Fig. 18.—Foliated Arrow-head.
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.
Fig. 19.—Lasso Stone, Kentucky.
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.
Fig. 20.—Cupped-stone, Ohio.
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]]