Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 11.djvu/150

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120
ON THE STONE WEDGES OF JAVA.

shaped wedges, wrought with three surfaces, the inner broad and somewhat hollow, and the two outer surfaces narrower, more or less convex, and meeting one another so that the transverse section is a triangle (See Diagram e, d and e), the base of which coincides with the broad inner surface, and the sides with the two narrower outer surfaces. The wedge becomes broader from top to bottom, or towards the edge, and this sharp part of the inner surface (e, a) being ground down towards the more or less obliquely worked outer surfaces (e, b), ends in a point, where the latter meet (e, c), by which means the tool serves as a chisel. Among the stone implements with which we are acquainted in the North of Europe, we find the greatest resemblance to these last-mentioned objects in the gouge, or hollow chisel, which, however, is distinguished from the Javanese implements by not being trilateral, but rather rounded, and not forming a point, but a curve.

Archaeological Journal, Volume 11, 0150.png

Class III. Diagram d.
(Length of the original, 31/4 inches.)

The wedges of this fourth class, as well as the curved wedges of the second class (c, b), exhibit a marked deviation from any others which have hitherto come to our knowledge, and seem peculiar to Java as distinguished from those which North Europe, Asia, and North and Central America have supplied. If, therefore, we find these characteristic peculiarities in the stone weapons and implements discovered on the peninsula of India, or found elsewhere