Neolithic period.
These he could easily have bought from the dealers. What he intended to
dump down were not practical weapons, but, in one case at least, _armes
d'apparat_, as French archaeologists call them, weapons of show or
ceremony.

The strange "vandyked" crozier-like stone objects of schist or shale from
Portugal were possibly _armes d'apparat_, or heads of staves of dignity.
There is a sample in the American room at the British Museum,
uninscribed. I submit that the three very curious and artistic stone axe-
heads, figured by M. Cartailhac, {114} representing, one an uncouth
animal; another, a hooded human head, the third an extremely pretty girl,
could never have been used for practical purposes, but were _armes
d'apparat_. Perhaps such stone _armes d'apparat_, or magical or sacred
arms, were not unknown, as survivals, in Scotland in the Iron Age. A
"celt" or stone axe-head of this kind, ornamented with a pattern of inter-
crossing lines, is figured and described by the Rev. Mr. Mackenzie
(Kenmore) in the _Proceedings_ of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries
(1900-1901, p. 310 _et seq._). This axe-head, found near a cairn at
Balnahannait, is of five inches long by two and a quarter broad. It is
of "soft micaceous stone." The owners must have been acquainted with the
use of the metals, Mr. Mackenzie thinks, for the stone exhibits
"interlaced work of a late variety of this ornamentation." Mr. Mackenzie
suggests that the ornament was perhaps added "after the axe had obtained
some kind of venerated or symbolical character." This implies that a
metal-working people, finding a stone axe, were puzzled by it, venerated
it, and decorated it in their late style of ornament.

In that case, who, in earlier times, made an useless axe-head of soft
micaceous stone, and why? It could be of no practical service. On the
other hand, people who had the metals might fashion a soft stone into an
_arme d'apparat_. "It cannot have been intended for ordinary use," "the
axe may have been a sacred or ceremonial one," says Mr. Mackenzie, and he
makes the same conjecture as to another Scottish stone axe-head. {115}

Here, then, if Mr. Mackenzie be right, we have a soft stone axe-head,
decorated with "later ornament," the property of a people who knew the
metals, and regarded the object as "a sacred or ceremonial one," _enfin_,
as an _arme d'apparat_.

Dr. Munro doubtless knows all that is known about _armes d'apparat_, but