for the sake of argument, to date the origin of the Clyde sites in the dark years of unrecorded turmoil which preceded and followed the Roman withdrawal. The least unpractical way of getting nearer to their purpose is the careful excavation of a structure of wood and stone near Eriska, where Prince Charles landed in 1745. Dr. Munro has seen and described this site, but is unable to explain it. Certainly it cannot be a Corporation cairn.
We now approach the disputed and very puzzling objects found in the three Clyde sites. My object is, not to demonstrate that they were actually fashioned in, say, 410-550 a.d., or that they were relics of an age far more remote, but merely to re-state the argument of Dr. Joseph Anderson, Keeper of the Scottish National Museum, and of Sir Arthur Mitchell, both of them most widely experienced and sagacious archaeologists. They play the waiting game, and it may be said that they “sit upon the fence”; I am proud to occupy a railing in their company. Dr. Anderson spoke at a meeting of the Scots Society of Antiquaries, May 14, 1900, when Mr. Bruce read a paper on Dumbuck, and exhibited the finds. “With regard to the relics, he said that there was nothing exceptional in the chronological horizon of a portion of them from both sites (Dumbuck and Dunbuie), but as regards another portion, he could find no place for it in any archaeological series, as it had ‘no recognisable affinity with any objects found anywhere else.’”
“For my part,” said Dr. Anderson, (and he has not altered his mind,) “I do not consider it possible or necessary in the meantime that there should be a final pronouncement on these questions. In the absence of decisive evidence, which time may supply, I prefer to suspend my judgment—merely placing the suspected objects (as they place themselves) in the list of things that must wait for further evidence, because they contradict present experience. It has often happened that new varieties of things have been regarded with suspicion on account of their lack of correspondence with things previously known, and that the lapse of time has brought corroboration of their genuineness through fresh discoveries. If time brings no such corroboration, they still remain in their proper classification as things whose special character has not been confirmed by archaeological experience.”
Sir Arthur Mitchell spoke in the same sense, advising suspension of judgment, and that we should await the results of fresh explorations both at Dumbuck and elsewhere. [61] Dr. Murray said that the disputed finds “are puzzling, but we need not condemn them because we do not understand them.” Dr. Munro will not suspend his judgment: the objects, he declares, are spurious.
I remarked, early in this tract, that “with due deference, and with doubt, I think Dr. Munro’s methods capable of modification.” I meant that I prefer, unlike Dr. Munro in this case, to extend the archaeological gaze beyond the limits of things already known to occur in the Scottish area which—by the way—must contain many relics still unknown. I
“Let Observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru,”
to discover whether objects analogous to those under dispute occur anywhere among early races of the past or present. This kind of wide comparison is the method of Anthropology. Thus Prof. Rhys and others find so very archaic an institution as the reckoning of descent in the female line,—inheritance going through the Mother,—among the Picts of Scotland, and they even find traces of totemism, an institution already outworn among several of the naked tribes of Australia, who reckon descent in the male line.
Races do not, in fact, advance on a straight and unbroken highway of progress. You find that the Kurnai of Australia are more civilised, as regards the evolution of the modern Family, than were the Picts who built crannogs and dug canoes, and cultivated the soil, and had domesticated animals, and used iron, all of them things that the Kurnai never dreamed of doing.
As to traces of Totemism in Scotland and Ireland, I am not persuaded by Professor Rhys that they occur, and are attested by Celtic legends about the connection of men and kinships with animals, and by personal and kinship names derived from animals. The question is very obscure. [63] But as the topic of Totemism has been introduced, I may say that many of the mysterious archaic markings on rocks, and decorations of implements, in other countries, are certainly known to be a kind of shorthand design of the totem animal. Thus a circle, whence proceeds a line ending in a triple fork, represents the raven totem in North America: another design, to our eyes meaningless, stands for the wolf totem; a third design, a set of bands on a spear shaft, does duty for the gerfalcon totem, and so on. [64a] Equivalent marks, such as spirals, and tracks of emu’s feet, occur on sacred stones found round the graves of Australian blacks on the Darling River. They were associated with rites which the oldest blacks decline to explain. The markings are understood to be totemic. Occasionally they are linear, as in Ogam writing. [64b]
Any one who is interested in the subject of the origin, in certain places, of the patterns, may turn to Mr. Haddon’s Evolution of Art. [64c] Mr. Haddon shows how the Portuguese pattern of horizontal triangles is, in the art of the uncivilised natives of Brazil, meant to represent bats. [64d] A cross, dotted, within a circle, is directly derived, through several stages, from a representation of an alligator. [64e]
We cannot say whether or not the same pattern, found at Dumbuck, in Central Australia, and in tropical America, arose in the “schematising” of the same object in nature, in all three regions, or not. Without direct evidence, we cannot assign a meaning to the patterns.
My private opinion as to the meaning of the archaic marks and the Clyde objects which bear them, has, in part by my own fault, been misunderstood by Dr. Munro. He bases an argument on the idea that I suppose the disputed “pendants” to have had, in Clydesdale, precisely the same legendary, customary, and magical significance as the stone churinga of the Arunta tribe in Australia. That is not my theory. Dr. Munro quotes me, without indicating the source, (which, I learn, is my first letter on the subject to the Glasgow Herald, Jan. 10th, 1899), as saying that the Clyde objects “are in absolutely startling agreement” with the Arunta churinga. [65]
Doubtless, before I saw the objects, I thus overstated my case, in a letter to a newspaper, in 1899. But in my essay originally published in the Contemporary Review, (March 1899,) and reprinted in my book, Magic and Religion, of 1901, [66] I stated my real opinion. This is a maturely considered account of my views as they were in 1899-1901, and, unlike old newspaper correspondence, is easily accessible to the student. It is not “out of print.” I compared the Australian marks on small stones and on rock walls, and other “fixtures in the landscape,” with the markings on Scottish boulders, rock walls, cists, and so forth, and also with the marks on the disputed objects. I added “the startling analogy between Australia and old Scottish markings saute aux yeux,” and I spoke truth. Down to the designs which represent footmarks, the analogy is “startling,” is of great interest, and was never before made the subject of comment.
I said that we could not know whether or not the markings, in Scotland and Australia, had the same meaning.
As to my opinion, then, namely that we cannot say what is the significance of an archaic pattern in Scotland, or elsewhere, though we may know the meaning assigned to it in Central Australia, there can no longer be any mistake. I take the blame of having misled Dr. Munro by an unguarded expression in a letter to the Society of Scottish Antiquaries, [67] saying that, if the disputed objects were genuine, they implied the survival, on Clyde, “of a singularly archaic set of ritual and magical ideas,” namely those peculiar to the Arunta and Kaitish tribes of Central Australia. But that was a slip of the pen, merely.
This being the case, I need not reply to arguments of Dr. Munro (pp. 248-250) against an hypothesis which no instructed person could entertain, beginning with the assumption that from an unknown centre, some people who held Arunta ideas migrated to Central Australia, and others to the Clyde. Nobody supposes that the use of identical or similar patterns, and of stones of superstitious purpose, implies community of race. These things may anywhere be independently evolved, and in different regions may have quite different meanings, if any; while the use of “charm stones” or witch stones, is common among savages, and survives, in England and Scotland, to this day. The reader will understand that I am merely applying Mr. E. B. Tylor’s method of the study of “survivals in culture,” which all anthropologists have used since the publication of Mr. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, thirty-five years ago.
What is admitted to be true of survivals in the Family among the Picts may also be true as to other survivals in art, superstition, and so forth. I would, therefore, compare the disputed Clyde objects with others analogous to them, of known or unknown purpose, wheresoever they may be found. I am encouraged in this course by observing that it is pursued, for example, by the eminent French archaeologist, Monsieur Cartailhac, in his book Les Ages Préhistoriques de France et d’Espagne. He does not hesitate, as we shall see, to compare peculiar objects found in France or Spain, with analogous objects of doubtful purpose, found in America or the Antilles. M. Cartailhac writes that, to find anything resembling certain Portuguese “thin plaques of slate in the form of a crook, or crozier,” he “sought through all ethnographic material, ancient and modern.” He did find the parallels to his Portuguese objects, one from Gaudeloup, the other either French, or from the Antilles. [69]
Sir John Evans, again, compares British with Australian objects; in fact the practice is recognised. I therefore intend to make use of this comparative method. On the other hand, Dr. Munro denies that any of my analogies drawn from remote regions are analogous, and it will be necessary to try to prove that they are,—that my Australian, American, Portuguese, and other objects are of the same kind, apparently, as some of the disputed relics of the Clyde.
If I succeed, one point will be made probable. Either the Clyde objects are old, or the modern maker knew much more of archaeology than many of his critics and used his knowledge to direct his manufacture of spurious things; or he kept coinciding accidentally with genuine relics of which he knew nothing.
Again, I must push my method beyond that of Dr. Munro, by considering the subject of Magic, in relation to perforated and other stones, whether inscribed with designs, or uninscribed. Among the disputed objects are many such stones, and it is legitimate for me to prove, not only that they occur in many sites of ancient life, but that their magical uses are still recognised, or were very recently recognised in the British Folk-lore of to-day.
A superstition which has certainly endured to the nineteenth century may obviously have existed among the Picts, or whoever they were, of the crannog and broch period on Clyde. The only a priori objection is the absence of such objects among finds made on British soil, but our discoveries cannot be exhaustive: time may reveal other examples, and already we have a few examples, apart from the objects in dispute.
Dr. Munro classifies the disputed objects as Weapons, Implements, “Amulets” or Pendants, Cup-and-Ring Stones, “Human Figurines or Idols.”
For reasons of convenience, and because what I heard about group 3, the “amulets or pendants” first led me into this discussion, I shall here first examine them. Dr. Munro reproduces some of them in one plate (xv. p. 228). He does not say by what process they are reproduced; merely naming them . . . “objects of slate and stone from Dumbuck.”
Dr. Munro describes the “amulets” or “pendants” thus:
“The largest group of objects (plate xv.) consists of the so-called amulets or pendants of stone, shale, and shell, some fifteen to twenty specimens of which have been preserved and recorded as having been found on the different stations, viz., three from Dunbuie (exclusive of a few perforated oyster shells), eleven from Dumbuck, and one from Langbank. Their ornamentation is chiefly of the cup-and-ring order, only a few having patterns composed of straight lines. Some of them are so large as to be unfit to be used as amulets or pendants, such, for example, as that represented by no. 14, which is 9 inches long, 3½ inches broad, and ½ inch thick. The ornamentation consists of a strongly incised line running downwards from the perforation with small branch lines directed alternately right and left. Any human being, who would wear this object, either as an ornament or religious emblem, would be endowed with the most archaic ideas of decorative art known in the history of human civilisation. Yet we can have no doubt that the individual who manufactured it, if he were an inhabitant of any of the Clyde sites, was at the same time living in a period not devoid of culture, and was in possession of excellent cutting implements, most likely of iron, with which he manipulated wood, deer-horn, and other substances. These objects are nearly all perforated, as if intended for suspension, but sometimes, in addition to this, there is a large central hole around which there is always an ornamentation, generally consisting of incised circles or semicircles, with divergent lines leading into small hollow points, the so-called cup-marks.”
I shall return to the theory that the stones were “ornaments”; meanwhile I proceed to the consideration of “cup-marks” on stones, large or small.
As to cup marks, or cupules, little basins styled also écuelles, now isolated, now grouped, now separate, now joined by hollowed lines, they are familiar on rocks, funeral cists, and so forth in Asia, Europe, and North America (and Australia), as M. Cartailhac remarks in reviewing Dr. Magni’s work on Cupped Rocks near Como. [73a] “Their meaning escapes us,” says M. Cartailhac.
These cups, or cupules, or écuelles occur, not only at Dumbuck, but in association with a Scottish crannog of the Iron age, admirably described by Dr. Munro himself. [73b] He found a polished celt, [73c] and a cupped stone, and he found a fragmentary block of red sandstone, about a foot in length, inscribed with concentric circles, surrounding a cup. The remainder of the stone, with the smaller part of the design, was not found.
Here, then, we have these archaic patterns and marks on isolated stones, one of them about 13 inches long, in a genuine Scottish crannog, of the genuine Iron age, while flint celts also occur, and objects of bronze. Therefore cup markings, and other archaic markings are not unknown or suspicious things in a genuine pile structure in Scotland. Why, then, suspect them at Dumbuck? At Dumbuck the cups occur on a triangular block of sandstone, 14½ inches long and 4 inches thick. Another cupped block is of 21½ inches by 16½. [74]
No forger brought these cupped stones in his waistcoat pocket.
We have thus made good the point that an isolated cupped stone, and an isolated stone inscribed with concentric circles round a cup, do occur in a crannog containing objects of the stone, bronze, and iron ages. The meaning, if any, of these inscribed stones, in the Lochlee crannog, is unknown. Many of the disputed objects vary from them in size, while presenting examples of archaic patterns. Are they to be rejected because they vary in size?
We see that the making of this class of decorative patterns, whether they originally had a recognised meaning; or whether, beginning as mere decorations, perhaps “schematistic” designs of real objects, they later had an arbitrary symbolic sense imposed upon them, is familiar to Australians of to-day, who use, indifferently, stone implements of the neolithic or of the palaeolithic type. We also know that “in a remote corner of tropical America,” the rocks are inscribed with patterns “typically identical with those engraved in the British rocks.” [75] These markings are in the country of the Chiriquis, an extinct gold-working neolithic people, very considerable artists, especially in the making of painted ceramics. The Picts and Scots have left nothing at all approaching to their pottery work.
These identical patterns, therefore, have been independently evolved in places most remote in space and in stage of civilisation, while in Galloway, as I shall show, I have seen some of them scrawled in chalk on the flag stones in front of cottage doors. The identity of many Scottish and Australian patterns is undenied, while I disclaim the opinion that, in each region, they had the same significance.
I have now established the coincidence between the markings of rocks in Australia, in tropical America, and in Scotland. I have shown that such markings occur, in Scotland, associated with remains, in a crannog, of the Age of Iron. They also occur on stones, large (cupped) and small, in Dumbuck. My next business is, if I can, to establish, what Dr. Munro denies, a parallelism between these disputed Clyde stones, and the larger or smaller inscribed stones of the Arunta and Kaitish, in Australia, and other small stones, decorated or plain, found in many ancient European sites. Their meaning we know not, but probably they were either reckoned ornamental, or magical, or both.
On Clyde (if the disputed things be genuine) we find decorated plaques or slabs of soft stone, of very various dimensions and shapes. In Australia some of these objects are round, many oval, others elongated, others thin and pointed, like a pencil; others oblong—while on Clyde, some are round, one is coffin-shaped, others are palette-shaped, others are pear-shaped (the oval tapering to one extremity), one is triangular, one is oblong. [77] In Australia, as on Clyde, the stones bear some of the archaic markings common on the rock faces both in Scotland and in Central Australia: on large rocks they are painted, in Australia, in Scotland they are incised. I maintain that there is a singularly strong analogy between the two sets of circumstances, Scottish and Australian; large rocks inscribed with archaic designs; smaller stones inscribed with some of these designs. Is it not so? Dr. Munro, on the other hand, asserts that there is no such parallelism.
But I must point out that there is, to some extent, an admitted parallelism. “The familiar designs which served as models to the Clyde artists”—“plain cups and rings, with or without gutter channels, spirals, circles, concentric circles, semicircles, horseshoe and harp-shaped figures, etc.,” occur, or a selection of them occurs, both on the disputed objects, and on the rocks of the hills. So Dr. Munro truly says (p. 260).
The same marks, plain cups, cups and rings, spirals, concentric circles, horseshoes, medial lines with short slanting lines proceeding from them, like the branches on a larch, or the spine of a fish, occur on the rocks of the Arunta hills, and also on plaques of stone cherished and called churinga (“sacred”) by the Arunta. [78] Here is what I call “parallelism.”
Dr. Munro denies this parallelism.
There are, indeed, other parallelisms with markings other than those of the rocks at Auchentorlie which Dr. Munro regards as the sources of the faker’s inspiration. Thus, on objects from Dumbuck (Munro, plate xv. figs, 11 and 12), there are two “signs”: one is a straight line, horizontal, with three shorter lines under it at right angles, the other a line with four lines under it. These signs “are very frequent in Trojan antiquities,” and on almost all the “hut urns” found “below the lava at Marino, near Albano, or on ancient tombs near Corneto.” Whatever they mean, (and Prof. Sayce finds the former of the two “signs” “as a Hittite hieroglyph,”) I do not know them at Auchentorlie. After “a scamper among the surrounding hills,” the faker may have passed an evening with Dr. Schliemann’s Troja (1884, pp. 126, 127) and may have taken a hint from the passages which have just been cited. Or he may have cribbed the idea of these archaic markings from Don Manuel de Góngora y Martinez, his Antigüedades Pre-históricas de Andalucía (Madrid, 1868, p. 65, figures 70, 71). In these Spanish examples the marks are, clearly, “schematised” or rudimentary designs of animals, in origin. Our faker is a man of reading. But, enfin, the world is full of just such markings, which may have had one meaning here, another there, or may have been purely decorative. “Race” has nothing to do with the markings. They are “universally human,” though, in some cases, they may have been transmitted by one to another people.
The reader must decide as to whether I have proved my parallelisms, denied by Dr. Munro, between the Clyde, Australian, and other markings, whether on rocks or on smaller stones. [80a]
It suffices me to have tried to prove the parallelism between Australian and Clyde things, and to record Dr. Munro’s denial thereof—“I unhesitatingly maintain that there is no parallelism whatever between the two sets of objects.” [80b]
It must be kept in mind that churinga, “witch stones,” “charm stones,” or whatever the smaller stones may be styled, are not necessarily marked with any pattern. In Australia, in Portugal, in Russia, in France, in North America, in Scotland, as we shall see, such stones may be unmarked, may bear no inscription or pattern. [81] These are plain magic stones, such as survive in English peasant superstition.
In Dr. Munro’s Ancient Lake Dwellings of Europe, plain stone discs, perforated, do occur, but rarely, and there are few examples of pendants with cupped marks. Of these two, as being cupped pendants, might look like analogues of the disputed Clyde stones, but Dr. Munro, owing to the subsequent exposure of the “Horn Age” forgeries, now has “a strong suspicion that he was taken in” by the things. [82a]
To return to Scottish stones.
In Mr. Graham Callander’s essay on perforated stones, [82b] he publishes an uninscribed triangular stone, with a perforation, apparently for suspension. This is one of several such Scottish stones, and though we cannot prove it, may have had a superstitious purpose. Happily Sir Walter Scott discovered and describes the magical use to which this kind of charm stone was put in 1814. When a person was unwell, in the Orkney Isles, the people, like many savages, supposed that a wizard had stolen his heart. “The parties’ friends resort to a cunning man or woman, who hangs about the [patient’s] neck a triangular stone in the shape of a heart.” [82c] This is a thoroughly well-known savage superstition, the stealing of the heart, or vital spirit, and its restoration by magic.
This use of triangular or heart-shaped perforated stones was not inconsistent with the civilisation of the nineteenth century, and, of course, was not inconsistent with the civilisation of the Picts. A stone may have magical purpose, though it bears no markings. Meanwhile most churinga, and many of the disputed objects, have archaic markings, which also occur on rock faces.
Dr. Munro next reproduces two wooden churinga (churinga irula), as being very unlike the Clydesdale objects in stone [84a] (figures 5, 6). They are: but I was speaking of Australian churinga nanja, of stone. A stone churinga [84b] presented, I think, by Mr. Spencer through me to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries (also reproduced by Dr. Munro), is a much better piece of work, as I saw when it reached me, than most of the Clyde things. “The Clyde amulets are,” says Dr. Munro, “neither strictly oval,” (nor are very many Australian samples,) “nor well finished, nor symmetrical, being generally water-worn fragments of shale or clay slate. . . .” They thus resemble ancient Red Indian pendants.
As to the art of the patterns, the Australians have a considerable artistic gift; as Grosse remarks, [85a] while either the Clyde folk had less, or the modern artists had not “some practical artistic skill.” But Dr. Munro has said that any one with “some practical artistic skill” could whittle the Clyde objects. [85b] He also thinks that in one case they “disclose the hand of one not altogether ignorant of art” (p. 231).
Let me put a crucial question. Are the archaic markings on the disputed objects better, or worse, or much on a level with the general run of such undisputably ancient markings on large rocks, cists, and cairns in Scotland? I think the art in both cases is on the same low level. When the art on the disputed objects is more formal and precise, as on some shivered stones at Dunbuie, “the stiffness of the lines and figures reminds one more of rule and compass than of the free-hand work of prehistoric artists.” [85c] The modern faker sometimes drew his marks “free-hand,” and carelessly; sometimes his regularities suggest line and compass.
Now, as to the use of compasses, a small pair were found with Late Celtic remains, at Lough Crew, and plaques of bone decorated by aid of such compasses, were also found, [85d] in a cairn of a set adorned with the archaic markings, cup and ring, concentric circles, medial lines with shorter lines sloping from them on either side, and a design representing, apparently, an early mono-cycle!
For all that I know, a dweller in Dunbuie might have compasses, like the Lough Crew cairn artist.
If I have established the parallelism between Arunta churinga nanja and the disputed Clyde “pendants,” which Dr. Munro denies, we are reduced to one of two theories. Either the Picts of Clyde, or whoever they were, repeated on stones, usually small, some of the patterns on the neighbouring rocks; or the modern faker, for unknown reasons, repeated these and other archaic patterns on smaller stones. His motive is inscrutable: the Australian parallels were unknown to European science,—but he may have used European analogues. On the other hand, while Dr. Munro admits that the early Clyde people might have repeated the rock decorations “on small objects of slate and shale,” he says that the objects “would have been, even then, as much out of place as surviving remains of the earlier Scottish civilisation as they are at the present day.” [86]
How can we assert that magic stones, or any such stone objects, perforated or not, were necessarily incongruous with “the earlier Scottish civilisation?” No civilisation, old or new, is incapable of possessing such stones; even Scotland, as I shall show, can boast two or three samples, such as the stone of the Keiss broch, a perfect circle, engraved with what looks like an attempt at a Runic inscription; and another in a kind of cursive characters.
If “incongruous with the earlier Scottish civilisation” the use of “charm stones” is not incongruous with the British civilisation of the nineteenth century.
In the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries (Scot.) (1902-1903, p. 166 et seq.) Mr. Graham Callander, already cited, devotes a very careful essay to such perforated stones, circular or triangular, or otherwise shaped, found in the Garioch. They are of slate, or “heather stone,” and of various shapes and sizes. Their original purpose is unknown. The perforation, or cup not perforated, is sometimes in the centre, in a few cases in “near the end.” Mr. Graham Callander heard of a recent old lady in Roxburghshire, who kept one of these stones, of irregularly circular shape, behind the door for luck. [88] “It was always spoken of as a charm,” though its ancient maker may have intended it for some prosaic practical use.
I take the next example that comes to hand.
“Thin flat oolite stones, having a natural perforation, are found in abundance on the Yorkshire coast. They are termed “witch stones,” and are tied to door keys, or suspended by a string behind the cottage door, “to keep witches out.” [89] “A thin flat perforated witch stone,” answers to an uninscribed Arunta churinga; “a magic thing,” and its use survives in Britain, as in Yorkshire and Roxburghshire. We know no limit to the persistence of survival of superstitious things, such as magic stones. This is the familiar lesson of Anthropology and of Folk Lore, and few will now deny the truth of the lesson.
I take another example of modern survival in magic. Dr. Munro, perhaps, would think wooden churinga, used for magical ends, “incongruous with the earlier Scottish civilisation.” But such objects have not proved to be incongruous with the Scottish civilisation of the nineteenth century.
The term churinga, “sacred,” is used by the Arunta to denote not only the stone churinga nanja, a local peculiarity of the Arunta and Kaitish, but also the decorated and widely diffused elongated wooden slats called “Bull Roarers” by the English. These are swung at the end of a string, and produce a whirring roar, supposed to be the voice of a supernormal being, all over Australia and elsewhere.
I am speaking of survivals, and these wooden churinga, at least, survive in Scotland, and, in Aberdeenshire they are, or were lately called “thunner spells” or “thunder bolts.” “It was believed that the use of this instrument during a thunderstorm saved one from being struck by the thunner bolt.” In North and South America the bull roarer, on the other hand, is used, not to avert, but magically to produce thunder and lightning. [91] Among the Kaitish thunder is caused by the churinga of their “sky dweller,” Atnatu.
Wherever the toy is used for a superstitious purpose, it is, so far, churinga, and, so far, modern Aberdeenshire had the same churinga irula as the Arunta. The object was familiar to palaeolithic man.
I have made it perfectly certain that magic stones, “witch stones,” “charm stones,” and that churinga irula, wooden magical slats of wood, exist in Australia and other savage regions, and survive, as magical, into modern British life. The point is beyond doubt, and it is beyond doubt that, in many regions, the stones, and the slats of wood, may be inscribed with archaic markings, or may be uninscribed. This will be proved more fully later. Thus Pictish, like modern British civilisation, may assuredly have been familiar with charm stones. There is no a priori objection as to the possibility.
Why should Pictish stones not be inscribed with archaic patterns familiar to the dwellers among inscribed rocks, perhaps themselves the inscribers of the rocks? Manifestly there is no a priori improbability. I have seen the archaic patterns of concentric circles and fish spines, (or whatever we call the medial line with slanting side lines,) neatly designed in white on the flag stones in front of cottage doors in Galloway. The cottagers dwelt near the rocks with similar patterns on the estate of Monreith, but are not likely to have copied them; the patterns, I presume, were mere survivals in tradition.
The Picts, or whoever they were, might assuredly use charm stones, and the only objection to the idea that they might engrave archaic patterns on them is the absence of record of similarly inscribed small stones in Britain. The custom of using magic stones was not at all incongruous with the early Pictish civilisation, which retained a form of the Family now long outworn by the civilisation of the Arunta. The sole objection is that a silentio, silence of archaeological records as to inscribed small stones. That is not a closer of discussion, nor is the silence absolute, as I shall show.
Moreover, the appearance of an unique and previously unheard-of set of inscribed stones, in a site of the usual broch and crannog period, is not invariably ascribed to forgery, even by the most orthodox archaeologists. Thus Sir Francis Terry found unheard-of things, not to mention “a number of thin flat circular discs of various sizes” in his Caithness brochs. In Wester broch “the most remarkable things found” were three egg-shaped quartzite pearls “having their surface painted with spots in a blackish or blackish-brown pigment.” He also found a flattish circular disc of sandstone, inscribed with a duck or other water-fowl, while on one side was an attempt, apparently, to write runes, on the other an inscription in unknown cursive characters. There was a boulder of sandstone with nine cup marks, and there were more painted pebbles, the ornaments now resembling ordinary cup marks, now taking the shape of a cross, and now of lines and other patterns, one of which, on an Arunta rock, is of unknown meaning, among many of known totemic significance.
Dr. Joseph Anderson compares these to “similar pebbles painted with a red pigment” which M. Piette found in the cavern of Mas d’Azil, of which the relics are, in part at least, palaeolithic, or “mesolithic,” and of dateless antiquity. In L’Anthropologie (Nov. 1894), Mr. Arthur Bernard Cook suggests that the pebbles of Mas d’Azil may correspond to the stone churinga nanja of the Arunta; a few of which appear to be painted, not incised. I argued, on the contrary, that things of similar appearance, at Mas d’Azil: in Central Australia: and in Caithness, need not have had the same meaning and purpose. [95a]
It is only certain that the pebbles of the Caithness brochs are as absolutely unfamiliar as the inscribed stones of Dumbuck. But nobody says that the Caithness painted pebbles are forgeries or modern fabrications. Sauce for the Clyde goose is not sauce for the Caithness gander. [95b]
The use of painted pebbles and of inscribed stones, may have been merely local.
In Australia the stone churinga are now, since 1904, known to be local, confined to the Arunta “nation,” and the Kaitish, with very few sporadic exceptions in adjacent tribes. [95c]
The purely local range of the inscribed stones in Central Australia, makes one more anxious for further local research in the Clyde district and south-west coast.