Note 9 — Chapter I

The following passage from Sir John Evans’s Ancient Bronze Implements ... of Great Britain and Ireland, 1880, pp. 25-6, is instructive:—‘In company with Sir John Lubbock I was engaged in opening a grave [at Hallstatt] in which we had come to an interment of the Early Iron Age, accompanied by a socketed celt and spear-heads of iron, when amidst the bones I caught sight of a thin metallic disc of a yellowish colour which looked like a coin. Up to that time no coin had ever been found in any one of the many hundred graves which had been examined, and I eagerly picked up this disc. It proved to be a “sechser”, or six-kreutzer piece, with the date 1826, which by some means had worked its way down among the crevices in the stony ground.... Had this coin been of Roman date it might have afforded an argument for bringing down the date of the Hallstatt cemetery some centuries in the chronological scale. As it is, it affords a wholesome caution against drawing important inferences from the mere collocation of objects when there is any possibility of the apparent association being only due to accident.’