28 JOURNAL OF THE COUNTY DONEGAL HISTORICAL SOCJETY. pottery have as yet been,found on any of blood now coursing in our veins it Is the~e sites. The only tools are flints, as yet impossible to determine." (Irecores, flakes and celts. The latter is a land in Prehistoric 1Tiimes, Macalister). bar of flint about six or seven inches in length, and brought to a blunt point These people belonged to the period at both ends as if it were for use as a before the NEW S:tone Age, from whence pick. No t '.'ace cf a kitchen midden ha.s came the new culture, the Neolithic. been found in association with these 'I'he chances are enormously in favour of flint-tearing g>ravel beds. It is quite the new culture being the importation possible that they may exist on some of a new people. For primitive man part of the site as yet undug, or they in any country adopts new methods only may have been washed away 'by the when forced to do so. iBut one way action of the sea as is known to ha:ve or another nothing definite is known of ha.ppened to shell hea.ps on the west the ex'pansion of man over the interior coast of Denmark. The coast of Antrim of Ireland. We can imagine what the would have a specialattraction for these country looked like in these days, Our people owing to the fact that there was bogs bear Witness to the fact that the an abundance of flint to be obtained land was covered. with vast !Pine forests which was not to be found elsewhere in interspersed with ancient oaks, while the country. The earliest coast- rivers meandered unrestrained as the dwellers are believed to belong to the great rivers of South America still fiow period immediately before the Neolithic, through the forest clad interior. Here or NEW STONE AOE which in this and there were dangerous bogs a.nd country is re.ga·rded as a century or two shaking quagmires. When we consider before and after 20<JO B.C. that wild animals abounded we can ORONSAY MAN Some years ago a shell heap was excavated at Oronsay, near Oban, in Scotland. Like the County Antrim deposit it belongs to the pe•riod of the 25 feet ra.ised beach. The contents ot the shell heap would lead to the conclusion that Oronsay man was a hunter, a fisher and a fowler. There were no corn grinders or other implements that would go to show that he practised agriculture. That he was clothed in hides is shown by the presence of pins and piercers of bone. Fragments of red pa.int and perforated shells indicate how he decorated his person. As no tool was found fit for making a dug-out canoe, it is thought that his boat was of the currach type. Yet the middens produced crabs of a deep-sea variety showing that as a seaman he had considerable skill, and that he was capable of constructing traps something like the lobster pots of our day. The geographical position of the earliest sites on the north-east coast would lead to the conclusion that Ireland was colonized from Scotland at about the same time as the Oronsay shell-heap was laid down. Beyond the facts already stated nothing more is known of the first men in Ireland. "Their lives, their loves, thei"r pates, their speech, their manners, customs and scheme of society, their deaths, their gods, all have faded as in a dream. Whether they vanished before invaders or perished by pestilence or otherwise, or whether they persisted so far as to bequeath some drons of the realize the difficult task that confronted those first explorers armed with no better tools than a quantity of rude fiint chips. SHORE DWELLERS Those early settlers were not the only shore dwellers of Ireland. At every period of our history there have been people living the same mode of life. Only a few of the sites can be attributed to those early settlers. The Whitepark Bay settlement (also in Co. Antrim) is early Bronze Age, and other settlements are later still, some of them of quite modern times. l\UDDEN SITES Macalister classtfies Midden Sites under four heads, i.e.: I. Raised beaches, a:lready referred to. II. Shore dwellers' sites. III. Factory sites. IV. Shell heaps. II. SHORE D:WE1LLERS' SI'f1ES The shore dW'ellers or sandhill sites are more frequent on the northern shore of Ireland than elsewhere. They were deposited at a time when the land had attained the level at which it now stands. The deposit at WhitePark Bay <already mentioned) is the typical sandhill site. To quote Macalister: "Here and elsewhere the loose sands of the
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