Q. From southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia there are many disk-shape fragments of pottery, small, thin, and coarse, with the edges roughly chipped; and from northeastern Kentucky there are similar pieces, except that they have been fashioned from fragments of limestone and sandstone. These specimens are illustrated by [figure 108] (pottery, from a mound in Bartow county, Georgia).
Fig. 108.—Discoidal pottery fragment.
Spuds.
It has been a puzzle to archeologists to assign to any class the peculiar stones called “spuds.” They are usually of a comparatively soft material, carefully worked and polished, and bear no marks of rough usage. On the other hand, they seem too large for ornament. Perhaps their office may have been in some ceremony or game. Something similar in form seems to be denoted in the following extracts:
Col. James Smith[81] says, speaking of the Indians of western Pennsylvania, that as soon as the elm bark will strip in spring, the squaws, after finding a tree that will do, cut it down, and with a crooked stick, broad and sharp at the end, take the bark off the tree, and of this bark make vessels. The Twana Indians, who formerly lived at the south end of Hoods canal, Washington, in barking logs use a heavy iron implement about 3 feet long, widened and sharpened at the end;[82] and the tanbark workers of our day use an instrument of somewhat similar form.
The ordinary spud is too weak to endure such usage, though it is claimed by old people living in the Shenandoah valley, Virginia, that in the last century the Indians in that locality used an implement of this pattern for stripping the bark from trees. The implement may have been used in dressing hides, the hole being for attachment of a handle.
Fig. 109.—Spud.
A celt of argillite, highly polished, from Loudon county, Tennessee, of the pattern shown in [figure 64], has a neatly drilled cylindrical hole about a third of the way from the top; but such cases are unusual. The spuds may be divided into three general classes, as follows: