GROUND STONE
MORTARS AND PESTLES
Classification of mortars and pestles.
Mortars.
(a) Oval or circular. (Figs. 501–02.)
(b) Angular or squared (metates). (Figs. 415–16.)
(c) Pointed. (Fig. 511, top row.)
Pestles.
(a) Elongated, plain. (Fig. 517.)
(b) Elongated, ridged or ornamented. (Figs. 513–14.)
(c) Bell-shaped. (Fig. 503.)
(d) With flat surfaces (mano-stones). (Fig. 515.)
There grew in North America, at the time of its discovery by Columbus, a
profusion of seeds, nuts, and roots of various kinds, developing
according to climate from northern Canada to southern Arizona. Man found
these a valuable addition to his food-supply, and he made use of many of
them that we of to-day should consider unpalatable. He procured
shell-fish of various kinds both salt and fresh water; he knew the
properties of many roots, bulbs, barks, and other plants. With the
exception of such molluscs as he ate, and his fresh meat, the greater
bulk of his food-supply was in the form of kernels, or grains, or bulbs,
or nuts, which must needs be reduced to meal, or stripped of husks, or
cracked and broken. To convert the raw food into palatable flour, he
used both wooden and stone pestles in flat, oval, or round mortars, the
form varying in different parts of the country.
In 1895, the American Antiquarian Society published “The Food of Certain
American Indians and Their Method of Preparing It,” by Professor Lucien
Carr. Mr. Carr was long Assistant Curator of the Peabody Museum at
Cambridge, and his research into historic Indian affairs is well known.
I quote a few paragraphs from Mr. Carr:—
[Illustration:
FIG. 501. (S. 1–8.) From the collection of Solon McCoy, Mountain Home,
Idaho.
]
“Speaking in a general way, the old chronicler was not far wrong when he
told us that the Indian ‘lived on what he got by hunting, fishing, and
cultivating the soil.’ Unquestionably, he derived the bulk of his food
from these sources, though there were times, and unfortunately they were
somewhat frequent, when he was glad to fill out his bill of fare with
the fruits, nuts, and edible roots and grasses with which a bountiful
Nature supplied him. Dividing all these different articles according to
their nature and origin, and beginning with those the production of
which is believed to indicate racial progress, we find that corn, beans,
and pumpkins were cultivated wherever, within the limits of the United
States, they could be grown to advantage. Of these corn was by far the
most important; and as it seems to have been the main dependence of all
the tribes that lived south of the St. Lawrence and east of the tier of
states that line the west bank of the Mississippi, and as the manner of
cultivating it and the different ways of cooking it were practically the
same everywhere and at all times, we shall confine our remarks to it and
to the Indians living within these limits, merely premising that much of
what is said about it will apply to ‘its sisters,’ as beans and squashes
were lovingly termed by the Iroquois.
[Illustration:
FIG. 502. (S. 1–3.) Ordinary mortar. Collection of Frank L. Grove,
Delaware, Ohio.
]
“And here, at the outset of our investigation, we are met by the fact
that modern research has failed to throw a positive light upon the
question of its origin. That it was indigenous to America is generally
believed, and so, also, the statement that it was first cultivated at
some point between the tropics is accepted. Beyond this we have not been
able to go; and without entering into a discussion of the subject, it is
probably safe to assume that this is as near the truth as we can hope to
get. However, be this as it may, there seems to be no doubt that its
domestication took place ages ago, for in no other way is it thought
possible to account for the vast extent of country over which its use
had spread, and for the number of varieties to which it had given rise.
Take our own country, for example, and when the whites first landed
here, there were found growing, within certain limited areas, a number
of different kinds, distinguished one from another, by the length of
time they took to ripen, by the size of the ear, by the shape and
hardness of the grain, and by the color, though this is said to be
accidental.
[Illustration:
FIG. 503. (S. 1–4.) Pestles, Class “C.” Collection of J. A. Rayner,
Piqua, Ohio.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 504. (S. 1–5.) Collection of W. A. Holmes, Chicago, Illinois.
]
“In addition to these, which were known to the whites as hominy corn,
bread corn, and six-weeks corn, there was still another sort, called by
the French _blé fleuri_, and by ourselves popcorn, of which the Indians
were very fond, and which they served up to those of their guests whom
they wished to honor. With so many kinds, and planting them at different
times during the spring and early summer, they not only had successive
crops, which they ate green as long as the season lasted, but they also
raised enough for winter use, and, not unfrequently, had some to spare
to their needy neighbors, white as well as red. Indeed, their pedlers
made long trips for the purpose of exchanging their surplus corn for
skins and anything else that they needed; and but for the supplies which
the Pilgrim fathers, and we may add the settlers at Jamestown and New
Orleans, ‘obtained from the Indians willingly or through force,’ it is
probable, as a recent writer suggests,’that there would have been but
few if any of their descendants left to write their histories and sing
their praises.’”
The cultivation of corn in the United States was widespread. De Soto,
Coronado, and other early explorers in their wanderings, as well as our
military expeditions of the French and Indian War, the wars of the
Revolution and of 1812, found large corn-fields wherever the Indian
population was thickest.
In addition to corn, which is placed first, the Indians gathered wild
rice in the North and koonti and tuckahoe in the South. Of these roots,
it is stated: “It grew like a flagge, in the marshes, and when made into
bread had the ‘taste of potatoes.’” There were also great stores of
dried meat and fish put up in every village, quantities of maple sugar,
squashes, beans, pumpkins, and an endless variety of roots and nuts.
We now know that there are seventeen separate foods for which
civilization is indebted to the Indian.
[Illustration:
FIG. 504 _A_. (S. 1–4.) From the collection of B. H. Young,
Louisville, Kentucky. Rare forms of pestles from the Cumberland and
Tennessee valleys.
]
What we should consider the simplest form of mortar is a question. Of
course, the mortar, rather than the pestle, is the essential thing. Man
must have something in which to grind or crush his food, and it did not
matter to him whether the receptacle was wood, stone, or leather so long
as it served the purpose, and it was of no consequence to him whether
his pestle was a round stone, an oval, an elongated pestle or
bell-shaped, or a flat mano stone. What he wished to accomplish, the
reduction of grains or nuts or chunks of dried beef to flour, was of
primary importance, and the agencies employed to obtain this result were
secondary. Of course, he may have used elaborately ornamented and
artistically worked pestles and mortars in the preparation of sacred
meal; as to that I do not know. What I am talking about now is the
common form of mortar and pestle.
[Illustration:
FIG. 505. (S. 1–4.) Cast of a steatite bowl. Found near Lynn.
Collection of Salem Museum. Salem, Massachusetts.
]
Wooden mortars, as well as wooden bowls, existed in many portions of the
country. There are abundant historical references to these, and readers
are referred to the Bibliography in this instance as in others. The
natives smoothed the surface of a fallen tree-trunk, or the top of a
stump, and, by constant friction of either stone or wooden pestle, soon
wore out a mortar cavity. They also selected glacial boulders,
convenient points of bluffs, ledges, etc., in various parts of the
country, and worked out stationary mortars. These have been found in at
least a hundred places in the United States. Aside from the stationary
mortars, there were many small flat stones, and some large stones of
convenient size on which grinding is evident for a considerable length
of time, and as a result a depression varying from a few inches to a
foot or more in depth occurs.
Paint stones are simply small mortars. Sometimes they are highly
polished and well worked out, but usually they are rude and may be
classed as small mortars, as they are receptacles for grinding. Fig.
501, from the collection of Mr. Solon McCoy of Mountain Home, Idaho,
illustrates seven short pestles and seven small mortars, size one
eighth, such as are common in the Southwest and not infrequent in most
portions of the East. This illustration may stand as typical for all
such forms in the United States. The pestles used in them were more
properly rubbing-stones; the end is slightly flattened, more often they
are round at either end. Great numbers of short oval pestles occur in
the New England States, and the South. Fig. 504, from Mr. Holmes’s
collection, illustrates three stone pestles; the one to the left may
have come from any one of a dozen states, as the form is the same
everywhere; to the right, the typical bell-shaped pestles of the Ohio
Valley. In the centre, the pestle is bell-shaped, short, and has been
highly polished, and there is a prominent depression in the centre.
Fig. 503, from the collection of Mr. J. A. Rayner, pictures fifteen
pestles; all save four of the bell-shaped variety. The one at the top,
the centre, is an ordinary cone, to the right of that, a pestle with two
grinding surfaces, one at either end, which is rare. In the centre are
two long, slightly curved objects which may be pestles or rollers used
in preparing clay for the making of pottery. The variation in the bell
pestle is from an ordinary plain form to that having a narrow top and an
unusually broad, flat base. The pestles shown at the right in Fig. 514
are highly specialized forms from the Northwest. There are similar types
in the Ohio Valley, as shown in Fig. 504 A, Colonel Young’s collection.
But as a rule the natives of the Mississippi Valley paid little
attention to artistic development of domestic tools, such as pestles and
mortars. Fig. 502 is the ordinary large stone mortar common in the
eastern United States. It ranges from a small paint-cup in which a
muller no larger than one’s thumb was worked, to stationary mortars in
glacial boulders, so large that they cannot be moved. Fig. 507 presents
three mortars of lava, and some flat mortars of trap rock. These are
from Mr. G. B. Abbott’s collection, Corning, California. The stones used
on these are flat, or oval water-worn stones and not finished, like mano
stones common to the Cliff-Dweller country.
[Illustration:
FIG. 506. (S. 1–4.) Soapstone dish. From the Peabody Museum
collection, Salem, Massachusetts.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 507. (S. 1–9.) From the collection of G. B. Abbott, Corning,
California.
]
In the East and the South we have steatite or soapstone mortars,
cooking-pots, dishes, bowls, and sometimes dippers. Most of the larger
museums have examples of these and particularly in highly finished stone
dishes. Fig. 505 is a large, thin stone dish from the Peabody Museum,
Salem, which was found near Lynn. Fig. 508 presents four soapstone
dishes, two of them dipper-like in form. The three upper ones are
finished and polished, while the lower specimen has been pecked into
shape but not polished.
[Illustration:
FIG. 508. (S. about 1–5.) Soapstone bowls. Collection of Peabody
Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
]
The quarries from which these dishes are obtained are found in New
England, in the Potomac region, and in the South. Professor Holmes made
them the subject of study. It seems that the natives worked around the
mass they wished to remove and shaped it _in situ_, cutting a deep
trench entirely around it, and when the dish had been brought into high
relief, they cut away the narrow base and removed it. Numbers of
unfinished dishes in position in the original ledge have been reported.
[Illustration:
FIG. 509. (S. 1–6.) A portion of the collection of J. G. Crawford,
Albany, Oregon. The peculiar objects above the central mortar are
interesting. Similar ones have been found in the far Northwest. The
purpose of such is at present a mystery. These were found in various
portions of Oregon, not far above the mouth of the Columbia River.
]
Widespread as was the use of steatite in the East for mortars and dishes
and of harder materials for mortars in which heavy grinding was to be
done, it is in the Southwest, California, and the Rocky Mountains where
more millstones are found than elsewhere in the United States. The
Southwestern metate (see Fig. 515) is well known to students of
archæology. All the museums have on exhibition hundreds of these, and we
have in our museum at Andover, a hundred or more of them. They vary from
small slabs, presenting a flat surface, to deeply worn rectangular and
square specimens, some of which are two feet in breadth and will weigh a
hundred pounds. These were in common use about the pueblos and
cliff-houses. In our museum and elsewhere there are metates that have
seen service for so many years that they are worn entirely through.
On these metates a flat stone, known as a mano stone, was used, taking
the place of the Eastern roller or bell-pestle. It was pushed back and
forth with the hand. In the Southwest, California, and Mexico some of
the metates are highly ornamented, and have legs, which raised the body
of the stone several inches from the ground. When I visited the Chaco
Group, in 1897, I saw several hundred metates scattered about on the
surface near the ruins. In explorations near Phœnix, Arizona, in
November, 1897, to June, 1898, I collected more than ninety good
metates. In Kelley Cavern, the Ozark Mountains, which was explored by
Dr. Charles Peabody and myself in May, 1908, we found thirty-seven stone
mills in one cave alone, and that cavern was no more than two hundred
feet across the front and about a hundred feet deep.
Mr. J. B. Lewis of Petaluma, California, now deceased, sent me the
photograph of a remarkable collection of California mortars. After
shipping generous quantities to various scientific institutions in the
East, Mr. Lewis still had several hundred in his possession. He
constructed an outdoor cabinet of plank and placed thereon a portion of
his collection. Fig. 511 illustrates a number of his specimens. It will
be observed, by comparison with the figure of Mr. Lewis who is standing
at the right of his cabinet, that the largest mortars at the bottom are
not upright but are placed at an angle. These mortars range from two
feet in diameter to those about a foot high. Many of these weigh as much
as seventy-five or a hundred pounds each. The smaller mortars are on the
upper rows.
Mr. Lewis, during the last two years of his life, wrote me many
interesting letters regarding the character of the various stone objects
found in his region. He was a keen observer, and during his fifty years
of residence at Petaluma he became thoroughly familiar with the various
prehistoric sites in that part of California. While I make substantial
quotations from these letters, I change his language slightly:—
[Illustration:
FIG. 510. (S. varying.) Stone bowls from a cache near San Fernando,
California.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 511. Collection of J. B. Lewis, Petaluma, California. Mr. Lewis,
who stands at the right, was fifty years in making this collection.
]
“On Sonoma Mountain, seven miles from Petaluma, is a depression in the
hills in which the winter rains are collected, forming a large lake or
lagoon of two hundred acres, called by the Indians Lagoon La Jara,
formerly covered with a tall growth of tules, the home of geese and
ducks and blackbirds in their season. Some forty years since, it was
drained and brought under cultivation. On ploughing, stones were brought
to light called ‘ceremonial sinkers,’ plumbs, etc. As time passes fewer
are found, until now only three or four a year.”
Mr. Lewis, who lived within two miles of the lake, procured half of the
objects thus discovered. Many of them are shown in Fig. 383. Another
collector has secured four hundred. In the summer the lagoon was dry or
nearly so. There was neither inlet nor outlet and no fish lived in its
waters. Therefore the stones were not made use of as sinkers.
[Illustration:
FIG. 512. (S. 1–10.) From the collection of H. K. Deisher, Kutztown,
Pennsylvania.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 513. (S. 1–4.) Long effigy pestle. Butler farm, northwest part of
Turkey Hill, Ipswich. From the collection of Peabody Museum, Salem,
Massachusetts.
]
“When I came here in the early fifties, there used large numbers of
Indians go by my ranch in the fall, down to the creek to catch sturgeon
and dry them, and they always went back by the way of the lagoon and
stayed a day or two and had some kind of a pow-wow. After the lagoon was
drained, they never came back.”
Mr. Lewis, on arrival in California, heard that a numerous tribe living
near Petaluma was practically exterminated by some contagious disease.
He believed that the Indians returning annually to hold ceremonies at
the lagoon belonged to this tribe.
[Illustration:
FIG. 514. (S. 1–4.) From the collection of Beloit College, Beloit,
Wisconsin.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 515. (S. 1–6.) From the collection of W. A. Holmes, Chicago,
Illinois.
]
It is interesting to note that during the years of Mr. Lewis’s
observations he found that the mortars with straight sides and flat
bottoms occurred near Sonoma Mountain, where boulders of basalt are
common. But in the sandy hills west of Petaluma pointed or urn-shaped
mortars, such as are shown on the top shelf of Fig. 511, are found in
some numbers. It is clear, he states, that the various types of mortars
were confined to certain regions. He knew of only two mortars found in
Indian graves. In one instance, where a mortar was buried with an
Indian, the skull was pierced by a flint point. Near Santa Rosa, twenty
miles from his home, a large spring was cleaned out, and in it were
found numerous objects of stone. Mr. Lewis states that he never found a
mortar and pestle placed together. They were usually found separate.
While the plummets and so-called sinkers are found scattered throughout
this region, yet nine tenths of his collection came from the lagoon
previously mentioned. Not only has he found mortars upon the surface,
but specimens have been dug up from a depth of twelve feet in the
ground. The cavities may be large or small, independent of size of
mortar. Of his entire collection of two hundred and fifty mortars he
states that seventy-five had holes in the bottom, seventy-five were more
or less broken, fifty were considered fair specimens, and about fifty
were perfect. The late Mr. Horatio N. Rust, an observer of much
experience in California archæology, described an interesting cache of
stone bowls some years ago.[18] I quote his article:—
“Mr. H. W. Hunt, of San Fernando, California, has been tilling for
several years the site of an old Indian village, and in doing so has
unearthed fragments of not fewer than thirty Indian bowls, but no whole
specimen. A short time ago, while ploughing, he encountered a stone, and
in digging it out discovered a cache of twenty-one sandstone bowls (see
Fig. 510) carefully packed together in a space not exceeding four or
five feet. On Mr. Hunt’s invitation I personally examined the contents
of this interesting cache, finding the bowls quite symmetrical and all
except one in perfect condition.
“These utensils measure about ten inches in greatest diameter, and from
seven to ten inches across the bottom; they are about one and one fourth
inches in thickness at the rim. A shallow groove is cut in the edge of
the rim of each vessel, in which shell beads are set in asphaltum. About
midway in the inside of one of the bowls a series of holes, about one
fourth of an inch in depth and diameter, is cut, and in each of these
holes a shell bead is set in asphaltum. These inset beads represent the
only attempt at ornamentation.
“After carefully examining the field in which these vessels were found I
reached the conclusion that the thirty broken bowls indicated the former
occupancy of the site by a village of considerable size, and that they
had been broken by an enemy rather than through use. I was led also to
the belief that the villagers had been killed and many of their vessels
destroyed, but that the predatory enemy had failed to find the cache of
bowls, which had been secreted by their owners in fear of such an
attack.
“This conclusion was reached in view of the experience gained from the
examination of many village-sites in California. On one occasion, at a
site south of San Jacinto Mountain, I discovered twenty-five stone
mortars, within the radius of a mile, all of which had been broken by
violence, evidently by an enemy for the purpose of depriving the
villagers of an important means of preparing food. Beside these mortars,
I found a slab of green talc, about eight by fifteen inches, and three
slabs of sandstone of about the same width and length and one and one
fourth inches in thickness. Fragments of similar sandstone slabs have
been found near the same site, but no pestles or other artifacts that
had not been broken, a circumstance that would seem to indicate that
everything had been either stolen or deliberately destroyed.”
[Illustration:
FIG. 516. (S. 1–5.) From the collection of James A. Barr, Stockton,
California.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 517. (S. about 1–6.) Found at Riverside, Rhode Island. Material:
greenish black slate. Collection of S. R. Turner, Riverside, Rhode
Island.
]
On the top shelf of Mr. Lewis’s exhibit in Fig. 511 are pointed mortars
such as I have placed under classification “C.” Usually these are of
volcanic rock, worked down light and rather thin. They were pointed in
order that they might be thrust into soft earth, or swampy places where
certain reeds and roots abounded, they being held in position by the
nature of the soil, while the women ground grain.
[Illustration:
FIG. 518. (S. 1–3.) Stone bowl from the collection of H. S. Hurlbutt,
Libertyville, Illinois.
]
Fig. 517 is a long, beautifully polished, roller pestle, about
twenty-six inches in length and owned by Mr. S. R. Turner, Riverside,
Rhode Island, and Fig. 513 is a roller pestle with an effigy head carved
at one end. It is impossible to determine what this effigy represents.
This is from the Salem collection, was found near Ipswich, and is about
thirty inches in length.
Doubtless there are not a few objects classed as mortars which were food
receptacles. I have included several in this chapter. The conditions
under which some of these more highly finished bowls are found leads us
to admit ignorance of their true meaning.
Fig. 518 is a delicate stone bowl from Illinois; Fig. 519 is a limestone
bowl, shown one third size. This was found in the oblong mound of the
Hopewell Group in 1901, by our survey. Neither of these specimens is to
be classed as a mortar. Both are highly finished, and the limestone bowl
is an unusual specimen, nothing just like it having been found in
America. We cannot imagine that these were made use of to contain
ordinary food.
[Illustration:
FIG. 519. (S. about 1–3.) Stone bowl of twelve or thirteen pounds
weight. Cut from solid limestone. It is somewhat like the type of
bowls found on the Pacific Coast, and nothing comparable to it has
been discovered in our Ohio Valley mounds.
]
Mr. C. E. Brown writes of his region:—
“A small number of stone pestles have been found in Wisconsin, and a few
hollowed-out stones which appear to have been employed as mortars. The
Wisconsin savages employed wooden mortars for crushing their corn and
wild rice. These were hollows cut into the side of logs or made of
sections of logs hollowed out. Wooden pestles were employed with these.
At Lake Winnebago and elsewhere in the Fox River Valley are large
boulders upon the tops of which are shallow depressions in which the
Indians of recent times are known to have ground corn.”
[Illustration:
FIG. 519 _A_. (S. 1–7.) Two are of steatite, and one of limestone.
They were found in eastern Kentucky. From the collection of B. H.
Young, Louisville, Kentucky.
]
There are no special conclusions to be reached with reference to mortars
and pestles. An inspection, in any public museum, of collections from
the Northwest Coast, Pacific Coast, and New England will acquaint the
readers with the fact that both the mortar and the pestle were sometimes
highly ornamented and worked into fanciful forms. Fig. 516, a remarkable
metate from Professor Barr’s collection, is an illustration of the point
I have in mind. Metates of this character are common in Mexico and
Central America. Those who have studied symbolism see evidences of
phallic worship in many of the pestles from California and the
Northwest. The range in all tools and receptacles needed in the Indian’s
domestic science, is considerable, and covers the entire field from the
rough pebble to the effigy pestle, or the metate, almost table-like in
character.