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:—

“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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:—

“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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.