| |
| Bone combs | X | X | X | | | X |
+---------------------------------------+---+---+---+---+---+---+

It is obvious in all these cases that men accustomed to luxury and
refinement were compelled, by the pressure of some great calamity, to
flee for refuge to caves with whatever they could transport thither of
their property. The number of spindle-whorls and personal ornaments
imply that they were accompanied by their families. We may also infer
that they were cut off from the civilization to which they had been
accustomed, because in some cases they extemporized spindle-whorls out
of fragments of Samian ware, instead of using those which were expressly
manufactured for the purpose. Why the caves were inhabited is
satisfactorily explained by an appeal to contemporary history. In the
pages of Gildas, in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, and in the _Annales
Cambriae_, we have a graphic picture of that long war of invasion by
which the inhabitants of the old Roman province of Britannia were driven
back by the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, who crossed over with their
families and household stuff. Slowly, and in the chances of a war which
extended through three centuries, they were gradually pushed back into
Cumberland, Wales and West Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. While this war
was going on the coinage became debased and Roman coins afforded the
patterns for the small bronze minimi, which are to be met with equally
in these caves and in the ruins of Roman cities. As the tide of war
rolled to the west, the English tongue and, until towards the close of
the struggle, the worship of Thor and Odin supplanted the British tongue
and the Christian faith, and a rude barbarism replaced what was left of
the Roman civilization in the island. It is to this period that relics
of this kind in the caves must be assigned. They are traces of the
anarchy of those times, and complete the picture of the desolation of
Britain, revealed by the ashes of the cities and villas that were burnt
by the invader. They prove that the vivid account given by Gildas of the
straits to which his countrymen were reduced was literally true.

The shrines of Zeus in the Idaean and Dictaean caves have been explored
by Halbher and Orsi (_Antichita dell' antro de Zeus Ideo_) and by Arthur
Evans and Hogarth (_Journal of Hellenic Studies_). These discoveries
prove that the cult of Zeus began among the Mycenaean peoples some 2000
years