Note 838 — Chapter IV · (continued 2)

A. Pitt-Rivers, Excavations in Cranborne Chase, iv, 238-9. Mr. Coffey (Journ. Roy. Soc. Ant. Ireland, 5th ser., v, 1895, p. 195) thinks that ‘herring-bone, chevron, and triangle ornament’ may be native in Europe, and (ib., vi, 1896, p. 42) that lozenge, chequer, and saltire patterns ‘may be original in Britain’. He holds, however (ib.), that ‘we have no reason to believe that geometrical forms have ever been spontaneously invented’, and adds that ‘they appear to have been invariably derived by a process of conventionalisation from realistic prototypes’: he cites examples (ib., iv, 1894, pp. 364-6) from the pottery of Cyprus to show how ‘the body of the lotus flower is simplified to a triangular form, and the central sepal to an enlarged lozenge, enriched by cross-hatching and chequer patterns’; and he argues (ib., v, 1895, pp. 210-1) that ‘the occurrence of chequers of lozenges on Early Bronze Age remains from Scotland, in some instances identical with Cyprian forms, and the close association of lozenge, chequer, and × [saltire] patterns with the spiral in the Bronze Age ornament of Ireland is ... strong evidence that lozenge and chequer patterns travelled northward across Europe on the path of the spiral’.

That geometrical forms were in certain cases derived from ‘realistic prototypes’ may be granted, but does not exclude the possibility that in others the same forms were ‘spontaneously invented’. Moreover, certain geometrical forms occur, as we have seen (pp. 197-8), on neolithic and even on palaeolithic objects, to which they could not have found their way by the route and from the source to which Mr. Coffey refers. Others again are of such a kind that it is difficult to conceive of any ‘realistic prototype’ from which they could have been derived; and there are lozenge, chequer, and saltire patterns on pottery of the Bronze Age in parts of England to which, according to Mr. Coffey, the spiral did not penetrate until the Bronze Age was at an end. Mr. Coffey (ib., iv, 1894, p. 356) is himself disposed to except ‘some zigzag, chevron, and triangle ornaments’ from the list of geometric patterns which, as he insists, ‘have been invariably derived from naturalistic forms’; but the truth is that, as Mr. Romilly Allen has shown (Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times, pp. 27-37), all the patterns of the Bronze Age, except spirals, circles and other curves, and mere dots, punch marks, and straight lines, are simply combinations of diagonal straight lines based upon the chevron.

Another theory of Mr. Coffey’s (op. cit., v, 1895, p. 202) is that ‘as far as the ornament of primitive peoples has been studied, it appears to be generally associated with religious ideas’, and that the ‘naturalistic objects’ to the conventionalization of which he would trace the geometric patterns of the Bronze Age had ‘a religious and talismanic meaning’. I am not concerned to deny that certain geometric patterns, for instance the swastika and the circle, may sometimes have had such a meaning; but Mr. Coffey’s theory is too sweeping. It would be difficult to prove that oblong punch-marks or impressions of finger-nails and finger-tips, or the herring-bone pattern were connected with religion. [See A. Lang, Magic and Religion, 1901, p. 248.]