There are signs too of a division of labour, as in modern manufacture, a large number of implements in the same stage of making being found together.

A good deal about the dwellings of New Stone man can be gathered from those built by primitive men at the present time, and from the remains of prehistoric lake-dwellings, the foundations of hut settlements, and the long barrows, or tombs, which were really houses built for the dead on the pattern of those intended for

the living. These tombs, which were probably built for chieftains, consist usually of a single roughly made stone chamber, often with a rounded entrance at one end, and approached by a passage, the whole covered with earth, as the Eskimo cover their winter houses at the present day. The barrow usually points east and west, the eastern end being broader and higher than the other. One excavated near Avebury was 336 feet long, 75 feet wide at the east end, and 40 feet wide at the west. All round the foot of the barrow there was originally a line of upright stones, the spaces between filled with dry walling, and the chamber and passage were roofed with stone slabs weighing about a ton each. Within the chamber were four long-headed skeletons, probably of the chiefs for whom the tomb was constructed, but others were found denoting that it had been opened from time to time for later burials. Cremation does

not seem to have been the practice at the beginning of the New Stone Age, but where a barrow has been reopened it sometimes contains bodies which have been burnt as well as bodies which have not. Another type of tomb was the dolmen (table-stone), a structure consisting of a large stone supported usually on three upright ones erected on the grave.

From "Child-Man in Britain," Ashford (Harrap)

It was not usual in early burials of this period to provide the dead with the things that had been useful or dear to them in life. Nevertheless we do find in barrows, perhaps as the result of many successive interments, flint celts (i.c. axes of chisel form), axe-hammers, javelin- and arrow-heads, implements of various kinds, food-bowls, beads, and pendants, and flint and iron pyrites for striking a light. The sacrifice entailed in burying these to a primitive people unencumbered by many possessions must have been due either to a reluctance to take from the dead the things that had

been peculiarly theirs, or to a desire to furnish them, when they awoke from their long sleep, with the means of resuming the existence they had known on earth. All care spent in burying the dead is in fact due to the belief in a life after death.

The hut sites of New Stone man's settlements may be found in many parts of England on dry, open ground that has never been ploughed. They are little circular pits, about four feet deep and about fifteen feet across the mouth. Digging through the deposits which have accumulated upon the prehistoric level we come to the black band, from three to thirty-six inches deep, of cinders and charcoal interspersed with bones, flint implements, and broken pottery, which is the hearth where the hut-dwellers cooked their food. Round the pit there was once a wall of earth, and from the middle of the floor rose a pole supporting a roof of thatch or branches. Often the number of hearths denotes quite a large settlement, and round the whole village there was probably an earthen wall and a ditch for defence. Near by, the dew-pond, where the cattle drink to-day, was made long ago by the pit-dwellers to hold rain and dew for the water-supply of themselves and their cattle.

Caverns and rock shelters still served sometimes for New Stone man, as they had done for his predecessors of the Old Stone Age. They represent the most primitive form of dwelling, the pit settlements a sort of middle stage, and the lake-dwellings that were constructed in many parts of Europe, but more especially in Switzerland, the greatest advance in house-building attained by the later users of stone.

Hippocrates, writing in the fifth century B.C. of the people of the Phasis, a marshy country subject to frequent floods, says that they live in houses of timber

and reeds built in the midst of the waters, and use boats made of a single tree trunk. Herodotus, also writing in

NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE POTTERY

the fifth century B.C., says that the people of Lake Prasias live in houses constructed on a platform supported by piles in the middle of the lake and approached from the land by a narrow bridge. Such were the lakedwellings of the New Stone Age, and such to-day are the settlements in the Gulf of Maracaibo, the estuaries

of the Orinoco and Amazon, and the pile-villages of New Guinea. The Rumelian fishermen of Lake Prasias still build their houses in this way, and in Switzerland the lake-dwellings continued in use right through the Bronze Age into the early Iron Age. There were fifty in Lake Neuchâtel, thirty-two in Constance,

A LAKE-VILLAGE
From "The Threshold of History," Hall (Harrap)

twenty-four in Geneva, and twenty on the Lake of Bienne, where the largest spread over an acre and was connected with the shore by a gangway 100 yards long and 40 feet wide.

The platform on which the houses were placed rested on piles driven into the bed of the lake, or sometimes on stacks of brushwood strengthened by piles, both piles and platform consisting of the unbarked trunks of trees. The walls, which were supported by posts, were of wattle and clay, the roof thatched with bark, straw, or rushes, and the floor of timber and clay. The hearth