THE QUARRY.
THE QUARRY—BRIXHAM CAVE—BRIXHAM FLINT IMPLEMENT—FLINT RIDGE,
OHIO—FLINT PITS—DRIFT QUARRY DEPOSITS—TRACES OF PALÆOLITHIC
ART—LANCEOLATE FLINTS—ALMOND-SHAPED FLINTS—THE SHAWNEES—THE
COLORADO INDIANS—CACHES OF WORKED FLINTS—SEPULCHRAL DEPOSITS—
CAVE-DRIFT DISCLOSURES—ILLUSTRATIVE ANALOGIES—CINCINNATI
COLLECTIONS—HORNSTONE SPEAR-HEADS—AMERICAN NEOLITHIC ART—
FLINT DRILLS—MODES OF PERFORATION—FLINT KNIVES—RAZORS AND
SCRAPERS—ARROW-HEAD FORMS—DISCOIDAL STONES—SINKERS AND
LASSO-STONES—CUPPED STONES—ARCHÆOLOGICAL THEORIES—GEORGIA
BOULDERS—HAND CUP-STONES—NEOLITHIC GRINDSTONES—ARCHÆOLOGICAL
ENIGMAS—ANCIENT ANALOGIES.
If mere rudeness is to be accepted as the indication of the first
artless efforts of man to furnish himself with tools, the investigator
into primeval history may assume that in the rudest of the drift and
cave implements he has examples of the most infantile efforts in the
industrial arts. He may even indulge the fancy that in the large,
unshapely flint implements recovered from ossiferous caves and alluvial
deposits, alongside of remains of the extinct fauna of a palæolithic
period so dissimilar to any historical era, he has traced his way back
to the first crude efforts of human art, if not to the evolutionary dawn
of a semi-rational artificer. It is a significant fact that no such
clumsy unshapeliness characterises the stone implements of the most
degraded savage races. Examples may indeed be produced, selected for
their rudeness, from among the implements of modern savages. But
Bushmen, Patagonians, Mincopies, Australians, or whatever other race be
lowest in the scale of humanity, each display ingenuity and skill in the
manufacture of some special tools or weapons. Nor is it less worthy of
note that the commoner implements and weapons of flint and stone
recovered from ancient Scandinavian, Gaulish, and British graves, from
the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the Danish shell-mounds, and other
European depositories of prehistoric industrial art, are scarcely
distinguishable from the flint-knives, scrapers, lance and arrow-heads,
or the stone gouges, axes, and mauls, of the Red Indians, or of the
Islanders of the Pacific. Peculiar types do indeed occur; and the
materials abounding in special localities, such as the obsidian of
Mexico, or the greenstone of Tasmania, give a specific character to the
implements of some regions; but, on the whole, the arts of the stone
periods of different races, however widely separated alike by space and
time, present so many analogies that they seem to confirm the idea of
certain instinctive operations of human ingenuity finding everywhere the
same expression within the narrow range of non-metallurgic art. Few
facts, therefore, related to this branch of the subject have impressed
me more than the essentially diverse types characteristic of the massive
and extremely rude implements of the caves and river-drift. They seem to
point to some unexplained difference between the artificer of the
Mammoth or Reindeer period, and the tool-maker of Britain’s neolithic
era, or the Indian savage of modern times.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.—Brixham Cave Flint Implement. (Evans). (½).]
Sufficient correspondence is traceable between the implements of the
cave-earth and the river-drift to assign them to the same era; and so to
justify us in testing its arts by their combined disclosures. The
ossiferous cave of Brixham, which has recently been subjected to an
exhaustive scientific investigation, consists of a series of galleries
and passages in the Devonshire limestone. They are partly natural
fissures, and partly chambers hollowed out by the action of running
water. Those have been refilled with gravel, red cave-earth, and layers
of stalagmite, which were in process of deposition while the _ursus
spelæus_, or great cave-bear, still haunted their recesses, and when the
reindeer was a native of the neighbouring region. Though visited from
time to time by man, Brixham cave had never been made his dwelling-place
or workshop; and so it has revealed only his rudest tools. Of these,
Fig. 4 is a characteristic example of a rude lanceolate implement, which
embodies within itself some very significant glimpses of the era to
which it belongs. The great valleys were excavated and refilled with the
rolled gravel of the drift during the prolonged operations of ice and
floods. But it is here seen that the violence of the floods extended
even to the recesses of the caves. The implement has been broken into
three pieces, evidently at the period of the original filling up of the
cave. One portion was recovered buried in the cave-earth of the
flint-knife gallery; another fragment lay far apart, under three and a
half feet of earth, in a neighbouring gallery; while a third portion has
escaped even the careful and discriminating search which resulted in the
recovery of those long-dissevered fragments. It has to be borne in
remembrance that every fragment of flint found in the cave-earth was
preserved, whether showing traces of human workmanship or not.
Thirty-two fragments were discovered in all; with an interval of nearly
a month between the finding of the first and second portions of the
implement figured here. A still longer period elapsed before it was
noticed that they fitted to each other as parts of the same worked
flint. Most of the fragments so found have undergone great alteration in
their structure, and have become absorbent and brittle. How little
chance, therefore, is there that any delicately formed flint-tool should
be recovered in the rolled gravel-beds!
But the comparatively virgin soil of the New World has examples of like
primitive workmanship in reserve, to illustrate the significance of some
of those amorphous flints which bear the evidence of art, and yet seem
almost too artless for any purpose of man. The valleys of the Ohio and
its tributaries have a special attraction as the sites of numerous
earthworks and other remains of a prehistoric race, known, from one
prominent class of their structures, as the Mound-Builders. In more
recent centuries, within the period of European intercourse with the New
World, the same valleys have been occupied by warlike tribes of the Red
Indian race; and now that an industrious population has supplanted their
ephemeral lodges with the cities and farmsteads of the Anglo-American
settler, the traces even of the latest aborigines seem primitive as
those of Europe’s neolithic era. During the summer of 1874 I devoted
part of the long vacation to an inspection of some of the most
remarkable earthworks and other ancient remains of this interesting
locality; and among other objects illustrative of its past history, I
visited the Flint Ridge, a siliceous deposit of the carboniferous age,
which extends through the State, from Newark to New Lexington, and has
been worked at various points to furnish materials for native
implements. Here I had an opportunity of exploring the ancient pits from
which it is assumed that the constructors of the gigantic earthworks of
the neighbouring valleys procured the flint, or hornstone, of which
their weapons and implements were chiefly made. The point visited is on
the summit of an undulating range of hills about ten miles distant from
the city of Newark and its remarkable earthworks, hereafter described.
At various points along the ridge, both there and in other parts of the
State, numerous funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five to
fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of mining may be seen in other
localities, as at Levenworth, about three hundred miles below
Cincinnati, where the grey flint, or chert, abounds, of which large
implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the pits are in many
cases covered with the fractured flints, broken up, and partially shaped
as if for purposes of manufacture. There for the first time I looked
upon true counterparts of the drift implements; and in the course of an
hour or two had no difficulty in procuring specimens closely repeating
many forms familiar among those common to the cave-earth and the
drift-gravel of France and England.
We are apt to think of the old flint and stone-workers as merely picking
up the chance materials suited to their simple craft. But the use of
flint in the manufacture of sling-stones, arrow-heads, and other missile
weapons, as well as of all ordinary household implements, and those of
war and the chase, involved a constant demand for fresh materials,
frequently procurable only from distant localities. It is what might be
assumed, therefore, apart from any direct evidence, that a regular
system of quarrying for flint nodules best fitted for the tool-makers’
art was pursued; and that a trade or barter in the raw material
furnished supplies to tribes remote from the flint-bearing chalk or
gravel. But also it appears from the interesting explorations of Colonel
A. Lane Fox at Cissbury, near Worthing,[33] and from those of the Rev.
W. Greenwell, at Grime’s Graves, near Brandon, in Norfolk,[34] that the
flint nodules were not only quarried, but prepared on the spot; so that
the miner carried off with him, not a mere load of flint nodules, as the
modern manufacturer might burden himself with the iron ore: but flints
of the required dimensions, roughly shaped for the final operation which
was to fashion them into knives, scrapers, arrow and lance-heads,
hatchets, etc. Precisely the same process is manifest in the remains
found in the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio. Flakes or spawls, knives,
scrapers, almond and lanceolate blocks, abound in the first crude stage
of manufacture. In studying those on the spot, I was strongly impressed
by the similarity of many of them to the ruder implements of the drift;
and hence was led to surmise that in the latter also we have in many
cases, not the artless implements which fitly suggest a maker
correspondingly deficient in even such skill and reasoning as guides the
modern tool-making savage; but only rudely-blocked flints, fresh from
the quarry, and in a condition least susceptible of injury in the
violence to which the tool-bearing gravels have necessarily been
subjected. May it not be, moreover, that in some of the richest deposits
of such worked flints in the gravels of France and England, we have
really the dispersed materials of such quarry accumulations, and not the
stray implements of individual hunters? In this way only can we
satisfactorily account for the fact that such traces of primeval man are
now successfully sought for on purely geological evidence. The
archæologist digs into the Celtic or Saxon barrow, and finds as his
reward the implements and pottery of its builder. But English
geologists, having determined the character of the tool-bearing gravel
of the French drift, have sought for flint implements in corresponding
English strata, as they would seek for the fossil shells of the same
period, and with like success. They have now been obtained in Suffolk,
Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey.[35] So entirely indeed
has the man of the drift passed out of the province of the archæologist,
that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up his “notes on further
discoveries of flint implements in beds of post-pleiocene gravel and
clay,” with a list of forty-one localities where gravel and clay-pits,
or gravel-beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England
where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly
be found, and subsequent discoveries have confirmed his anticipations.
It has been felt by many as an element which in some degree detracted
from the otherwise incontrovertible force of this accumulated proof,
that where the wrought flints are discovered _in situ_, they occur in
beds of gravel and clay abounding in unwrought flints in every stage of
accidental fracture, and including many which the most experienced
archæologist would hesitate whether to classify as of natural or
artificial origin. But on the assumption of regular quarrying and
working in the flint-bearing strata, such traces of palæolithic art may
be expected to occur in the river-gravels, as a geological formation in
which the requisite material abounded; and which, moreover, in its
latest reconstruction belongs to the river-valleys best adapted to be
the habitat of post-glacial man. They are, in fact, the localities to
which the experience of the archæologist would direct him when in search
of the traces of rude hunting and fishing tribes; but also they are the
same mammaliferous strata to which the geologist turns when looking for
remains illustrative of the extinct fauna of the post-glacial age.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.—Lanceolate Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio, (2/3).]
In and around the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio, are now to be seen the
accumulated results of centuries of mining and quarrying, extending in
all probability from the era of the Mound-Builders to the extinction of
the Miamis, Shawnees, and other recent occupants of the Ohio valley.
Swept by floods into the lower valleys, the smaller fragments would be
broken up and disappear; and only such specimens would survive unchanged
as in the valley of the Somme have startled archæologists by their
numbers; and tempted sceptics to assign their origin to accidental
fracture in the beds of gravel and unwrought flints in which they
chiefly occur. In Fig. 5 a worked flint is shown, picked up in one of
the pits on Flint Ridge, in Licking County, Ohio. A small piece has been
broken off the point by recent fracture. Its analogy to one familiar
type of drift implements can scarcely admit of question. This, it will
be remembered, had never been removed from the pit, and doubtless
represents the material thus roughly blocked out, from which the old
artificer designed to fashion a finished tool. Another common type is
shown in Fig. 6, roughly chipped into the crude form of an almond-shaped
blade. Some of the specimens acquired by me are weather-stained from
long exposure, and others discoloured and brittle; but many of them
exhibit little traces of the effect of time. It may be doubted, indeed,
if any of them can be regarded as of remote antiquity; though,
doubtless, the ancient Mound-Builders
[Illustration: FIG. 6.—Almond-shaped Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio. (2/3).]
derived the materials for their stone implements from this inexhaustible
source; and specimens of the same class of worked flints are frequently
met with in the vicinity of the mounds, and even among their contents.
Flint-flakes, and rudely-fashioned knives and scrapers, are so common in
the ploughed fields, that they are spoken of generally throughout Ohio
and Kentucky by the name of “spawls.” It is difficult, indeed, to make a
selection from the abundant materials illustrative of this part of the
subject. The supply of flint, or its hornstone and chert equivalents,
was inexhaustible; and its natural fracture and cleavage resulted in
forms which frequently required little labour to convert them into
useful household implements. The examples thus far figured were obtained
directly from the Flint Ridge pits; but equally characteristic specimens
lie intermingled with the finished axes and arrow-heads turned up by the
plough, or recovered from the mounds. In the example figured here (Fig.
7), from the original ploughed up in Sharon Valley, Licking County,
Ohio, in the vicinity of a large mound, the reader cannot fail to
recognise an analogy to a familiar class of implements of the drift.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.—Leaf-shaped Flint, Sharon Valley, Ohio. (2/3).]
The Shawnees, who last occupied the region now referred to, were a
numerous and warlike tribe, who according to Indian tradition had come
from Georgia and West Florida into the Ohio Valley. But they became
involved in the French wars, joined in the famous conspiracy of Pontiac
in 1763, and were nearly exterminated in a battle fought within two
miles of the city of Newark. To them must, no doubt, be ascribed many of
the flint and stone implements so abundant in the neighbouring valleys,
as well as the partially worked flints in the numerous pits along Flint
Ridge. But the material for the largest implements is here
inexhaustible; and the natural lines of conchoidal fracture equally
controlled the workmanship of the Troglodyte of the Drift, and the most
recent Shawnee or Chippewa arrow-maker.
In the great mounds which abound throughout the region watered by the
Ohio and its tributaries, delicately-wrought knives and arrow-heads,
prized axe-heads, plummets and hemispheres of hæmatite, elaborately
carved pipes, and even pins and bodkins of bone, lie buried along with
the largest lanceolate and oval-shaped flints; or blocks of the same
material, rough-hewn, as brought from the pits. A general and
well-founded idea prevails that the old Mound-Builders, and, in some
cases also, the modern Indians, were in the habit of making caches of
flint-blocks, so as to protect the material from exposure to the
atmosphere. The modern English gun-flint makers entertained the same
idea, believing that a certain amount of moisture present in the flint
was necessary for working it with ease, and that it lost this by long
exposure. Professor J. W. Powell, in his report of explorations of the
Colorado of the West, made in 1873, thus describes the method pursued by
the Colorado Indians in the manufacture of their stone implements: “The
obsidian, or other stone of which the implement is to be made, is first
selected by breaking up larger masses of the rock, and choosing those
which exhibit the fracture desired, and which are free of flaws; then
these pieces are baked or steamed, perhaps I might say annealed, by
placing them in damp earth covered with a brisk fire for twenty-four
hours; then with sharp blows they are still further broken into flakes
approximating to the shape and size desired. For the more complete
fashioning of the implement a tool of horn, usually of the mountain
sheep, but sometimes of the deer or antelope, is used. The flake of
stone is held in one hand, placed on a little cushion made of untanned
skin of some animal, to protect the hand from the flakes which are to be
chipped off, and with a sudden pressure of the bone-tool the proper
shape is given. They acquire great skill in this, and the art seems to
be confined to but few persons, who manufacture them, and exchange them
for other articles.”[36] No doubt some of the simple bone implements
found in the mounds were used for this purpose. I was shown recently, in
Cincinnati, some well-made arrow-heads, the work of Dr. H. H. Hill, who
informed me that his sole implement was the bone handle of a
tooth-brush.
Among the many interesting disclosures due to the researches of Messrs.
Squier and Davis, was the discovery in a mound of “Clark’s Work,” one of
the largest earthworks in the Scioto Valley, of what may fairly be
regarded as a magazine of such flint-blocks, fresh as from the quarry.
Many of them are half a foot in length, but they vary in size and shape.
Out of an excavation six feet long by four wide, nearly six hundred were
taken. They lay regularly stacked, edge-ways, in two layers, one above
the other; and the explorers estimated that the whole deposit might
amount to four thousand discs of hornstone, roughly prepared for future
manufacture.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.—Flint Implement, Licking County, Ohio. (1/1).]
Blocks of flint from ten to twelve inches in length, fashioned in like
manner into the nucleus of a lance or spear-head, have occurred from
time to time in Denmark, France, and Belgium; and are to be looked for
elsewhere: since implements of flint are common in many localities where
the material out of which they are fashioned is wholly unknown. Those
are rightly conjectured to be the raw material, which, like pig-iron,
was thus ready to be turned to the special uses of the artificer. No
doubt, by barter and traffic in various ways, such material for the
flint-workers of Europe’s and America’s different stone periods was
disseminated from centres where native flint occurs; just as in the
later copper and Bronze periods of both continents the prized metals
were diffused through remote areas. But it is only in localities where
the flint abounds that implements, or even blocks or nuclei, of the
largest size are of common occurrence. Fig. 8 represents one of the
class of smaller rudely shaped flint implements recovered from a large
mound in the vicinity of Newark. It indicates, alike in the
discoloration and the change of the dulled surface, characteristic
evidences of considerable antiquity. Thus buried in the mounds, or
scattered about in the furrows of every ploughed field, slender
flint-chips, knives, or spawls, with arrow-heads, axes, and other relics
both of the Mound-Builders and their Indian successors, abound. The huge
rough-hewn block of flint or hornstone takes its place as fittingly
beside the delicately finished implements, as the prized lump of
unwrought hæmatite, the large pyrula, or even the mass of copper or
galena. Possibly they were deposited in the sepulchral mound to furnish
to the dead the materials from which to fashion implements adapted to
the new life on which he was about to enter. More probably, however,
they were laid there simply as part of the ordinary furnishings adapted
to the daily experiences of life. But if the Palæolithic tool-maker
fashioned anything akin to the more delicate implements, the
vicissitudes of diluvial and other geological changes have left few and
partial illustrations of such finished handiwork of the Drift-folk.
Their cave-dwellings did indeed admit, under specially favouring
circumstances, of the occasional preservation of bone implements, the
smaller knives and lances of flint, and other comparatively delicate
objects used in indoor work; and the value of these as illustrations of
the habits and usages of the ancient Troglodytes can scarcely be
exaggerated. But even those owe their preservation to processes akin to
that which fractured and dispersed the fragments of the Brixham Cave
implement; and which, in the more violent rearrangement of the
river-gravels, must have generally reduced any carved bone or delicately
worked flint to indistinguishable fragments. The exceptions indeed are
exceedingly rare of finding in the gravel-beds a single bone of any
animal so small as man.
The caves also undoubtedly embody in the contents of their silt and
stalagmite the industrial implements of a later period than that of the
river-gravels; and, as in the case of Kent’s Cavern, even preserve the
evidence of a succession of occupants belonging to distinct eras, and
probably to essentially diverse races of men. But it is only in
exceptional cases of special interest that the cave-drift discloses
traces of actual habitation, the refuse heaps of the kitchen, the broken
or stray tools, and even the flint-cores, hammer-stones, and
flint-chips, which indicate the workshop of the ancient tool-maker. Mr.
Evans figures hammer-stones of various kinds, made of diverse pebbles
and of chipped flint; and others from the French caves consist of
flint-cores with the prominent surfaces worn round by their use as
hammer-stones in the process of chipping the flint into the desired
forms. One of this class of implements now in my possession, of light
grey flint, and bearing manifest traces of long use, was turned up in a
ploughed field in Licking County, Ohio. Another example in my collection
was presented to me by Mr. W. L. Merrin, who picked it up in the
vicinity of one of the pits on Flint Ridge, among the broken flakes and
nodules which showed where the old flint miner had been at work. The
cave deposits embedded animal remains and human implements in part by
the same processes which in neighbouring river-valleys were burying the
works of man alongside of the bones of the largest fossil mammalia. In
the former, at times, the silting up was by a process sufficiently
gentle to preserve unharmed the minuter traces of the cave-dweller and
his arts; but as a rule there have remained to us from that remote
Palæotechnic era, only the larger and ruder implements, corresponding as
it were to the axe of the woodman, and the mattock or plough of the
field labourer, which were alone capable of withstanding the violence of
floods, and the like elements of geological reconstruction.
Enough survives to us, from the disclosures of a different character in
the actual cave-dwellings of the Men of the Drift, to confirm the idea
that we have as yet obtained a very partial glimpse of the arts of that
remote dawn; and that we may watch with interest every fresh disclosure
calculated to lessen the wonder excited by the large lanceolate or ovate
worked flints of that era: rude enough at times to be ascribed to some
irrational Caliban, rather than to a human artificer. It may perhaps be
thought that I have yielded too ready credence to a fanciful analogy;
but as I explored the deserted flint pits of the Shawnees, and the
ancient quarry of the Ohio Mound-Builders, or picked up in the furrows
of their desecrated earthworks huge half-formed ovate and spear-shaped
blocks of hornstone akin to those of the European drift, it seemed to me
like a glimpse of light illuminating the obscurity of that remote dawn.
The whole region of Ohio and Kentucky is rich in remains of the old
flint-workers. In the Granville, the Cherry, Sharon, Hanover, and other
valleys around Newark, in the vicinity of Dayton, and at Fort Ancient,
in Warren County, Ohio, all of which I had special facilities for
exploring, as well as in numerous other localities throughout the State,
flint and stone implements abound. In Cincinnati I examined large
collections, chiefly obtained by searching along the banks of the Ohio
and its tributaries after the spring floods. Occasionally fine specimens
may be observed _in situ_, projecting from the eroded bank, at a depth
of about twenty inches from the surface; but the greater number are
picked up in the silt and gravel left by the falling river, while many
more must be buried in its bed: to form, perchance, a subject of study
for future generations, in the reconstructed river-valleys of a newer
world. Their number indeed is astonishing, in the contrast which the
virgin soil of the New World thus presents to the rare traces of
Europe’s neolithic arts. One enthusiastic collector, Dr. Byrnes, of
Cincinnati, told me that his most successful gleaning had been at a
point near the junction of the Little Miami and Ohio rivers, where in
one day he found upwards of seventy stone implements of various kinds,
exposed by the ice and spring floods, on the river banks.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.—Flint Hoe, Kentucky. (1/3).]
Many of the flint implements are finished with exquisite delicacy, to
the finest serrated edge; while, no doubt owing to the abundant
material, they are frequently on a scale considerably surpassing those
of the European neolithic period. In the collections of Dr. Hill, Dr.
Byrnes, and Mr. Hosea, of Cincinnati, I made drawings of flint-knives,
spear-heads, and hoes, measuring nearly eleven inches in length. Fig. 9
shows an example of the latter implement, reduced to one-third, linear
measure. It was found by Dr. Hill, on the river edge of the Ohio, near
Smithland, Kentucky, and fully illustrates the character of the flint
hoe. The broad end has been worked to an edge, and is fractured from
use; while the narrow end terminates in a flat unworked surface, showing
the natural texture of the nodule from which it has been made. The same
collections above referred to include spear-heads of dark hornstone,
from 6½ to 7 inches long, of which upwards of fifty were found on a farm
in Casey County, Kentucky. On another farm in Jackson County, Indiana,
the owner’s curiosity was excited by the large size of two or three
spear-heads of dark grey hornstone turned up by the plough; and on
digging down he found about ninety stacked edge-ways, one tier above
another. Specimens of them examined by me in different collections
measured from 4½ to 5 inches long. One of the smallest of them is
figured here full size, Fig. 10. Along with some of these large
spear-heads, Dr. Hill produced several beautifully finished leaf-shaped
blades, chipped to a fine edge, measuring upwards of 5 inches long. They
are worked in a pale grey hornstone speckled with white. Twelve of these
were ploughed up in a level between two large mounds, near Brookville,
Indiana; and ten perfect, with numerous broken specimens of a rarer type
of large arrow-head, equally well finished, were found in the vicinity
of another mound, near Anderson’s Ferry, a few miles below Cincinnati.
The number of such implements in this region is astonishing; and
frequently the beauty of a piece of milky-quartz, yellow chert, or pure
rock crystal, appears to have stimulated the workman to his utmost
dexterity in the manufacture of serrated, dentated, and elaborately
finished blades of various forms.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.—Flint Spear-head, Indiana. (1/3).]
In the collections I have named, as well as in those of Mr. Cleneay and
Mr. James of Cincinnati, and of Mr. Merrin and Mr. Shrock of Newark, the
examples of flint and stone implements number many hundreds, and would
require a volume not less ample than Mr. John Evans’s comprehensive
monograph of _The Ancient Stone Implements_, _Weapons, and Ornaments of
Great Britain_, to illustrate their details. I shall limit myself here
to a few examples selected from among those peculiar to the neolithic
art of the New World which offer any suggestive hint relative to the
origin or use of objects already familiar to the archæologist.
Perforated teeth of bears and other animals occur among the mound
relics; shell beads are still more abundant; bone and horn pins and
lance-heads, and a peculiar class of stone implements, most frequently
made of a striated, grey or blue shale, perforated with two or more
holes, are all of common occurrence. The chief varieties are shown in
the _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, Fig. 136, p. 237.
Some of them bear so near a resemblance to the bracers, or guards, found
in British graves, and supposed to have been worn on the left arm to
protect it from the recoil of the string in the use of the bow, that I
am inclined to ascribe the same purpose to them. But others are curved
at the edges, and frequently of too large a size for this purpose. The
latter are also occasionally formed of copper. One example of this class
of implements, or personal decorations, obtained from the Lockport
mound, and now in the possession of Mr. Merrin, measures 5·30 by 3·80
inches.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.—Flint Awl, Mayville, Kentucky. FIG.
12.—Flint Drill, Cincinnati.]
The frequent occurrence of drilled and perforated stone and shell
implements, tubes, pipes, etc., accounts for the finding of a variety of
awls, or drills, made of flint and stone. Not only perforated
shell-gorgets, stone tablets or guards, plummets, and the like relics,
but also beads, bears’ teeth, and other pendants or personal ornaments
of various kinds, have been found in the mounds. They correspond to some
extent to a class of perforated shell and bone implements met with in
the ancient cave deposits of France and England; and the flint awls or
borers by which they were drilled have been recognised among the rarer
objects of the neolithic period found in England, France, Denmark, and
in the Swiss Lake-dwellings.[37] Figs. 11, 12 are good examples of two
types of such tools in use by the ancient flint-workers of the Ohio
Valley. Fig. 11 was found by its present owner, Mr. James Pierce, near
Mayville, Kentucky. The square butt which forms the handle retains the
natural shape of the block of yellow chert of which it is made, while
the chipped surfaces of the blade show the dark grey colour of the core.
Fig. 12 is a larger and ruder example of the flint drill, from the
collection of Dr. Hill, of Cincinnati, probably designed to be attached
to a wooden haft, and used for operations on a larger scale. A more
carefully finished small flint-awl, with a neatly worked handle, but
unfortunately broken at the point, was presented to me by Mr. Merrin, of
Newark, who picked it up in a field in that vicinity. A drill of a
different kind is shown in Fig. 13, also from the collection of Dr.
Hill.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.—Stone Drill, Cincinnati. FIG.
14.—Flint-Knife, Cincinnati.]
It is of diorite, and at the first glance might be taken for a stone
arrow-head. But it is worn perfectly smooth along its two edges,
especially towards the point, evidently from continuous use in the
perforation of some hard substance, such as might result in the
hollowing out of the bowl of a stone pipe: though such an instrument
would be called into use in many operations of the old flint-workers.
Knives and razors of diverse forms, and some of them finished with great
care, at times in very fantastic shapes, are also of frequent
occurrence. Their unusual shapes are probably in part due to the chance
fracture of the flint-flakes, specimens of which abound in the pits on
Flint Ridge, frequently requiring little manipulation to convert them
into cutting implements. Fig. 14 is a small knife of this class,
selected from several in the collection of Dr. Hill. It is made of
yellow chert, and has a keen cutting edge. But there is another class of
flint-knives not unfamiliar to European archæologists, of which
interesting examples occur. A good American specimen of the flint-core,
such as has been found in Kent’s Cavern, and elsewhere on British sites,
and is common among the neolithic relics of Denmark, is now in my
possession. It was picked up in the Granville valley, Licking county,
Ohio, not far from the famous Alligator Mound; and shows the facets from
which long curved flakes have been struck off. The curved form which the
flake naturally assumes is frequently retained in the finished
implements, along with three facets, forming an acute triangular blade,
coming to a sharp edge.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.—Flint Razor, Kentucky.]
The Mexican obsidian is characterised by the same fracture; and some of
the early Spanish writers enlarge on the keenness of the edge of the
obsidian razors, as scarcely inferior to those of steel, though they
speedily lose their edge. A good example of the flint razor is shown in
Fig. 15, from the collection of Mr. James Pierce of Mayville, Kentucky.
It is one of the outer flakes of the core, coming to a good edge on the
one side, and chipped to a broad back. Fitted with a wooden haft, it
would form a convenient cutting implement for many purposes. It is shown
here nearly 5-6ths of the original size. The natural cleavage of the
flint, thus controlling the forms which the fractured nodules assume,
has tended to beget certain classes of implements common to all the
stone periods of which we have any trace, from the palæolithic era of
the drift and cave-men to that of the flint-workers among savage tribes
of our own day. Horse-shoe, pear-shaped, oval, discoidal, and other
scrapers abound among the more familiar implements of the old American
flint-workers, reproducing all the forms common to the early stone
periods of Europe, and which have been minutely illustrated by Mr.
Evans.[38] But there is another type of scraper, of a more finished
character,
[Illustration: FIG. 16-17.—Flint Scrapers, Ohio.]
which frequently occurs among American flint implements, of which I am
not aware that any example has hitherto been noted in Europe. In its
more common form it might be mistaken at the first glance for a broken
arrow-head. But the repeated occurrence of examples of this type, with
the well-finished edge invariably inclining, with a curve, to the one
side, leaves no room for doubt as to its purpose as a scraper, designed
to be fastened to a haft, and used for fashioning needles, bodkins,
lance-heads, and other implements of ivory, bone, or horn. This type is
shown in Fig. 16, picked up in the neighbourhood of Newark. Fig. 17 is
another common form, with the edge wrought to one side, but with
slighter curve, or inclination otherwise to the side. Both of these are
figured the full size; but many specimens occur of larger sizes, and
varying curves of the blade, from a long horse-shoe to a broad crescent
shape. There are also arrow-heads of analogous forms, but with no curve
in the blade. Similar arrow-heads are now made by the Blackfeet Indians
out of iron hoops obtained from the Hudson Bay fur traders, and it is
said that with those a skilful marksman will behead a bird on the wing.
Others of the rarer forms of flint implements include foliated,
flamboyant, or fantastically-shaped arrow-heads, and the like
implements, of which an example is shown in Fig. 18, and for which it is
difficult to assign any specific use. Some of them, indeed, look like
the sports of an ingenious workman tempted by chance forms of the
fractured flint to try his hand at some fanciful knife, arrow-head, or
other implement of unwonted design.
[Illustration: FIG. 18.—Foliated Arrow-head.]
Discoidal stones, somewhat varying in form and size, are common in the
valley of the Ohio, and throughout the Southern States. Messrs. Squier
and Davis figure two examples found by them along with an unusually rich
deposit of choice relics, including several coiled serpents carved in
stone, and carefully enveloped in sheet mica and copper, under a mound
within the great earthwork of Paints Creek. The discoidal stones found
there are made of a very dense ferruginous stone, of a dark brown ground
interspersed with specks of yellow mica. Others are of granite,
porphyry, jasper, greenstone, and quartz, sometimes with concave
surfaces, or perforated with a funnel-shaped hollow on either side; but
always of a hard stone, and highly polished. One fine specimen in the
collection of Dr. Byrnes is of polished novaculite, and another of
quartz. The largest are about six inches in diameter, and are generally
finished with great symmetry. There is no doubt that such implements
were employed among the Southern Indians, subsequent to their being
visited by Europeans, in certain favourite games. Adair describes their
use; and adds that they were so highly valued “that they were kept with
the strictest religious care from one generation to another; and were
exempted from being buried with the dead.” It may be that in some of
them we have implements used in the games which formed a prominent part
in the sacred festivities, for which it is assumed that the great
geometrical earthworks were constructed. Indeed the perfect symmetry of
form in the majority of this class of relics seems to accord with the
idea of their having been fashioned by the race who have left such
gigantic memorials of their regard for geometrical configuration. One
perforated discoidal stone, of polished granite, which I examined at
Cincinnati, was dug up by Dr. J. H. Hunt, within a large earthwork at
Cleves, near the great Miami River; and another in the possession of Dr.
Byrnes was found in the vicinity of one of the great mounds on the Ohio.
Among the rarer stone implements which occur among the relics of
Europe’s neolithic arts are certain objects which, though of small size,
otherwise so closely resemble the most highly finished mining hammers
that they have been generally designated hammer-stones. A more careful
and discriminating study of them, however, has led to the assignment of
them to a totally different purpose. An example found near Ambleside,
Westmoreland, and figured in the _Archæological Journal_,[39] shows a
well-finished ovoid implement of stone, with a deep groove round the
middle. Others have been repeatedly found in the neighbourhood of the
English lakes, as well as in other localities; and as they show no
traces of being battered or worn from use in hammering, and are
frequently made of sandstone or other material unsuited for such a
purpose, they are now generally regarded as sinkers for nets or fishing
lines. Objects of nearly similar form, but most frequently made of
diorite, granite, or other equally hard rocks, occur among the stone
implements of the Ohio Valley. Many of them measure from 3 to 4 inches
long. But while in them also the absence of any marks of abrasion or
battering serves to show that they were not used as hammers, a hard and
heavy material appears to have been preferred in their construction.
Hence it has been surmised that they were the weights attached to a
hunting thong, or lasso; though they would equally serve as sinkers for
the fisherman’s nets. One of them, from a mound in Kentucky, is shown in
Fig. 19. It is of granite, and carefully finished, but a hard siliceous
concretion at one end has resisted the efforts of the workman to reduce
it to perfect symmetry. The attempt to determine the uses for which
implements were made, under circumstances so wholly different from
everything we are familiar with, is at best guesswork. But it seems
unlikely that so much labour and skill would be expended in fashioning
such intractable material into symmetrical shape for a mere net-sinker.
In the collection of Mr. Merrin is a large implement of the same form,
weighing fully eighteen pounds. It was found on the site of the Lockport
Mound, at Newark, along with numerous other stone, shell, mica, and
copper relics. Its size and weight at once suggest the idea of its use
as a miner’s maul; but it is made of sandstone, and retains no traces of
use as a hammer. It is equally inapplicable for the hunter’s lasso and
the fisher’s net; and if designed for a weight, must have been for some
very different purpose.
[Illustration: FIG. 19.—Lasso Stone, Kentucky.]
Among various novel relics of the Ohio Valley which attracted my notice
from their resemblance to others familiar to European archæologists, was
a class of cupped stones, very abundant in many localities. In 1867 Sir
James Y. Simpson published an elaborate and nearly exhaustive
disquisition on “Archaic stones and rocks in Scotland, England, and
other countries”; and about the same time Algernon, Duke of
Northumberland, undertook the illustration of the same class of relics
in his own district. The work was projected on a large scale, and did
not appear till after his death, when a large imperial folio was
produced, entitled “_Incised Markings on Stone found in the County of
Northumberland, Argyleshire, &c._” The simplest types of this class of
archaic sculpturings consist of rounded depressions, or “cups,” formed
in the surface of rocks and standing-stones, and varying from 1 to 3
inches in diameter. Those are scattered irregularly over the surface.
But another class has the cups surrounded by concentric rings, and with
lines leading from one group to another, with so much apparent system as
to have suggested the idea of their being specimens of primitive
chorography, not unlike the delineations which I have seen made by an
Indian on a bit of birch-bark, in order to indicate the geography of a
locality. They have, in fact, been supposed to be maps, whether of the
Celtic Britons, or of some older people, and to represent the chief
towns, or intrenched strongholds, and neighbouring villages or
encampments, with the roads leading from one to another. But while the
cup-like hollows constitute their main features, the accompanying linear
marks vary sufficiently to afford antiquarian fancy and conjecture ample
scope in assigning their origin or use. They have accordingly been
described as Phœnician, Druidical, Mithraic; as originating in the
worship of Baal, or of the Persian Sun-god; as the blood-focuses of
Druid altars; emblems of female Lingam worship; Sabean astronomical
devices; or as in some way or other recognisable as possessing a sacred
or religious character.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.—Cupped-stone, Ohio.]
Attention had not been long directed to the cup sculpturings in Britain,
when Professor Nilsson reported their occurrence on Scandinavian
standing-stones; Dr. Keller recognised their presence on the rocks and
boulders of Switzerland; and now it appears that they are no less common
in Ohio and Kentucky, and extend southward into Georgia and other states
of the Gulf. Fig. 20 represents a cupped sandstone block on the banks of
the Ohio, a little below Cincinnati. Others, much larger, were described
to me by Dr. Hill. One above Mayville has thirty-nine cups, and another,
close to the river’s bank, eighty of the same characteristic hollows,
with other linear and circular carvings. Mr. Charles C. Jones figures,
in his _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, a sculptured boulder of
fine-grained granite in Forsyth county, Georgia, which in more than one
respect is the precise counterpart of ancient British ring and cup
sculpturings. Like the cap-stone of the Bonnington Cromlech, the Old
Bewick block described by Sir J. Y. Simpson, and the Lancresse Cromlech
in the Channel Islands: the Georgia boulder has a row of cups, or
drilled holes, running along one side, while its surface is indented
with cup-like hollows from a half to three-quarters of an inch deep,
with concentric rings and connecting lines closely resembling the
sculpturings on some of the ancient Scottish stones. In Georgia they are
assumed to be the work of the Cherokees; but Mr. Jones adds: “No
interpretation of these figures has been offered, nor is it known by
whom or for what purpose they were made.”[40] But besides the large rock
sculptures, numerous small stones occur in the ploughed fields with
similar cups wrought in them. They are mostly of rough-grained
sandstone, frequently with several holes irregularly disposed on more
than one surface; and closely corresponding to examples figured by Dr.
Keller, some of which were procured from the lake-dwellings of
Neuchâtel. I gathered several specimens, and could have obtained many
more on Ohio farms, including both the smoothly hollowed cups, from one
to two and a half inches in diameter, and those where the hollow is
roughly picked out, or only partially worn into a smoothly rounded cup.
Some of those examples were found in neighbouring fields, while engaged
in excavating the Evans Mound, in Sharon Valley, near Newark, where also
I obtained both polished axes and mullers. The cupped stones were of a
coarse-grained sandstone, with the depressions occurring irregularly on
both sides, and occasionally so close as to run into each other. Into
these the rounded ends of the stone axes and pestles fitted, and the two
classes of objects seemed complements of each other. Here was the
roughly picked hollow, gradually worn into a smooth rounded depression,
in the process, as I conceive, of grinding the ends of stone axes,
maize-crushers, pestles, and the like implements, some of which fitted
exactly into the cups. As the hollow gradually wore too large, a new one
was made. The edges of the smaller cup-stones also frequently show
evidence of their use in grinding down the surfaces of such stone
implements. Such, however, is not the theory which finds favour in the
Ohio Valley. There the hickory, or native walnut, abounds, with its hard
shell, defying all ordinary efforts to reach the tempting kernel. But
the boys have learned to hunt up a cupped stone, and placing the nut in
its hollow, it is fractured at a blow with another stone, and its
contents secured. Hence such objects are called nut-stones; and Mr. C.
C. Jones, in his _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, has adopted both
the name and the idea implied in it, in spite of the occurrence of the
same cups or depressions on rocks and boulders altogether inapplicable
for such a purpose.[41]
[Illustration: FIG. 21.—Cupped Boulder, Tronton, Ohio.]
Whatever may have been the purpose of the cupped stones, they were not
unknown to the ancient Mound-Builders. Messrs. Squier and Davis state
that “in opening one of the mounds, a block of compact sandstone was
discovered, in which were several circular depressions, in all respects
resembling those in the work-blocks of coppersmiths, in which plates of
metal are hammered to give them convexity.” These accordingly they
suppose to have been the moulds in which the copper bosses and discs
were formed, of which numerous examples have been obtained from the
mounds.
A highly characteristic example of what may not inaptly be styled a
neolithic grindstone was found near Tronton, Ohio, in the summer of
1874. It is a large sandstone boulder, as shown in Fig. 21, covered with
cups, or pits; and also, as will be seen, with long grooves, which
suffice to prove its use as a stone for shaping and polishing tools.
This adds confirmation to the probable origin of the cups from a like
cause. Since I drew attention to the subject, I have been informed of
the discovery of numerous similarly indented and grooved rocks along the
shores of the Ohio river, including some of the hard granite, or
Laurentian boulders. But gritty sandstone rocks appear to have been
preferred.
The supposition that the cups on large boulders and small sandstone
grinders may alike be referred to the manipulations of the stone
tool-maker, leaves the more elaborate accompaniments of concentric rings
and linear devices unaccounted for; though it seems to me less
improbable that these additions—which are thus found among other traces
of the Cherokees and Shawnees of the new world, as well as amid the
remains of Europe’s prehistoric races,—may be no more than supplements
of an idle fancy added to the hollows which originated in the needful
grinding of flint and stone implements into their required forms, than
that they are mysterious religious symbols. Yet there is a fascination
in the idea that they are “archæological enigmas”: Phœnician, Mithraic,
Sabean, or Druidical; “lapidary hieroglyphics and symbols,” as Sir J. Y.
Simpson assumes, “the key to whose mysterious import has been lost, and
probably may never be regained.”[42] “They are,” he again says, “too
decidedly ‘things of the past’ for even the most traditional of human
races to have retained the slightest recollection of them”; and, as in
his attempt to determine the race to which to refer them he follows up
the glimpses of their occurrence beyond the British Isles, he asks: “Are
they common in countries which the Celtic race never reached? still
more, are they to be found in the lands of the Lap, Finlander, or
Basque, which apparently neither the Celt nor any other Aryan ever
occupied? Do they appear in Asia within the bounds of the Aryan or
Semitic races? Or can they be traced in Africa, or in any localities
belonging to the Hamitic branches of mankind? Do they exist upon the
stones or rocks of America or Polynesia?”[43] If my theory is correct,
they may be looked for in all. It is with tender memories of a dearly
valued friend that I render the response, that such sculptured cups do
exist upon the stones and rocks of America, and amply justify the
reference of those of the Old World to Europe’s neolithic age, when the
men of its polished Stone Period were grinding and working into
perfected form the most prized relics of their laborious art.
The explanation thus derived from the traces of America’s native savage
arts, in possible elucidation of a class of archaic European sculptures
which have been made the subject of such learned speculation and
research, may seem too artless to be substituted for theories of
religious symbolism or rites of worship. But the ancient evidences of
artistic labour in either hemisphere accord with the idea that man’s
earliest arts were of the most practical kind. He did, indeed, find
leisure to ornament the tools designed for common uses; and gave play to
his imitative faculty in drawings and carvings which answered no other
end than the pleasure the draughtsman in all ages has derived from the
manifestation of his skill in the arts. But the grafting of recondite
theories of symbolism and ritualistic devices either on such
delineations, or on the simpler evidences of his handiwork, is apt to
lead us astray into fanciful and profitless speculations, wholly apart
from the true significance of such traces of primitive mechanical
ingenuity as reveal the presence of man even on the skirts of ancient
glaciers, and among the drift-gravels, of Europe’s post-pleiocene dawn.
-----
[33] _Archæologia_, vol. xlii. p. 68.
[34] _Journ. Ethnol. Soc. N.S._, vol. ii. p. 419.
[35] _Journ. Geol. Soc. Lond._, vol. xvii. pp. 322, 368; vol. xviii. p.
113, etc.
[36] _Report of Explorations of the Colorado of the West and its
Tributaries_, p. 27.
[37] _Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain_, p. 289.
[38] _Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain_, pp. 270-277.
[39] _Archæol. Journ._, vol. x. p. 64.
[40] _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 378.
[41] _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 315-320.
[42] _Archaic Sculpturings_, p. 92.
[43] _Ibid._, p. 147.