On four leaf and lozenge-shaped flint javelin-heads, from an oval barrow near Stonehenge : and on the leaf-shaped type of flint arrow-head, and its connection with long barrows / by John Thurnam.

  • Thurnam, John, 1810-1873.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On four leaf and lozenge-shaped flint javelin-heads, from an oval barrow near Stonehenge : and on the leaf-shaped type of flint arrow-head, and its connection with long barrows / by John Thurnam. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    respectively. The fourth is of a rhomboidal lozenge form, and is larger than any of the others, being more than 3| inches long, and about 1J inch broad. All, with great pains and skill, have been chipped into form, both at the edges and on the surfaces. The central part has been left moderately thick (quarter of an inch), apparently for strength. This is especially the case in those of leaf shape. That of lozenge form is thinner and more delicate. I suppose these objects to have been the heads of javelins and not of arrows, from their size ; their average length being twice that of the barbed flint arrow-heads. There can at least be but little doubt that the}7 formed part of the warlike equipment of some ancient Briton. Is there any sufficient reason why the missile weapons or javelins (“tela”) with which Caesar repeatedly tells us the Britons opposed the advance of the legionaries through the south of the island, (B.G. lib. iv. c. 24, 26, 32, 33), may not in many instances have been tipped with flints; so admirably fashioned for the purpose as these are ? Objects of this description have very rarely been found in barrows, and never before, so far as I know, in this part of England.1 Out of the large number of more than four hundred barrows excavated bj7 Sir Richard Hoare and his friends, and described in “Ancient Wilts,” I do not find that a single specimen was obtained, and there is not one in the Museum at Stourhead. Examples, however, do exist in collections—apparently casual finds; and there are figures of such in Sir W. Wilde’s Catalogue of Antiquities of Royal Irish Academy, p. 22, fig. 22, 23, 25), and by Mr. Franks, in Ilorce Ferales, (p. 135, pi. ii. fig. 39, 41, 42). These, however, are none of them quite similar in form to the specimens from the oval barrow of Winterbourne Stoke, to which also they are inferior in beauty. 1 Since this was written, I have received “ The Celtic Tumuli of Dorset,” by Charles Warne, F S.A. In this volume (errata, p. 15; comp p. 16, 27,) is a woodcut of four leaf-shaped flat arrow or javelin heads, from an oblong bar- row on Pistle Down, Dorset, opened by Dr. Wake Smart in 1828. The coinci- dence with my Winterbourn Stoke discovery is not a little curious. Dr. Smart in- forms me that the tumulus was of “ no great height, and had nothing in common with the true Long Barrow, and only deviated from the ordinary type of Round- Barrow by presenting an oval or somewhat oblong shape.” It was doubtless one of those I have distinguished as Oval Barrows.