Headstone

“ The radial lines may have been intended for a halo of glory or a frilled cap, but, as will be seen by comparison, the whole thing is easily to be classed with the skull series.
It will be noticed that we have in this instance a form of headstone differing materially from those of later times, and wherever we find the rude incised figure we nearly always have the stone of this shape. Such homely memorials are distinguished in nearly every instance by dwarfishness and clumsiness. They are seldom more than 2 feet in height, and are often found to measure from 5 inches to 7 inches in thickness. ”

“ I had seen from the window where I stood the quick surprise with which she had come to a standstill at the sight of this stone, and I had caught the tremble in her usually steady voice as she made the inquiry I have mentioned above. I therefore hastened down and joined her before she had left the spot.
"You are wondering what this stone means," I observed, with an indifferent tone calculated to set her at her ease. Then suddenly, and with a changed voice and a secret look into her face, I added: "It is a headstone; a dead body lies here." ”

“ Aberdeen, 1800." The practice of carving on both faces of the headstone is very common in Scotland, [pg 90] and, so far as I have observed, in Scotland alone; but, strange as it may seem, Scotland and Ireland when they write gravestone inscriptions have one habit in common, that of beginning their epitaphs, not with the name of the deceased person, but with the name of the person who provides the stone. ”

“ No hedges or ditches to separate one owner's property from another's. To each little or big patch of land there is a white headstone with initials on it, as if somebody had hurriedly and unostentatiously been buried on the spot where he fell, killed in the Battle of the Vineyards, by a grape-shot. At first, seeing so many of these white headstones with initials on each one, I conclude that it is some peculiar French way of marking distances or laying out plots, and I find my conclusion is utterly erroneous. ”

“ In a short tour through Wales, in 1898, I found very few old headstones. Most of the memorials in the churchyards were constructed of slate, which abundant material is devoted to every conceivable purpose. There is a kind of clay-slate more durable than some of the native stones, and even the poorer slate which perisheth is lasting in comparison with the wooden planks which have been more or less adopted in many burial-places, but can never have been expected to endure more than a few brief years. ”

“ There are no headstones to the tombs, but every slab, in high relief of imperishable bronze fashioned by the skill of the most distinguished artists, [65] bears the coats-of-arms and devices of the civic noble who moulders beneath. ”

“ In confirmation of this theory is the fact that scarcely any headstones are discoverable of a date earlier than 1650, and whenever they have been left to their fate the veterans of 150 years have scarcely more than their heads above ground. ”

“ Yet it was a long time before churchyard interments became general, the inhabitants [pg 50] clinging to the Pagan habit of indiscriminate burial in their accustomed places. We hear nothing of headstones in the early days of Christianity, but there are occasionally found in certain localities inscribed stones which bear the appearance of rude memorials, and these have been regarded as relics of our National Church in its primitive state. ”

“ In few places are there so many and such artistic specimens of allegorical carvings on the headstones. The usual experience is to find one or two, seldom more than a dozen, of these inventions worth notice, and only in rare instances to light upon anything of the kind distinctly unique; but at Cheshunt there are more than a hundred varieties of sculptured design and workmanship, all the stones standing at the proper angle, and all in good condition.
FIG. 82.—AT CHESHUNT.
"To Mary Lee, died July, 1779, aged 49 years." ”

“ They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous tomb or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion. ”

“ Never but in one case have I discovered any article of European manufacture interred with the dead in whose honor the mound was clearly erected. Upon opening a small earth-mound on the Georgia coast, a few miles below Savannah, I found a clay vessel, several flint arrow-heads, a hand-axe of stone, and a portion of an old-fashioned sword deposited with the decayed bones of the skeleton. ”

“ Underneath the large stones lay the skeleton of a man, in the prime of life, and of fine proportions, apparently the sole occupant of the mound; who had been interred while enveloped in a skin of dark-red colour, the hairy surface of which had left many traces both upon the surrounding earth and upon the verdigris, or patina, coating; a bronze axe-shaped celt and dagger deposited with the skeleton. ”

“ The second class, or stone mounds, which are much more numerous than those of earth, differ but little from the others in their construction, except that the final additions to the mound were of stones instead of earth, and the stones about the circumference were flat and set up close together. A piece of quartz sometimes accompanies the bones, but no other relics are found. When the skeleton is deposited face down, as is usually the case, the skull is placed toward the south, or when in a sitting position, it faces the south, seeming in some cases to have been burned where it sat. ”

“ Other stones, such as ‘fired’ zircon, white sapphire, white topaz, and rock-crystal, may dazzle with brilliancy of light reflected from the surface or emitted from the interior, but none of them, like diamond, glow with mysterious gleams. No hint of colour, save perhaps a trace of the blue of steel, can be tolerated in stones of this category; above all is a touch of the jaundice hue of yellow abhorred. It taxes all the skill of the lapidary to assure that the disposition of the facets be such as to reveal the full splendour of the stone. ”

“ From the bottommost stone to the highest there is never a break in the perfect line; and the plain massive base of enormous quarried stones, some of which, they say, measure ten feet by three, passes into the light octagonal spire, covered with its curious coat of mail or fishes’ scales, by imperceptible and inevitable gradations. It is a triumph of sheer beauty of proportion unaided by the art of ornament. ”

“ To those who may wish to occupy themselves with this problem these explorations have furnished, as we have just seen, a vast collection of objects made of stone, bone, horn, wood, bronze, iron, and gold.
Among the stone objects are—querns, hammer-stones, whetstones, so-called sling-stones, a few cup-marked stones (one surrounded by concentric circles) , spindle-whorls, flint flakes, and [Pg 450] scrapers, a polished celt, a perforated axe-hammer head, portions of two polished circular discs, and some oval implements with a wrought hollowed surface on each side. ”

“ It exhibits a noble frame of the human species, bearing a skull with craniological developments of a highly favorable character. The face bones are elongated, with a long chin and symmetrical jaw, in which a full and fine set of teeth, above and below, are present. The skeletons in the upper vault, where the inscription stone was found, are nearly all destroyed.
It is a damp and gloomy repository, and exhibits in the roof and walls of the rotunda one of the most extraordinary sepulchral displays which the world affords. ”

“ Material: black slate and granite. Phillips Academy collection, Andover. The one to the right has a groove about the top. There are many of these in all museum collections, and I am sorry I cannot illustrate a large number of them. They range from the ordinary ridged form, unperforated, to long, slender, almost pick-shaped objects. They constitute a study in themselves. There have been many theories as to drilled and winged objects, but these pendant-shaped, “coffin”-shaped, and kindred stones not only defy classification, but there is absolutely no use to be assigned them. ”

“ The bones were distinctly traced by the colour of the earth, a small fragment of the skull being all that remained entire, and from the quantity of black mould which occupied the place of the body, resembling that which in other places was found to have resulted from the decomposition of wood, we may be led to suppose that the body was placed in a wooden chest. Another large quantity of similar black mould lay together in an elongated form on the left side of the body towards the foot of the grave. ”

“ Stone implements are more abundant than those of any other material in the altar-mounds and elsewhere. They include arrow and spear heads, knives, axes, hatchets, chisels, and other variously formed cutting instruments, with hammers and pestles. These are made of quartz and other hard varieties of stone, all belonging to the mound region except the obsidian. ”

“ They consist of the bronze cheek-ring of a bridle with part of the iron bit, and fragments of wood with iron rivets which were supposed to be the remains of a shield. The second grave was explored by Mr. Farrer in 1855. There is no record of the phenomena of the burial, but the objects found were sent to the museum. They are an iron knife, a small sickle of iron, an iron key of peculiar form (Fig. 49) , and a bronze mounting of a sheath or scabbard-end plated with silver, and ornamented with an engraved pattern suggesting
Fig. 50.—1. Sheath-mounting from a grave in Westray, Orkney. 2. ”

“ In the upper group I found a block of stone in form like a square Roman altar, on each face of which, within an oblong panel, is a rude relief representing a tree in a basket. Close by this stone is another, on which is carved a rude spiral or volute. In the upper group were also found seven small female figures, cut out of Maltese stone, a skull, a number of human bones, and some stones, shaped like women's breasts. ”

“ The flat stone is 47 feet in girth, and 12 in length, and its height from the ground is sufficient to enable a man on horseback to pass under it.—The aged monument, however, has at length bent beneath the hand of time, and fallen on its side. ”

“ Every joint of the stone is used, in like manner, as a thin black line, which the slightest sign of cement would spoil like a blot. And so proud is the builder of his fine jointing, and so fearless of any distortion or strain spoiling the adjustment afterwards, that in one place he runs his joint quite gratuitously through a bas-relief, and gives the keystone its only sign of preëminence by the minute inlaying of the head of the Lamb into the stone of the course above. ”

“ To these possible uses I may add that of fashioning other instruments of wood and bone, such as may yet be eventually discovered with them in the same beds of drift, as has already been the case in caves, with regard to those of bone or stag's horn.
Considering the number of the stone implements which have been collected, it seems at first sight singular that no other relics of those who made them have as yet been discovered. ”

“ Those of the bronze-period, on the other hand, have no circles of massive stones, no stone chambers, in general no large stones on the bottom, with the exception of stone cists placed together, which however are easily to be distinguished from the stone chambers; they consist, as a general rule, of mere earth, with heaps of small stones, and always present themselves to the eye as mounds of earth which, in a few very rare instances are surrounded by a small circle of stones, and contain relics of bodies which have been burned and placed in vessels of clay with objects of metal. ”

“ The slight mound, backed up with large stones, that now surrounds it, with a diameter of 73 to 74 feet, seems an enclosure more like that of Hob Hurst's House (woodcut No. 53) than the remains of a tumulus, and till some further evidence is adduced, we must be allowed to doubt whether any cap stone on legs was ever so treated. ”

“ If a stone be found on which is graven or figured an armed man or the draped figure of a virgin, bound with laurel and having a laurel branch in her hand, this stone is sacred and frees the wearer from all changes and haps of fortune.
When thou findest a stone on which is graven the figure of a man holding a scythe in his hand, a stone like this imparts strength and power to the wearer. Every day adds to his strength, courage and boldness. ”

“ The first is a stone of a long oval form like a human head, six feet high and thirty-five feet in circumference, the surface being covered with carved figures in demi-relief, which for some reason have been better preserved and present clearer outlines than other carvings at Quirigua. One of the most clearly defined of these sculptures represents a sitting female, whose legs and hands are wanting, but whose arms hang down to the ground. A prominent feature is her head-dress, sixteen inches high, the upper part of which is an idol's head crowned with a diadem. ”

“ Some examples have the edge of the blade near the shoulder ornamented with incisions or deep notches and others also have incisions at the extremity of the handle. These implements are as a class graceful and beautiful objects and represent a high type of aboriginal stone art. They are usually wrought of hard primitive rock and are generally highly polished. ”