Note 638 — Chapter IV

Professor Boyd Dawkins (Early Man in Britain, pp. 360-2) remarks that if a well-known amber cup, which was found at Hove, was of British workmanship, it proves that the use of the lathe was known in Britain in the Bronze Age. Sir John Evans (Anc. Stone Implements, 1897, pp. 445-50), like the professor, thinks that the cup may have been imported; but he points out that cups made of shale, which were certainly turned in a lathe, and were most probably of British manufacture, have been found in round barrows on Broad Down near Honiton. Sir R. C. Hoare (Anc. Wilts, i, 122-3) found in the trunk of a tree inside a bowl barrow along with a skeleton an urn which he described as ‘different both in shape and colour to any we have ever found in the British sepulchres’, and which appeared to him to have been turned in a lathe. Still the statement in the text is, generally speaking, true both of the British Isles and of Northern and Western Europe.