QUARRIES
During the process of manufacture of implements of flint the first forms would scarcely fit into a classification based on complete forms or types; therefore I have decided to begin a description of chipped objects with a chapter on methods of quarrying and manufacture.
The quarries from which we know aboriginal man in the United States obtained material for his knives and projectile points number perhaps twenty. There may be small isolated sites, but the following were the chief sources of material:—
Fig. 28. Indirect percussion, as practiced by the Wintuns and also described by B. B. Redding. In addition to this, Figs. 26, 32, 33, and 34 are from the American Anthropologist, vol. II, 1891—W. H. Holmes’s paper.
Flint Ridge, Licking County, Ohio.
The jasper quarries on the Susquehanna and Delaware.
Those of Indian Territory, Missouri, and Illinois.
Near Coshocton, Ohio.
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania.
The obsidian cliffs of Yellowstone Park.
Piney Branch, in the District of Columbia.
Southwestern New Mexico.
Little River, Tennessee. (See Fig. 1.)
Wyoming and California quarries.
(See Bibliography for others.)
Fig. 29. Indirect percussion. Two persons being concerned. Practiced by the Apaches, according to George Catlin.
Flint, chert, chalcedony, jasper, quartz, argillite, and other materials of flint-like character occurred in regular veins, or in nodules or in ordinary boulders or pebbles in the drift. Aboriginal man, therefore, mined in a quarry or he dug in the drift, or he picked up from the surface, or he worked in a limestone stratum to extract the nodular flint. He sought in any one of these places according to his locality and character of the material and its position. At Flint Ridge, the largest flint quarries in the United States, there is a hill or ridge, nearly eight miles in length and varying from a few hundred yards to as much as three miles in width, which is literally filled with depressions varying from small pits to one nearly a hundred feet in diameter and twenty or more feet in depth at the present time. The flint from this quarry is distributed throughout Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, portions of Pennsylvania, and even west of the Mississippi. The amount of work done at Flint Ridge by the aborigines passes comprehension. When one considers their primitive methods of quarrying, it is surprising that they were able to quarry such hard material as flint. Without the use of fire, which they had to apply very carefully, first placing a coating of clay over the flint, they would have been unable to remove any considerable portion of the material.
The Flint Ridge chalcedony is beautifully colored, red, blue, cream color, pink, and pure white. It is easily chipped, and was highly prized by the natives.
I have not space for a long narrative of how the flint was quarried. It is of more importance to tell readers how the implements were manufactured. Mr. Gerard Fowke has made a study of Flint Ridge and published an able paper in the National Museum Reports, 1884–5. He also wrote a chapter for “Primitive Man in Ohio.” His paper was reprinted in Bulletin no. III, Department of Archæology, Phillips Academy, 1906. I quote, as to how the flint was quarried, from his paper:—
Fig. 30. Flaking by pressure, a bone implement being used; (a) the bone tool, (b) the stone, (c) the flake.
Fig. 31. Flaking by pressure, a bone point being used, the implement to be shaped resting on a support.
“Digging away the earth with such tools as he could improvise,—pointed sticks hardened by fire, antler, bone, or stone,—he came to the surface of the flint. This resisted all his efforts until he thought of the effects of heat. Placing wood upon it, he set fire to the pile. When the stone had reached a high temperature he threw cold water on it; this caused it to shatter and crack in all directions. Casting aside the fragments, he repeated the operation, until he had finally burned his way to the limestone beneath. Removing all burned portions of the flint, he next procured a quantity of fine clay and spread a thick coating on the top and sides of the stone, to prevent injury to it. Then building a fire at the bottom of the hole, he soon burned away the limestone and the lower part of the flint stratum, leaving the top projecting. This he broke loose with large boulders of quartz or granite; hammers of this sort, weighing from twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds, have been found in the bottoms of pits that have been cleared out. Knocking loose the clay, which had burned almost as hard as the stone, he found himself in possession of a block of clear, pure flint. By means of the same hammers he broke this into pieces of a convenient size for handling. These were carried to a spot near by, which may be termed a “blocking-out” shop. Here they were further broken by smaller hammers, and brought somewhat into the shape of the implements which were to be made from them. The work was never, or very seldom, carried beyond this stage at the spot where it was begun; the subsequent manipulation was at some other place, best designated as a “finishing-shop.” These are characterized by quantities of small chips, flakes and spalls, broken implements, and unfinished pieces, which were unavailable by reason of some flaw or defect not discernible until the final work was begun. The finishing touches were always made by means of pressure with a bone, antler, or some other tough substance. Many finishing-shops are located near the quarries, others at a distance, some of them several miles away. The principal one was near the cross-road; here a pile of fine chips, covering one fourth of an acre, and fully six feet in depth at the central portion, existed when the country was first settled by the whites, but from various causes it has been reduced until it now is all of one level. This, while the largest, is only one of several hundred such places.”
Similar operations were employed in Indian Territory and elsewhere. In the quarries of Little River, Tennessee, the flint occurred in nodular form in limestone ledges. It was easier for the natives to burn the limestone and remove the nodules than to quarry in the flint layers of Flint Ridge. Fig. 1 shows the nodules outcropping in two layers in the limestone ledge.
Mr. D. N. Kern, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, informs me that there are fully two hundred pits of various sizes where the natives quarried material, within some miles of his home.
Professor Wm. H. Holmes published in the 15th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology a comprehensive paper entitled “Stone Implements of the Potomac-Chesapeake Tide-Water Province.” This paper embodies the observations for a number of years on the archæology of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The description of the quarries along Piney Branch, a small tributary of the Potomac, in the District of Columbia, in this volume is complete, and I wish to recommend to students and readers who wish to obtain a broad understanding of the subject a perusal of Professor Holmes’s paper. The entire genesis of implement making is ably presented.
While other quarries have not been so carefully worked, and certainly not described in detail, the method employed by the prehistoric peoples at the Piney Branch quarry, and in the rhyolite sites further back in the hills on either side of the Potomac, may be taken as typical of aboriginal quarrying in the United States. That is, of quarrying in beds where boulders or nodules are embedded in clay or gravel or till. The boulder or nodule materials and the flint strata occurring in different formations were quarried by different methods. The Piney Branch quarries are an illustration of the separation of material from the general mass and composite of boulder and clay. It was easy to get at the material, but more difficult to fashion the implements, because quartzite, quartz, and argillite were harder to work than flint. At Flint Ridge, while quarrying was extremely difficult, the material once secured could be very easily fashioned. The planes of cleavage of flint, as all know, were very different from those of the boulders found at Piney Branch.
Fig. 32. Flaking by pressure. Manner of holding as observed among many tribes by J. W. Powell and others.
Fig. 33. Flaking by pressure, bone pincers being used.
One illustration, Fig. 40, reproduced from Professor Holmes’s plate, is self-explanatory. Before the stage represented in Fig. 37 is reached one must imagine the ordinary oval or water-worn pebble of either quartzite or argillite. This pebble was pried by means of levers from its ancient bed. Both Professor Holmes and Mr. F. H. Gushing have constructed life-sized models of Indians at work in the Piney Branch quarries digging, hammering, flaking, in order to produce blades. (See Fig. 22.) At Piney Branch itself the abundance of material made it a mecca for the prehistoric people of the region. Several trenches dug by workmen under the direction of Professor Holmes penetrated this mass of material to a considerable distance. All of these, while varying in minor details, emphasize the general proposition that the quarry was in use for a considerable length of time.
I present several illustrations showing the method of hammering the rough turtleback and partly finished blades and the completed forms. These are from Professor Holmes’s paper. In addition I show hammer-stones and blades from the collection of Phillips Academy, Andover, representing similar work on other sites.
The difference to be noted between Piney Branch material and the material of chert and flint, the working of which is described by Mr. George Sellars, in Chapter IV, page [48], of this book, is considerable, and the probable method of treatment varies in a more marked degree. Apparently there was more pecking, hammering, etc., of these rude forms than in the case of flint and chert. That is, flint and chert lent themselves more readily to the flaker’s art.
The quarry at Piney Branch was productive of large numbers of rejects. This is true of other sites as well, but it would seem that where material was scarce, the natives made use of many objects quite as crude as those we have designated as rejects. Only flawless materials seem to have been made into implements at Piney Branch, at Flint Ridge, on the Little River sites in Tennessee, and about the jasper quarries of Pennsylvania. This is natural when one reflects that there was a wealth of material and that the Indian naturally selected the best. But were these objects, blocks of flint, and objects of all kinds deposited in any of the large prehistoric villages, I am confident that much of the material called by Professor Holmes rejects, would have been made use of. I think we have overlooked the significance of this fact in our archæological studies. On the Great Plains, and at certain places in Texas, about the Mandan sites, and elsewhere, there are implements quite as rude and ill-shaped as many of those illustrated in the several reports as rejects, yet which show unmistakable evidence of usage.
Fig. 34. (S. about 2–3.) Scrapers and rejects from an ancient workshop near Swarts, on the Rio Mimbres, New Mexico. Material, unknown. There are ancient ruins near by. Phillips Academy collection. (Clement L. Webster.)
Again, the turtlebacks and discs and the other materials may be in part rejects, and yet may represent material blocked out for transportation. I have always been a firm believer in the theory that, as most of the flint was carried on the backs of Indians, or transported in canoes from one point to another, the discs, turtlebacks, and other forms which had been quickly blocked out by a few strokes of the stone hammer, represented material to be transported to distant villages and there refashioned. We may explain the quantity of such material on all these quarry sites by means of a dozen different theories. The workers blocked out more than they could transport; they were interrupted during the course of their labors by the enemy; they were prevented from returning; they found that the home villages were supplied with knives, and arrow-points, and did not return to the quarries for another supply; and so on. That much of the material of quarries is rejects and refuse no one will deny, but that all of it is to be so classed I do not believe.
Fig. 35. (S. 1–1.) Flake knife. Frank L. Grove, Delaware, Ohio.
There seems to be no evidence that Flint Ridge, Piney Branch, Little River, the Indian Territory quarries, or other sites were worked in historic times. On the contrary, one may believe that the quarries developed through a long period of time. The very character of them seems to indicate this. If America has been peopled for thousands of years, I can see no reasons against the suggestion that the quarries were discovered three or four thousand years ago, that a few Indians visited them each season, or at intervals, and that quarrying ceased about the year 1600. While this is my opinion merely, yet I have given the subject a great deal of thought. If all the material in a certain region came from a special quarry, no long period of time could be assigned that quarry. But an inspection of village-sites, of local collections, of museum collections, will teach the observer that not only is there present material from the local quarry, but there is also a considerable quantity of chipped implements of flint, or chert, or quartz, or rhyolite, or jasper, or other stones which are not native to the locality. Not one site, but many sites furnished material. It is evident from the abundance of chipped material that river boulders, the talus of bluffs, and drift pebbles furnish a great part of the chipped implements of this country. If the Indian found a suitable pebble or block of flint or fragment of stone, he most certainly would fashion that into an implement rather than travel a considerable distance and work laboriously to produce that which was found nearer home. Because of the observations cited above, I cannot believe that the quarries represent the work of aboriginal man during a few generations, but that they indicate, perhaps, three or four thousand years of occupation. Dr. W. C. Barnard, of Seneca, Missouri, has given the subject much study. He contributes his observation as follows:—
Fig. 36. (S. 1–3 to 1–6.) Rejects from rhyolite quarried from the mass, in upper row. Rejects from jasper quarried from the mass, in lower row.
“Prehistoric man of this region [the Ozarks] secured his principal supply of flint from boulders and pebbles found in the beds of water-courses as evinced by the character of the material found in hundreds of workshops along the banks of streams. All the more primitive implements are of this boulder and pebble material.
Fig. 37. (S. 1–3 to 1–6.) This figure is a portion of Professor Holmes’s plate, chap. 1 (15th Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology), which for convenience I have divided. It carries to complete form the specimens shown in Fig. 36. Numbers 7, 8, and 9 are cache forms worked down from quartzite boulders; 9, 10, and 11 are from quartz pebbles. It will be observed that these six specimens could be used as knives, or when notched or barbed they were available as projectile points.
“Later the rich deposits of cream white chert located in what is now Ottawa County, Oklahoma, were discovered, yet this, I am sure, after a close study of the two flint quarries, must have been in comparatively recent times, for only a small per cent of implements made of the quarry chert are found in the hundreds of village-sites and workshops of this region, and all these, making due allowance for texture and location, look new compared with the deeply patina-covered and frequently decomposed surfaces of the pebble flint implement.”
Fig. 38. (S. 1–3 to 1–6.) Continuation of Professor Holmes’s plate (Fig. 36). First and second rows, g, h, and i, and g, h, are rhyolite and jasper objects of quarry material. These represent first the blades and forms more convenient for exchange, and in the series j to q the completed projectile points.
Figs. 39 and 40 illustrate the process of manufacture. Fig. 39 shows native quartzite boulders which have been reduced from a, to forms e and f. These are not implements, and while Professor Holmes says they were not transported, yet I am of the opinion that letters e, f, g, and h, represent types which were in such form as would admit of transportation. That is, they represent stone in such form as to be of value for barter or exchange. If these specimens show flaws, as might letters a, b, and c, then they are properly rejects, or if they have hard protuberances which resisted the skill of the Indian, then they are rejects.
Readers should compare Figs. 39 and 40 with Figs. 31 and 36. A difference is observed between the pebbles and boulders shown in Figs. 39 and 24, and the quarry material shown in Figs. 31 and 36.
Fig. 39. (S. 1–3.) See Fig. 40 for description.
Fig. 40. (S. 1–3.) Series of flaked forms illustrating progressive steps in the manufacture of projectile points, etc., from quartzite boulders, obtained from shop- and village-sites about Washington City.