A BRONZE AGE VILLAGE

Hokitika Guardian, 25 September 1925, Page 4

A BRONZE AGE VILLAGE

BUJUED RECORD OF FAXON HAVOC.

BOX DUX, Aug. 11

Oil ;i long slope of seemingly virgin turf oil an undulating .s trot oh of almost unvisited Bownlund lietweou the famous hills of Cissbury and Chanetonbury. Sussex, notable things, writes an archaelogist, have been unearthed. The first is the site, abounding in evidences of occupation, of what is known to scientists as a late Bronze Age village. In other words this was the habitation of a tribe of Ancient Britons, dwellers on the Downs, hunters of the red deer and the wild boar, asforal and primitive, of whom every iivng vestige disappeared six or seven hundred tears before Christ.

The second and scientifically the more important discovery is on the site of the village which Air Reginald A. Smith, of the Britsh Museum, considers to he a settlement of the very first Celtic peoples who came to Britain, presumably from the Continent, about uOO or (700 B.C. This site bars yielded the oldest Celtic tvpes of pottery and other remains tot found in Britain. The third, an perhaps to-day the most, appealing is the broken remains of a village of ancient Britons civilised by the Romans. Tt is now revealed as it was left !>v the Saxons when 1.500 years ago they burst in their fury on the Sussex coast, and as their chronicler tersely and grimly records, left not one Briton alive. AVATFR BOH.TXO TRICK. Everywhere are the signs of a peaceful, cultured homestead, pastoral, yet with many of the luxuries of life brought about by -100 years of Roman oivilsntion. and with every sign of this is a sign of destruction wrought by I hi' Saxon invader. The ground is littered with the Roman tiles, the Roman tile nails, ifragments of walls that were once covered in the Roman manner with coloured distemper. Merc, in what was obviously the rubbish pit, fragments put together make up a perfect- specimen of a wine cup of the classic red Samian ware, delicately ornamental with a pattern that originally came from classi. 1 (' recce. Here are fragments of tin* great amphorae used by Romans for importing

wine. 11 should be noted Iha 1 pot - made by these vanished Bronze Age people and the earliest of the Celts would not stand lire so to cook their food they heated (lint stones and threw them into the water until il is boiled. It is ;> (rick of savages to this day. Once the tin I is removed the soil of ihe Ilnitit' about these villgages is strewn all ovci with millions of flint stones hearing unmistakoahle signs of having been intuit* rod hot and then plunged ink u a ter. So far the excavations that have revealed this lost romance of British history have been the almost unheeded work, carried on quietly for the las! three years, of Air Carnet Wolseley, a net hew of the famous general. AB AVnl'oh'y is a painter. His work of excavation Inis been super, i-od. and. as he puts it. interpreted by Mr Reginald A. Smith, the keeper of British antiquities at the British Museum. The Society of Antiquaries arc alloting a considerable sum of money to continue the excavation more t horoughh .