Tools of the Wee People |
Towards the end of the 19th century hundreds of extraordinary flint tools were unearthed beneath the moorland peat of east Lancashire's Pennine Hills. By their miniature size, they seemed not to belong in the province of man, but rather in the realm of Gnomes, Elves and Faeries. None of the tools found - scrapers, borers, and tiny crescent-shaped knives was longer than half an inch indeed many were smaller than a quarter of an inch. The flaking by which they were shaped and brought to a sharp edge was so fine that, in many cases it could only be appreciated through magifying glasses. That the flints were not "bird points" - used for bird hunting - seems evident from the fact that nothing resembling an arrow head was found among them. And while the scrapers and borers may have been conceivably been fitted with wooden handles (being far to small to be used by human hands), two observations suggest that this was not the case. no bored or engraved material were found in conjunction with the flints; and even with handles the scrapers would have been hopelessly impractical for the task of scraping animal flesh from its bones. The same observation applies to the crescent shaped knives, which were, in any case, clearly not designed to have handles or to be placed in wooden holders. With that in mind, some have guessed that the knives were ritual replicas of the crescent moon. But why, in that case, they should have been found alongside small versions of conventional tools is a mystery, unless those also are supposed to have had ritual purpose. (To label ancient objects of unknown purpose as "ritual instruments" is, of course, a remedy commonly applied by puzzled archeologists.) If the Lancashire finds had been unique they would have probably been forgotten. But other examples of tools, apparently fashioned by and for small hands, or miniature people were discovered in England, beneath the floor of the drowned forest in Devon and in the sandy heathland of Suffolk. However, England is not unique in these kinds of finds. More have been unearthed in Egypt, Africa, Australia, France, and Sicily, for example, and in India, where small crescent shaped knives of flint and agate were found in caves in the Vindhya hills. Whoever the makers of these pygmy flints were, and whatever their purpose, they seemed to have been an established class of artisans and to have plied their delicate craft from one end of the world to the other. An interesting note, many of the Celtic folklore tales describe that when the Celts originally came to England, Ireland and Scotland, they encountered a race of "wee" people, very small in stature. As legend goes the Celts promptly killed the wee people who had to flee underground. People in that region believed that the wee people would come to the surface periodically to steal human babies. |
