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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

The nearest type which we can now conceive of to the Drift-Folk of Europe’s post-glacial era is the Esquimaux. It is even possible that, like them, they may have occupied winter snow-huts; and only retreated to their cave-dwellings during the brief heat of a semi-arctic summer. Among a people so situated the industrial arts are called into utmost requisition, alike for clothing and tools; and the simplest experience of the hunter directs him to the produce of the chase for the most easy supply of both. The pointed horn of the deer furnishes the ready-made dagger, lance-head, and harpoon; the incisor tooth of the larger rodents supplies a more delicately edged chisel than primitive art could devise; and the very process of fracturing the bones of the larger mammalia in order to obtain the prized marrow, produces the splinters and pointed fragments which an easy manipulation converts into bodkins, hair-pins, and needles. The ivory of walrus, narwhal, or elephant is more readily wrought into many desirable forms, and is less liable to fracture, than the intractable flint or stone; and all those materials are abundant in the most rigorous winters, when flint and stone are sealed up under the frozen soil. Tools and weapons of bone and ivory may therefore be assumed to have preceded all but the rudest stone implements; and although, owing to the indestructible nature of their material, it is from the latter that our ideas of earliest post-glacial art are chiefly derived, enough has been found in contemporary cave-deposits to confirm this inference from the analogous hyperborean arts of our own day.

Flint, indeed, though so widely used as the primitive tool-maker’s material, is unknown in many localities. We are familiar with regions at the present time, where man not only subsists, but supplies himself with implements and weapons adapted to his need, though neither flint nor stone is available. This fact has been practically ignored in the accepted terminology of the science. As now reduced to system, it proceeds in retrospective order thus:—Historic, prehistoric, neolithic, palæolithic, with a possible protolithic period of still older geological epochs. An awkward misnomer inevitably results from this assumption of stone as the sole basis of primitive art: as where the archæologist speaks of palæolithic bone implements, or neolithic pottery. I have therefore substituted here the more comprehensive terms palæotechnic and neotechnic. They suffice equally for the classification of implements and personal ornaments of flint, stone, bone, ivory, or even of metal: as in the neotechnic gold and bronze work; and also for those made from marine shells. Many of the latter have been recovered under circumstances which establish their claim to be classed with other examples of primitive art; and even find illustration among the rarer disclosures of the ancient cave-drift. In the great Archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, as well as in widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, the primeval stage of native art might indeed be more correctly designated a shell period; for until their discovery by Europeans, the large shells which the mollusca of the neighbouring oceans produce in great abundance, furnished to the native artificers the most convenient and easily wrought material. For the natives of the coral islands of the Pacific especially, marine shells supplied the want not only of copper and iron, but of flint and stone; and left them at little disadvantage when compared, for example, with the Indians of the copper regions of Lake Superior.