Note 483 — Chapter IV
Reading edition
Congrès internat. d’anthr. et d’archéol. préhist., 1900 (1902), p. 340; Vict. Hist. of ... Hertford, i, 232; C. H. Read, Guide to the Ant. of the Bronze Age (Brit. Museum), 1904, pp. 5-6, 27, 101, 111, 130. M. P. du Chatellier (Rev. de l’École d’anthr., xiii, 1903, pp. 169-72) thinks that there was a copper age in Brittany, but admits that he cannot settle the question. Professor O. Montelius affirms (Man, v, 1905, No. 7, p. 13) that ‘copper had been used there [in Britain] for a long time’ before bronze; but British archaeologists do not bow to his authority. Pitt-Rivers (Journ. Roy. United Service Inst., xiii, 1870, p. 520) remarked that ‘it is not surprising that on the first discovery of the advantages of [adding tin to copper] ... all the old implements of copper, wherever procurable, should have been taken to the melting-pot for conversion into bronze, and we should thus be left with such scanty evidence of the existence of an age of copper’. Still we have sufficient evidence for Ireland, and not for Britain. Professor Gowland (Journ. Anthr. Inst., xxxvi, 1906, p. 23) attributes the scarcity of copper celts in England to ‘the occurrence of mixed copper and tin ores in Cornwall.’