Fig. 21.—Cupped Boulder, Tronton, Ohio.
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.
| [33] | Archæologia, vol. xlii. p. 68. |
| [34] | Journ. Ethnol. Soc. N.S., vol. ii. p. 419. |
| [35] | Journ. Geol. Soc. Lond., vol. xvii. pp. 322, 368; vol. xviii. p. 113, etc. |