Supplementary note on the great auk or garefowl (Alca impennis Linn) / by Symington Grieve.

  • Grieve, Symington.
Date:
[between 1890 and 1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Supplementary note on the great auk or garefowl (Alca impennis Linn) / by Symington Grieve. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1897-98-] Afterwards I got two humeri which had weathered out of this old surface. Then the humerus with ulna, radius, and smaller bones of the wing were found where they had all just fleshly dropped out, and were still in close relationship to each other. All of these were found opposite different hut sites, and those I wrote you lastly about were found opposite a hut site where I had not previously obtained any such bones. The two coracoids I got a few days ago belong to one side, and so, though found near each other, could not be a pair. All the bones, however, have been found at Whitepark Bay within a radius of 200 or 300 yards.” These discoveries of Great Auk remains in kitchen-middens are exceedingly interesting, as they indicate pretty clearly that the few Great Auks that are recorded as having been seen along the coasts of Ireland during the past century were visiting the homes of their progenitors. It seems likely that further investigations will lead to the discovery that the Great Auk did not confine its visits to only one or two points on the coasts of Ireland, Scotland, and north-eastern England, but was widely distributed, and formed an important item of food for the ancient fishermen and shore- dwellers of Ireland and the western and northern shores of Britain. I would even go further and suggest that the shores of Eastern Scotland and the north-east of England are well worth careful examination wherever the kitchen-middens of the ancient inhabitants are to be found. In Scotland the remains of Alca impennis were found by me on Oronsay associated with the shells of many molluscs, fish-bones, and layers of scales of the grey mullet and other fish, numbers of bones of birds and animals, stone pot-boilers, stone limpet - hammers, bone spear - heads, rubbed bones or portions of antlers, a bone awl, and a number of other things enumerated at p. 47 of ‘ The Great Auk or Garefowl: Its History, Archaeology, and Remains.’ The race that formed this deposit appears to have been the same that left traces of its existence at various points upon the Irish coasts, and also in caves at Oban (‘ Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,’ vol. xxix., pp. 211 and 410). They may be the same people who formed the kitchen-midden at Keiss, in Caithness, in which were discovered by the late Mr Samuel VOL. III. 7
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