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IX.—Further Observations on Prehistoric Man in Jersey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

R.R. Marett
R.R. Marett
Affiliation:
Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford
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This paper is intended to supplement, and in the light of fuller information to modify, the communication regarding recent archaeological discoveries in Jersey that I had the honour to lay before the Society of Antiquaries last year. The new matter relates to two sets of excavations undertaken by the Societe Jersiaise, in both of which I was privileged to take part. Neither site was altogether virgin. But, whereas the cave known as La Cotte de St. Brelade could be counted on as rich in objects of antiquarian interest, Green Island, or, to call it by its more ancient and authentic name, La Motte, had yielded little, at all events of late. Fifty years ago a human cranium of ancient appearance had been found low down in its basement of loess or brick-earth; but since that time nothing more had come to light here, except a rough neolithic implement or two from the higher levels of the islet. Even now, perhaps, it can scarcely vie with the St. Brelade's cave as an attraction to the student of prehistorics; for I am afraid that he is apt to rate the neolithic in general all too cheaply, owing to the glamour that enshrouds the more remote, if hardly more inscrutable, palaeolithic. Yet, as the sequel will show, La Motte has at any rate given birth to a crop of problems, which, I venture to think, may prove of more than local importance.

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Research Article
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Archaeologia , Volume 63 , 1912 , pp. 203 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1912

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References

page 204 note 1 See the Report, signed by Messrs. E. T. Nicolle and J. Sinel, and dated September 20, 1911, printed in 37° Bulletin de la Société jersiaise, 213 f. I need hardly say that it has been of the greatest use to me in drawing up the present statement; for which, however, the sole responsibility is mine.

page 205 note 1 No typological difference was to be discerned between the implements occurring severally above and below the block in question. It may be worth noting, however, that an implement figured in my former paper (Archaeologia, lxii. 461, pl. lxvii. 1, 3rd row, no. 1), which does seem to be of a rather peculiar type, came from a spot level with the top of this stone, and but a few feet away from it.

page 205 note 2 See (Sir) Prestwich, J., Phil. Trans. Royal Soc, vol. 184 (1893), A. 903.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 205 note 3 See Rutot, A., Bull. Soc. beige de Géol., xxiv (1910), 70.Google Scholar

page 207 note 1 For fuller details, see Dr. Keith's paper in Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, vol. 46 (1911), p. 12Google ScholarPubMed ; reprinted, with an additional note, in 37eBull. Soc. jers., 223.

page 208 note 1 At the present day the nearest trees are about half a mile away from the exposed headland into which the cave burrows.

page 209 note 1 La Motte is one of the regular French folk-names for an artificial mound or barrow, but the word is also applied to any natural eminence: see Manuel des Recherches préhistoriques: public par la Societe préliistorique de France (1906), 288Google Scholar . The neolithic inhabitants of Jersey had a predilection for high places as burying grounds, to judge by the situation of most of the dolmens; though Ville-es-Nouaux is almost at shore-level, and Le Dicq, though stated by Falle, (Caesarea (1734), 258 n.)Google Scholar to be built on ‘an artificial rising ground,’ cannot have stood much higher.

page 209 note 2 See the diagram, p. 227. A quarter of a mile south of the dolmen, in the orchard of Mr. A. P. Le Jeune, is a fine menhir, standing some 9 ft. above the ground, which is known as Blanche Pierre or La Dame Blanche. Those who believe that menhirs served in some cases as pointers to places of burial will perhaps see in this stone a connecting-link between the dolmen of Mont Ube and the graves of La Motte. A straight line drawn from the dolmen over the menhir falls, however, a little to the east of La Motte, and almost touches the Rocque Berg, or Witches' Rock, a striking outcrop of granite, pitted with weatherings not unlike hoof-marks, which may well have appealed to the fancy of neolithic man, as it certainly did to that of a later age.

page 210 note 1 See the section given in my article, Archaeologia, lxii. 473.Google Scholar

page 211 note 1 The indications of a raised beach below Mont Ube (see my paper, Archaeologia, lxii. 470Google Scholar) are at best slight; whilst, if such it be, there is no reason why it should not be connected with the mid-level (60-70 ft) raised beach visible a little further east on the St. Clement's main road.

page 211 note 2 The illustrations (plate xxx) will give a better idea than any verbal description of what was to be seen.

page 211 note 3 The Societé Jersiaise just at this time, by the kind gift of Lady Tilden and of Mr. Lionel Mourant, Seigneur of Samares, became likewise the proprietors and custodians of the dolmen on Mont Ubé.

page 212 note 1 All the graves that I helped to open had merely a clay floor, but it appears that nos. 1–4 were more or less paved; though I suspect that, in the reconstructions of them to be seen in the courtyard of the Society's Museum, this feature has been somewhat over-emphasized, in order to render the work as solid and permanent as possible.

page 213 note 1 Intentional orientation is said by S. P. Oliver (‘Report on the Present State and Condition of Prehistoric Remains in the Channel Islands,’ Journal of the Ethnological Society, Ap. 1870, 59) to be exhibited by all the dolmens of the Channel Islands; i.e. so that the entrance is to the east and the chambered end to the west. In Jersey Le Couperon and Ville-es-Nouaux lie almost due E.-W., Faldouet ESE.-WNW., and Mont Ubé SE.-NW.; Mont de la Ville and Les Monts Grantez are likewise stated to have lain more or less E.-W., or, as the French archaeologists say, Levant-Couchant.

page 214 note 1 A good many of the other graves contained some of these small sherds, the tale of them amount ing to about two dozen. In no case was there any reason to think that an entire vessel had been placed within the grave and had subsequently collapsed. Either, then, the broken pieces slipped in by accident, or else were introduced as fragments for ceremonial reasons.

page 215 note 1 The precarious position in which nos. 1–4 were situated, viz. across the neck of the little promontory, forbade all hope of preserving them if left in situ. The stones were therefore removed, after photographing their position and affixing a number to each of them, to the courtyard of the Museum of the Societe Jersiaise. Here they have been most successfully re-erected so as to furnish models of the graves as they appeared at the moment of opening them.

page 216 note 1 Sollas, W. J., Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives(1911), 372.Google Scholar

page 216 note 2 M. Le Rouzic laid special emphasis on the fact that both at La Motte (no. 2) and at Beker-Noz a small grave occurs beneath one of the larger type. It turns out, however, that the two cases are not strictly parallel. In the Brittany example, the top of the capstone of the small tomb exactly coincides with the floor of the larger one; and, moreover, the former underlies a corner of the latter transversely, so that we seem to have a simple case of superimposition. In the Jersey example, on the other hand, the upper grave, if such it be, was probably the earlier (see p. 214). In any case, these collocations must surely be regarded as accidental, rather than as forming an intentional feature of the burial system in vogue.

page 216 note 2 See Dechelette, J., Manuel d'Archcologie préhistorique celiique et gallo-rotnaine, vol. i (1908), 161 f.Google Scholar , where both Thinic and Beker-Noz are referred to, the latter being apparently treated as neolithic also. M. F. Gaillard, who excavated the graves at Thinic in August, 1883, is strongly of opinion that they belong to the age of the dolmens. Amongst other arguments, he brings forward the fact that, in all the cist-burials of this type which he has examined, the skeleton is laid on its side, with bent legs and arms turned towards the upper part of the body, in exactly the same crouched position which he has himself frequently observed in dolmen-burials (L'Astronomie préhistorique, 106-14). M. E. Cartailhac, speaking of Thinic, notes that we are here in the presence of a very old rite, since the mode of interment is one with that of quaternary times, as seen, for instance, at Laugerie and Mentone (La France prehistorique, 277). It is doubtless some such consideration as this that leads M. P. du Chatelier to declare that, after cavern-burials, these cist-burials constitute the most ancient specimens of the sepulchral remains of the age of polished stone (Les époques prehistoriques et gauloises dans le Finistcre, 17) M. G de Mortillet, however, on the strength of the associated artefacts, classes the Thinic graves as ‘Robenhausian’, that is, as belonging to the more advanced neolithic; noting in passing that Thinic, now an islet standing off a little way from the mainland exactly as La Motte does, must have been part of terra finna in neolithic times ( L'Homme, 1884, 422–4Google Scholar ; cf. Le Préhistorique, 597).

page 217 note 1 The only cairn (as distinguished from the numerous mounds, some of them largely composed of rubble, that enclose dolmens) hitherto discovered in Jersey is the small one found at Ville-es-Nouaux half-way between the allée couverte and the cromlech (9 Bull. Soc.jers., 429). Apparently it yielded nothing when excavated in 1883.

page 218 note 2 Dry-walling occurs in association with several of the Jersey dolmens. On the east side of Faldouet portions of two low walls of rubble, apparently forming a double circle round it, were brought to light (Oliver, o.c, 60; cf. 36eBull. Soc.jers., 67). Les Cinq Pierres was surrounded by a circular band of rubble 2 ft. high and 6 to 8 ft. broad (ier Bull. Soc. jers., 8); and the Hougue at Noirmont likewise showed an encircling wall of stones and earth, well put together, 18 in. high and 2 ft. thick (7e Bull. Soc.jer., 325). In these cases the object of the wall was probably to mark the limits of the sacred enceinte, being thus equivalent to the peristalith of large blocks such as we have at Faldouet and elsewhere. Or the dry-walling may form an integral part of the megalithic structure itself. Thus at Beauport the chamber was bounded partly by an outcrop of the natural rock and partly by a compact wall of rubble, about 2 ft. high, with a backing somewhat similar to that found at La Motte {f Bull. Soc.jers., 91); the Table des Marthes, a single stone dolmen, rested on pillars of rubble ( Ahier, J. P., Tableaux historiqucs de la Civilisation á Jersey (1852), 34Google Scholar ; and at Les Monts Grantez the five capstones were supported by dry-walling ( British Press and Jersey Times, June 1, 1870)Google Scholar.

page 218 note 1 See Déchelette, , Manuel d'Archéologie, i. 411Google Scholar , section headed ‘Dolmens en maconnerie de pierres seches’.

page 218 note 2 The presence of a hearth in the immediate vicinity of sepulchral structures of the neolithic age is fairly common, and must be assigned to some ritual reason, such as the holding of a funeral feast. Human bones may easily find their way into such hearths (as one has done at La Motte), and this fact by itself is no sufficient proof that incineration was practised, much less that there was ceremonial cannibalism. See Dechelette, , Manuel d'Archeologie, i. 466.Google Scholar

page 219 note 1 Oliver, who knew Guernsey best, speaks of limpet-shells as almost universally met with in the dolmens of the Channel Islands (o. c, 64), and notes their absence at Ville-es-Nouaux as remarkable. Ican, however, find no specific mention of their occurrence in a Jersey dolmen except at Les Cinq Pierres (Ier Bull. Soc.jers., 8). It is, on the other hand, interesting to note that on the coast just opposite La Motte in 1813 an inroad of the sea revealed, at a depth of 12 to 15 ft. below the surface, fireplaces with charcoal in them, and ‘the scattered shells of limpets bearing the marks of fire’—in fact just such a midden as we have at La Motte ( Quale, T., General View of the Agriculture and Present State of the Islands on the Coast of Normandy (1815), 7).Google Scholar

page 219 note 2 The zoological identifications I owe to Mr. Sinel, who has been most generous in putting his rich store of observations and inferences at my disposal, as every other page might bear witness.

page 219 note 3 That some of the graves were more or less paved has already been noted. We get pavements n i association with the Jersey dolmens, for instance, at Ville-es-Nouaux (Oliver, o. c., 64), Les Cinq Pierres (ier Bull. Soc.jers., 7), Beauport (5e Bull. Soc.jers., 92), and Moye, La (5e Bull. Soc.jers., 212)Google Scholar ; and in Guernsey dolmens Mr. Lukis sometimes found several layers of interments separated by pavements of pebbles (Oliver, ib.).

page 220 note 1 See Archaeologia, Ixii. 472-3, and the two photographs, ib., pl. Ixx.

page 220 note 2 The notes and drawings have been handed over by Dr. Keith to the Société Jersiaise, and will, I hope, appear in full in their next Bulletin.

page 220 note 3 Not a man, as I ventured to suggest, judging from the rather rugged surface of the skull (Archaeologia, Ixii. 472).

page 221 note 1 It may be worth noticing in this context that the fragment of the roof of a skull from the dolmen of Les Cinq Pierres was examined by Dr. Keith when he visited Jersey, and pronounced by him to show signs of slight brachycephaly (estimated breadth, 146 mm.; length, less certain, about 175 mm.; cranial index, say, 80-83). It was likewise judged to be brachycephalic by the Rev. R. Bellis, one of the excavators of the dolmen; see 12e Bull. Soc.jers., 179. It may be noted that no other osseous remains have been recovered from the Jersey dolmens, with the exception of three skeletons, the skulls of which were apparently missing, found in 1848 at Faldouet in a side-cist (hence probably a secondary interment) and reburied elsewhere by their over-scrupulous discoverer: see Ahier, , o. c., 30Google Scholar . Incineration, not inhumation, seems to have been the rule.

page 221 note 2 Of course, the same or a very similar type of man existed in Europe in palaeolithic times, and some authorities would assign it even to the earlier pleistocene.

page 222 note 1 Yet the calotte was found on the north side of La Motte, whereas the graves occur on the south side, a matter of a few yards' distance, to be sure; and we satisfied ourselves by some excavation and a good deal of probing that no graves occur on the floor just above the place where the skull was found in the loess.

page 222 note 2 Very similar querns were found by the excavators at Ville-es-Nouaux, in the space between the cromlech and the allée couverte, and at Les Cinq Pierres, (9e Bull. Soc.jers., 428)Google Scholar . As regards the use to which the La Motte quern was subsequently put, Mr. Nicolle tells me that a Jersey fisherman was photographed the other day in the act of making a stone anchor of the very same size and shape.

page 224 note 1 See Chatelier, P. du, La Potene aux epoques préhistorique et gauloise en Armorique (1897), pl. viiGoogle Scholar , no. 8. As a matter of fact, the kitchen-midden is so near to the present surface that I should not have been surprised to find in it occasional potsherds of quite modern origin. Happily, thanks perhaps to the isolated position of La Motte, no such disturbing elements were there to add to our difficulties.

page 224 note 2 Compare du Chatelier, ib., p. 9. Mr. Reginald Smith tells me of another good parallel to this lug from a neolithic burial of La Rochette, Drome, and now at the British Museum (part of the Morel Collection, cf. Description de la Collection Leon Morel, 14).

page 225 note 1 The closest analogies in respect to pottery can be shown to exist between Brittany and Jersey, du Chatelier, ib., p. 10.

page 225 note 2 See my other paper, Archaeologia, lxii. 474. On July 29, 1912, whilst the present article was in the press, Mr. Sinel obtained from an excavation in Halkett Place, St. Heliers, several additional sherds found 6 ft. down in the lower peat, the most characteristic piece almost exactly matching in quality and ornamentation the largest of the fragments from La Motte given in pl. xxxiii.

page 227 note 1 See (Sir) Prestwich, J., Phil. Trans. Royal Soc, vol. 184 (1893), A, esp. 916–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Prestwich's theory has never, I believe, obtained much favour amongst experts. The American geologist, Wright, G. F. (Scientific Confirmations of Old Testament History 1907), 279Google Scholar , apparently accepts Prestwich's conclusions so far as La Motte goes, and gives a full description with a plan; but these, I suspect, have been simply taken over from Prestwich, and do not rest on first-hand observations of his own. The diagram here given is adapted from that of Prestwich, but seeks to do further justice to the details.

page 227 note 2 At the very base of the clay, and merging with the stones of the present beach, are some water-worn blocks which Prestwich is probably right in regarding as the remains of a low-level raised beach which was there before the deposition of the loess.

page 228 note 1 Archaeologia, lxii. 454, 476, 479.Google Scholar

page 228 note 2 Prestwich, ib., 914. If the boulders at the base of the clay at La Motte are to be regarded, with Prestwich, as a raised beach, they would have to be referred to a pre-Mousterian low-level submergence for which there is definite evidence, as I have shown in Archaeologia, lxii. 469, 476, 479.

page 228 note 3 See my paper, Archaeologia, lxii. 473-4, 477-9.Google Scholar

page 228 note 4 I understand from Mr. Sinel, who once lived in Samares Lane, viz. on the line between La Motte and Mont Ube, that a well sunk about 500 yards from La Motte showed a bed of shingle and sea-gravel at 12ft. below the surface; whilst further inland, about 800 yards from La Motte, the sinking of another well showed blue marine clay at about the same depth. Here we clearly have the bottom of the old channel. Some clay, as well as sand, overlaid the marine layer, but was such as might be ranked as more or less modern alluvium.

page 229 note 1 The graves may have been covered over with soil to a certain depth, though in that case we should have expected the clay on which they rest to have been used. But the extent and general character of the light-soil cap of La Motte absolutely precludes the notion of its being an artificial mound.

page 229 note 2 Quale, , o. c, 7 n.Google Scholar

page 229 note 1 John Poingdestre, at one time Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, writing about 1682 says: ‘Of late yeares within the memory of most men two great Rocks lying one behind the other in the Sea at a place called Le Hoc in St. Clements Parish, the neerest of which is seuered from the Land a Bow-shot at full sea, were ioyned to it, & serued many men yet aliue to drye Vraic upon’ (‘Caesarea, or a Discourse of the Island of Jersey,’ Soc. jers., Publication 10me, 75); whilst in 1781 the States of the Island were called upon to resist invasion, not only on the part of the French but likewise on the part of the sea at this same spot (‘Actes des 6tats de l'lsle de Jersey, 1781, Juin 18,’ Soc. jers., Pub. 1911). The masses of shells of Trochus umbilicatus (Mont.) and Littorina obtusata (L.) on the top of La Motte have been adduced as evidence by a learned conchologist, Mr. E. Duprey, to show that it must formerly have served as a drying-ground for seaweed, in the way that the adjacent outliers of the coast do now (12e Bull.Soc. jers. 221).

page 229 note 4 A sufficient proof that the submergence was gradual is that the trees of the forest-bed still stand where they grew. This fact in itself might have convinced the Abbé Manet that his épouvantable catastrophe of A.D. 709 was a fable (De I'état ancien et de I'état actuel de la bate du Mont-St.-Michel (1829), 10).

page 229 note 5 See the map, Archaeologia, lxii. 454.Google Scholar

page 229 note 6 Some good specimens of these ma be seen in the graves preserved in the Society's courtyard. We get water-worn blocks, by the way, in several of the Jersey dolmens, e.g. Pierres, Cinq (1er Bull. Soc. jers., 7)Google Scholar and Ville-és-Nouaux, (18e Bull. Soc. jers., 244)Google Scholar.

page 230 note 1 That the dolmens go back to the time of the forest-bed emergence is suggested by their occurrence below high sea-level in France. See, for instance, M. Baudouin, ‘Les Megalithes submerges des Cotes de Vendee,’ L'Homme prehistorique, i (1903), no. 5Google Scholar . Indeed, in the neighbourhood of La Motte there is more than one sporadic block amongst the rocks covered by the tide that looks as if it were a megalith. Thus Mr. Sinel has discovered what he takes to be a fallen menhir some 12 ft. long, at half-tide level about 250 yards south-east of the Table Rock at Le Dicq, the stone being of close-grained granite unlike that of the neighbouring rocks. Also at half-tide level a third of the way from the jetty of La Rocque to Seymour Tower there is an isolated block of conglomerate from the north-east corner of the Island, weighing about 15 tons, which is probably the capstone of a dolmen; though Pere Noury ( Géologie de Jersey (1886), 76Google Scholar ) thinks that it must have been dropped there out of a barge by some one who intended to build a grotto or decorate his garden with it!