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size and exact proportions. His piece is very close indeed to the hache courte of the Hwabinhian. All that we can say is that both these Lamma specimens seem to belong to the same culture as that which made the polished spear and arrow-heads. They seem also to go with the other objects described above in the present part. But Mr. Schofield's find makes a very remarkable link with the mesolithic of Tongking and N. Annam.
The
A
Another piece that puts us in touch with flaked tools is F. material of this is that of the saws, a mica-schist: it is a very flat tool with an average greatest thickness of 10 mm. which by flaking has been reduced all around the edges to about 6 mm. One face shows an old patina, while the other seems to be a more recent cleavage from the parent block. The straight edge (hypoteneuse) has a narrow flat ribbon in place of a working edge and suggests that a beginning of use as a saw had been made. strange similarity with a completely flaked instrument again presents itself here (33) Plate XIV, 8 is a chert knife from Rubetsu on Yeterofu, one of the Kurile Islands: its shape is almost precisely that of our piece and it is only 15 mm. shorter and about 5-9 mm. narrower : our piece is certainly not a knife in its present state, it has no point and no edge-possibly we have an older shape transferred to another use when stone had yielded to the metals as the material of knives and the stone came to survive in the saw and sharpener type of tool. It may be well to note that Lamma has given us clear cases of a pot with loop-handles inside the neck, a style that is found in these same Kurile Islands, in Kamchatka and in North Japan (33) Plate XV and text.
Again, Dr. Andersson (99) pp. 207-209 provides an extraordinarily satisfactory parallel. He identifies a similar stone "knife" from An Yang (Chinese historical c. 1200 B.C.) functionally with iron scythes used in N. China (Anhui Kalgan). This parallel leads me to see in our piece F the "makings" of a scythe, for such an explanation suggested by actual modern types gives a very satisfactory reconciliation of the flaked stone from the Kuriles with the polished stone from An Yang and the unfinished Lamma piece an agricultural implement is more likely to retain an old form amid the changes of technique and material than is a weapon or a knife.
In conclusion, it would seem that this group of tools offers a link between the flaked type and the polished implement that already was in contact with bronze: here the old weapon-form has sunk down to a subsidiary workshop-form.
POLISHERS AND SHARPENERS.
In this section, there is space here only for the merest indication. The unifying factors are the material (most usually, sandstone), the surfaces (smooth, concave, often glistening), the shapes (either broad and flattish, like modern fixed whet-stones of the Chinese knife-sharpener or tool-maker or else multiple faces on a longish cucumber-shaped stone), sometimes there are the grooves that prove the use as a sharpener. Here there are illustrated only two specimens out of the very many we have found. These are two small ones which show very markedly the tracks of points that were to be
The Hong Kong Naturalist.