Whether or not the mammoth and mastodon had been contemporary with man, their remains were objects of sufficiently striking magnitude to awaken the curiosity even of the unimpressible Indian; and traditions were common among the aborigines relative to their existence and destruction. M. Fabri, a French officer, informed Buffon that they ascribed those bones to an animal which they named thePère aux Bœufs. Among the Shawnees, and other southern tribes, the belief was current that the mastodon once occupied the continent along with a race of giants of corresponding proportions, and that both perished together by the thunderbolts of the Great Spirit. Another Indian tradition of Virginia told that these monstrous quadrupeds had assembled together, and were destroying the herds of deer and bisons, with the other animals created by the Great Spirit for the use of his red children, when he slew them all with his thunderbolts, excepting the big bull, who defiantly presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them off as they fell; until, being at length wounded, he fled to the region of the great lakes, where he is to this day.
The first notice in an English scientific journal of the fossil mammals of the American drift furnishes such a counterpart to the Shawnee traditions of extinct giants as might teach a lesson to modern speculators in science; when it is borne in remembrance that the difficulty now is to reconcile with preconceived beliefs the discovery of works of human art alongside of their remains. In 1712, certain gigantic bones, which would now most probably be referred to the mastodon, were found near Cluverack, in New England. The famous Dr. Increase Mather soon after communicated the discovery to the Royal Society of London; and an abstract in thePhilosophical Transactionsduly set forth his opinion of this supposed confirmation of the existence of men of prodigious stature in the antediluvian world, as proved by the bones and teeth, which he judged to be human, “particularly a tooth, which was a very large grinder, weighing four pounds and three-quarters, with a thigh bone seventeen feet long.”[24]They were doubtless looked upon with no little satisfaction by Dr. Mather, as a striking confirmation of the Mosaic record, that “there were giants in those days.” To have doubted the New England philosopher’s conclusions might have been even more dangerous then than to believe them now. Possibly, after the lapse of another century and a half, some of our own confused minglings of religious questions with scientific investigations will not seem less foolish than the antediluvian giants of the New England divine.
In all that relates to the history of man in the New World, we have ever to reserve ourselves for further truths. There are languages of living tribes, of which we have neither vocabulary nor grammar. There are nations of whose physical aspect we scarcely know anything; and areas where it is a moot point even now, whether the ancient civilisation of central America may not be still a living thing. The ossiferous caves of England have only revealed their wonders during the present century, and the works of art in the French drift lay concealed till our own day. We cannot, therefore, even guess what America’s disclosures will be. Discoveries in its ossiferous caverns have already pointed to the same conclusions as those of Europe. A cabinet of the British Museum is filled with fossil bones of mammalia, obtained by Dr. Lund and M. Claussen from limestone caverns in the Brazils, closely resembling the ossiferous caves of Europe. The relics were imbedded in a reddish-coloured loam, covered over with a thick stalagmitic flooring; and along with them lay numerous bones of genera still inhabiting the continent, with shells of the largebulimus, a common terrestrial mollusc of South America.
No clear line of demarcation can be traced here between the era of the extinct carnivora and edentata, and those of existing species; and there is therefore no greater cause of wonder than in the analogous examples of Europe, to learn that in the same detritus of those Brazilian caves Dr. Lund found human skeletons, which he believed to be coeval with some of the extinct mammalia. Nor have the first disclosures of works of art in the American drift still to be made. I have in my possession an imperfect flint-knife (Fig. 1), to all appearance as unquestionable a relic of human art as the most symmetrical of those assigned to a similar origin by the explorers of the French and English drift-gravels. It was given to me by Mr. P. A. Scott, an intelligent Canadian, who found it at a depth of upwards of fourteen feet, among the rolled gravel and gold-bearing quartz of the Grinell Leads, in Kansas Territory, while engaged in digging for gold. In an alluvial bottom, in the Blue Range of the Rocky Mountains, distant several hundred feet from a small stream called Clear Creek, a shaft was sunk, passing through four feet of rich black soil, and below this, through upwards of ten feet of gravel, reddish clay, and rounded quartz. Here the flint implement was found, and its unmistakably artificial origin so impressed the finder, that he secured it, and carefully noted the depth at which it lay.
Fig. 1.—Flint-Knife, Grinell Leads.
Fig. 1.—Flint-Knife, Grinell Leads.
It is difficult at present to test such chance evidence accurately. The discovery of the palæolithic implements of Europe had been recorded upwards of half a century before their true significance was recognised; whereas the American explorer is on the look-out for similar disclosures, and evinces at times a feeling as though the honour of his country is imperilled if he fail. It will be seen, moreover, from the narrative of a subsequent chapter, that the abundance of flint and stone implements in the virgin soil of the New World is almost marvellous. The discovery, therefore, of stray specimens in modern river-gravels, the washings of gold-drift, or in any excavations liable to be affected by surface admixtures, must be viewed with the utmost caution. Several flint implements from the auriferous gravel of California were produced at the Paris Exposition of 1855. According to the geological survey of Illinois, for 1866, the bones of the mastodon and other fossil mammals have been found in a bed of “local drift” near Alton, underlying the Loess; and at the same depth stone axes and flint spear-heads were obtained.[25]
But such disclosures of worked flints or polished implements of stone are cast into the shade by the reputed discovery of human remains in the auriferous drift of California. In 1857 Dr. C. F. Winslow produced a fragment of a human skull found eighteen feet below the surface, in the “pay drift,” at Table Mountain, in connection with the bones of the mastodon and fossil elephant. A later disclosure brought to light a complete human skull, reported to have been discovered in auriferous gravel, underlying five successive lava formations. Professor Whitney, after satisfying himself of the genuineness of the discovery, produced the skull at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1869, to the manifest delight of some who were prepared at once to relegate American man to a remoter epoch than the Flint-folk of the Abbeville and Amiens gravel drift. More recently a highly polished plummet of syenite, in the form of a double cone perforated at one end, was produced before the Chicago Academy of Sciences, as an implement found at a depth of thirty feet, in the drift-gravel of San Joaquin, California, by some workmen engaged in digging a well. In this case also Professor Whitney appears to have had no hesitation in assigning it to the age of the fossil elephant and mastodon. It does not seem to have been recognised how much more probable it is that a highly finished stone implement like the San Joaquin plummet should fall from the surface, in the process of excavation, and so be perhaps no older than the era of the Mexican conquest, than that it is a choice specimen of post-pleiocene art.
Much of the evidence hitherto adduced for the antiquity of the American man has a singularly modern aspect. The human skulls are of the predominant Indian type of the present day, though that need not surprise us. Dr. Usher only notes this in the case of the “human fossils” from the Brazil Caves, to add: “this consideration may spare science the trouble of any further speculation on themodusthrough which the New World became peopled from the Old; for after carrying backwards the existence of a people monumentally into the very night of time, when we find that they have also preserved the same type back to a remote, even to a geological, period, there can be no necessity for going abroad to seek their origin.”[26]The question of this fancied American type will come under review hereafter. But on a par with this evidence are fragments of baskets and clay vessels submitted to the New Orleans Academy of Sciences in 1867, as contemporary with the elephant and other fossil mammals, the bones of which were found in digging the same salt-pits in which the pottery and basket-work were met with; or a fragment of cane-matting presented to the Smithsonian Institution in 1866 by Mr. J. F. Cleu, along with portions of tusks and teeth of the fossil elephant which lay above it, at a depth of thirteen feet in a Louisiana salt mine. Matting, or basket-work, of split cane is as common among the contents of southern Indian graves as fragments of pottery; and both may be reasonably suspected to carry with them evidence inconsistent with any geological antiquity.
Fig. 2.—Lewiston Flint Implement. (5/7).
Fig. 2.—Lewiston Flint Implement. (5/7).
Mr. Charles C. Jones notes a discovery of a more suggestive character, due also to the search for gold. In the state of Georgia the river Chattahoochee flows through an auriferous region of the Nacoochee valley. From time to time the gold-diggers have made extensive cuttings through the soil and underlying drift-gravel, down to the slate-rock upon which it rests. During one of these excavations, at a depth of some nine feet, intermingled with the gravel and boulders of the drift, three large flint implements were found, measuring between three and four inches in length, and “in material, manner of construction, and appearance so nearly resembling some of the rough so-called flint hatchets belonging to the drift-type that they might very readily be mistaken the one for the others.”[27]With those may not unfitly be classed a large implement of hornstone, now in the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries, obtained by me from a dealer in Indian curiosities at Lewiston in the State of New York, where it was said to have been found at a great depth when sinking a well. Its form, though common enough among the implements of the American Mound-Builders, rarely, if ever, occurs on so large a scale in Europe, except among palæolithic remains. Ovoid discs of the same class attracted the attention of the Rev. J. MacEnery in his early explorations of Kent’s Cavern, and have anew been brought to light in the recent systematic researches there. Mr. Evans figures one found there in 1866 (Fig. 3), somewhat smaller, and more ovoid in outline, but of the same type. The Lewiston implement is shown in Fig. 2. It has been reduced to the present shape by comparatively few strokes; and on the reverse side it appears as if broken off by a final ill-directed blow. One edge is worn and fractured as if by frequent use. Unfortunately more minute information of the locality and the circumstances attendant on its discovery could not be obtained. But even if it be regarded as only a stray relic of the same class as those hereafter described among the ancient mound deposits of Wisconsin and Ohio, it possesses a novel interest from its discovery near the banks of the Niagara River, where no traces of the Mound-Builders or their arts occur. Mr. Evans permits me to introduce here the analogous example from Kent’s Cavern. It is of grey cherty flint, and chipped on both faces with more than wonted care. Though smaller than the Lewiston implement, the difference is only about half an inch; the larger of the two being a little over five inches long. I have purposely engraved the Lewiston disc on a large scale, in order to suggest more clearly the proportions of this class of implements; and to show the close analogy traceable between those of the American continent, and the European disclosures of the river and cave drift.
Fig. 3.—Flint Disc, Kent’s Cavern. (½).
Fig. 3.—Flint Disc, Kent’s Cavern. (½).
Such, then, are some of the indications which have been assumed to point to the ancient presence of man in the New World. If we estimate this by historical, and not by geological periods, whatever proofs of his antiquity archæology may supply will be found to accord with other evidence; and especially with proofs furnished by the multitude of independent languages, and the diversity of types of race, ranging from the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego. But it would be rash to assume from the partial evidence yet obtained, that the juxtaposition of flint arrow-heads with the mastodon of Missouri, the pottery with bones and tusk of the same animal in the post-pleiocene of South Carolina, the human bones in the rich ossiferous caverns of the Brazils, or the flint implements, and human remains recovered from Californian and other auriferous drifts, unquestionably prove the existence of man on the American continent contemporaneously with the fossil elephant or the mastodon.
The proofs hitherto adduced have been at best only suggestive of further research. There is no question that Dr. Lund visited that portion of Brazil lying between the Rio das Velhas and the Rio Paraopeba, with very important palæontological results. He there found a mountain chain of limestone rock, abounding with fissures and caverns; and from some of these calcareous caves he recovered, not only the bones of numerous fossil mammals imbedded in red earth, but also human bones which he pronounced to be fossil. The remains included not only those of sloths and armadillos of gigantic size, but also extinct genera of monkeys, all assumed to have been contemporaries of the fossil cave-men. But experience is teaching the palæontologist that the mere recovery of bones or implements from the same cave is no proof of contemporaneity. A cave which had been filled with cave-earth and bone breccia, together with extinct animals of the period of theglyptodonand themylodon, may in a long subsequent era have become the shelter or the place of sepulture of Indians.
Nearly forty years have elapsed since Dr. Lund’s discovery. Since then the lamented Agassiz has visited Brazil with valuable results to science; but no additional light has been thrown on the significance of the disclosures of this interesting locality. One important fact, however, has not only been admitted, but insisted upon. The crania of the fossil men of Brazil betray no traces of approximation to that of the fossil monkey, but on the contrary differ in no respect from the predominant American Indian type; and the same has since been affirmed of a set of human skulls now in the Smithsonian collection, which were found incrusted with stalagmite, in a limestone cave in Calaveras County, California. Their fossil character and extreme antiquity were at first assumed to be indisputable. In this other respect they correspond with the Brazilian fossil remains. Professor Jeffreys Wyman reported of them that they present “no peculiarities by which they could be distinguished from other crania of California.”[28]
Here then might seem to be additional proofs “that the general type of races inhabiting America at that inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the period of the Columbian discovery”;[29]and that, therefore, Dr. Morton’s assumed uniform cranial type pertains to the American man from remotest geological time. There seems more reason, however, for believing that the Calaveras Cave was a place of interment of the present race of Indians; and that its crania are very modern compared even with the fossil Caribs of Guadaloupe. But the increasing evidence of the remote antiquity of the European man has naturally suggested a revision of the evidence adduced in confirmation of his ancient presence in the New World.
Sir Charles Lyell latterly regarded with greater favour than he had once done, the possible coexistence of man with the mastodon, megalonyx, and other extinct species, among bones of which, in the loam of the Mississippi valley, near Natchez, a human pelvic bone was recovered, and made the basis of very comprehensive theories. In the delta of the same river, near New Orleans, a complete human skeleton is reported to have been found, buried at a depth of sixteen feet, under the remains of four successive cypress forests; and this discovery furnished the data from which Dr. Bennet Dowler has assigned to the human race an existence in the delta of the Mississippi 57,000 years ago.[30]
Evidence of this exceptional nature requires to be used with modest caution. Antiquaries of Europe having found tobacco pipes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside of pottery and other undoubted remains of Roman art, have hastily antedated the use of tobacco to classic times.[31]On equally good evidence it might be carried back to those of the mammoth, as the discovery of a similar relic has been recorded at a depth of many feet, in sinking a coal-pit at Misk, in Ayrshire.[32]
[6]The British Dominions in North America.Lond. 1832. Vol. i. p. 89.
[6]
The British Dominions in North America.Lond. 1832. Vol. i. p. 89.
[7]Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher.
[7]
Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher.
[8]Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. i. p. 41.
[8]
Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. i. p. 41.
[9]Antiguedades Prehistoricas de Andalusia, Madrid, 1868.
[9]
Antiguedades Prehistoricas de Andalusia, Madrid, 1868.
[10]The Land of Israel: a Journal of Travels in Palestine, 1865, p. 11.
[10]
The Land of Israel: a Journal of Travels in Palestine, 1865, p. 11.
[11]J. Trimmer:Jour. Geol. Soc., vol. ix.
[11]
J. Trimmer:Jour. Geol. Soc., vol. ix.
[12]Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, 1851, 1st Ed. p. 29.
[12]
Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, 1851, 1st Ed. p. 29.
[13]Archæologia, vol. xiii. p. 206; vol. xxxviii. p. 301.
[13]
Archæologia, vol. xiii. p. 206; vol. xxxviii. p. 301.
[14]Antiquity of Man, 4th Ed. p. 190.
[14]
Antiquity of Man, 4th Ed. p. 190.
[15]Archæologia, vol. xxxviii. p. 296.
[15]
Archæologia, vol. xxxviii. p. 296.
[16]Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, 1st Ed. p. 33.
[16]
Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, 1st Ed. p. 33.
[17]Edin. Phil. Jour., i. 395.
[17]
Edin. Phil. Jour., i. 395.
[18]This question was first brought forward by the author in an “Inquiry into the Evidence of the existence of Primitive Races in Scotland prior to the Celtæ.”—British Association Report, 1850.
[18]
This question was first brought forward by the author in an “Inquiry into the Evidence of the existence of Primitive Races in Scotland prior to the Celtæ.”—British Association Report, 1850.
[19]Hamlet, Act ii. sc. 2.
[19]
Hamlet, Act ii. sc. 2.
[20]Montgomery,Pelican Island.
[20]
Montgomery,Pelican Island.
[21]Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, July 1859, pp. 178, 186.
[21]
Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, July 1859, pp. 178, 186.
[22]Mantell’sFossils of the British Museum, p. 473.
[22]
Mantell’sFossils of the British Museum, p. 473.
[23]American Journ. of Science and Arts, vol. xxxvi. p. 199, First Series.
[23]
American Journ. of Science and Arts, vol. xxxvi. p. 199, First Series.
[24]Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv. p. 85.
[24]
Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv. p. 85.
[25]Geol. Survey of Illinois, by A. H. Worthen, vol. i. p. 38.
[25]
Geol. Survey of Illinois, by A. H. Worthen, vol. i. p. 38.
[26]Types of Mankind, p. 351.
[26]
Types of Mankind, p. 351.
[27]Antiquities of the Southern Indians, p. 293.
[27]
Antiquities of the Southern Indians, p. 293.
[28]Smithsonian Report, 1867, p. 407.
[28]
Smithsonian Report, 1867, p. 407.
[29]Dr. Usher,Types of Mankind, p. 351.
[29]
Dr. Usher,Types of Mankind, p. 351.
[30]Types of Mankind, p. 272.
[30]
Types of Mankind, p. 272.
[31]La Normandie Souterraine, p. 76.
[31]
La Normandie Souterraine, p. 76.
[32]Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 505.
[32]
Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 505.
CHAPTER III.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.
Fig. 4.—Brixham Cave Flint Implement. (Evans). (½).
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 theursus 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 discoveredin 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.
Fig. 5.—Lanceolate Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio, (2/3).
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
Fig. 6.—Almond-shaped Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio. (2/3).
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.