STONE AGE IN IRELAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 173, 12 October 1927, Page 4

STONE AGE IN IRELAND

DISCOVERY OF RELICS OVER 100,000 YEARS’ OLD Discoveries which, it is claimed, show that Ireland was inhabited 100,000 years ago, have been made by a young London archaeologist during a holiday exploration tour in Sligo. The archaeologist is Mr. J. p. T. Burchell, of Southwick Street, Hyde Park, assistant clerk to the commis-

sioner of taxes for Holborn. Mr. Reginald Smith, a deputy-keeper of the British Museum, has agreed that his finds were evidence of human life in the Lower Palaeolithic (Early Mousterian) period—from 100,000 to 150 000 years ago. Mr. Burchell describes how, in a rock shelter at Rosses Point, the roof of which was covered with an Early Neolithic raised beach consisting of powdered shells, he found more than. 100 unrolled flakes and flake implements made of limestone, some of them weighing as much as 361 b. They were found in Boulder clay, a glacier deposit almost contemporary with the Lower Palaeolithic age, ancl he classifies them as follows: Lavallois-like flakes (the earliest kind of hand axe known). Side and fan-shaped racloirs (scrapin instruments). Choppers. Square-ended scrapers. Ovate hand-axes. Pointed hand-axes. At other places on the coast and on Coney Island, a mile from Rosses Point. Mr. Burchell found similar examples of Lower Palaeolithic workmanship. “The rock shelter in which I made the first discoveries was probably used as a factor:/ for the manufacture of the instruments, and the workers themselves have lived in a cave I found about 100 feet from the shelter,” Mr. Burchell said. “The racloirs, or scrapers, may have been used by the natives for cutting up firewood, and for skinning such animals as redndeer.”