The Antiquity and Function of Antler Axes and Adzes

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.