ABSTRACT
For reconstructing the life of forgotten, illiterate societies, archaeology offers the prehistorian an undigested mass of broken articles and ruined buildings—relics and monuments. The succeeding stages are all confined to a later geological epoch when the distribution of land and sea at least was much the same as it is to-day. In England, Beaker graves often contain other distinctive gear: bowmen’s wrist-guards, tanged-and-barbed arrowheads, flint daggers, and bronze knife-4aggers. The most conspicuous group is constituted by the sixty Gallic and vitrified forts. The classification into stages exhibits the succession of events. On the west, accordingly, intercourse between the isolated units of settlement has always been far easier by sea than by land. Obviously, the several provinces of the North Sea frontage too, in so far as they were connected in prehistoric times, were linked across the Firths of Forth, Tay, and Moray, rather than round them.
