They are brown, or black, in colour, and very generally have had rounded bottoms, from which it may be inferred that they were not intended to stand on tables, but were placed in hollows on the ground or floor. Sometimes they are ornamented with patterns in right lines or in dots.
The Neolithic Flint-Mines near Brandon.
The stone implements of the Palæolithic men were fashioned out of pebbles and boulders torn from the rocks by the elements, and ready to hand on the surface. The stones used by the Neolithic men for their implements were carefully sought beneath the ground. The flint out of which many of them have been manufactured was obtained by mining operations, carried out with great skill and ingenuity. Two of these mining centres in this country have been scientifically explored.
The series of workings at Grimes Graves, near Brandon, in Suffolk, explored by the Rev. W. Greenwell,[1] consists of shafts connected together by galleries from three to five feet high, which had been made in pursuit of a layer of flint good for manufacture. When the flint within reach was exhausted a new shaft was sunk close by, and a new set of galleries made; for the miners appear to have been ignorant of the use of timber to keep up the roof, and were therefore unable to work very far from the bottom of the shaft. The partially filled up shafts appear at the surface as circular depressions of the same form as the hut circles described above.[2] In the old workings the miners have left behind
