The Archæology of the Channel Islands

Abstract

THIS survey of the archæology of the Channel A Islands was projected by Mr. T. D. Kendrick, by whom the first volume, dealing with the Bailiwick of Guernsey, was published in 1928. Other interests supervened, and in 1934 Mr. Kendrick passed his material relating to Jersey- field notes, and analyses of manuscript and published sources-to Mrs. Hawkes. This material she has re-interpreted and expanded in the light of the revolutionary ideas and discoveries which have supervened in European archaeology since the first volume appeared, and now publishes as a review of the prehistory of the Bailiwick of Jersey. The relics of the remoter past of the Channel Islands have long attracted the interest of antiquarians; while the island of Jersey earned no little notoriety of a less enviable kind in the annals of archaeology by the mistaken, if grateful, act of generosity of the States of the Island when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, they made the embarrassing gift of one of their finest megalithic monuments to General Conway, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Island, by whom it’ was re-erected complete on his estate at Henley. No little interest, of a more honorific character, has been aroused by these megalithic monuments, of which the Channel Islands present an astonishing assemblage, in view of the small size of the islands-Jersey, 44 square miles, and Guernsey, 24 square miles only-while Guernsey can show two remarkable examples of the anthropomorphic sculptured menhirs characteristic of the cult of the Mediterranean goddess. This interest, however, was eclipsed by the discovery in 1910 of the teeth of Neanderthal man, associated with relics of a pleistocene fauna-mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, elk, horse and several deer-in the cave of La Cotte de St. Brelade then under excavation, but from the deposits of which Mousterian implements had been extracted so long before as the nineties of the preceding century.

The Archæology of the Channel Islands

Vol. 2: The Bailiwick of Jersey. By Jacquetta Hawkes. Pp. xvii + 320 + 12 plates. (Jersey: Société Jersiaise, 1939.) 25s. net.