Archaic England An Essay in Deciphering Prehistory from Megalithic Monuments, Earthworks, Customs, Coins, Place-names, and Faerie Superstitions

"Archaic England" by Harold Bayley is an archeology book about the application of the jigsaw system to certain archæological problems of Great Britain, Ireland, and Central Europe. Excerpt: "The fact is now generally accepted as proven by both anthropologists and archæologists, that the most ancient records of the human race exist not in Asia, but in Europe. The oldest documents are not the hieroglyphics of Egypt, but the hunting-scenes scratched on bone and ivory by the European cave-dwelling contemporaries of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. Human implements found on the chalk plateaus of Kent have been assigned to a period prior to the glacial epoch, which is surmised to have endured for 160,000 years, from, roughly speaking, 240,000 to 80,000 years ago. It is now also an axiom that the races of Europe are not colonists from somewhere in Asia, but that, speaking generally, they have inhabited their present districts more or less continuously from the time when they crept back gradually in the wake of the retreating ice."