For the Canada regions, the Annual Reports of the Canadian Institute, appended to the Reports of the Minister of Education, Ontario, contain accounts of the discovery of objects of stone, horn, and shell. (See particularly the sessions of 1886-87.) Dawson in his Fossil men (ch. 6) considers what he accounts the lost arts of the primitive races of North America. On the other hand, Professor Leidy found still in use among the present Shoshones split pebbles resembling the rudest stone implements of the palæolithic period (U. S. Geological Survey, 1872, p. 652).
Many archæologists have remarked on the uniform character of many prehistoric implements, wherever found, as precluding their being held as ethnical evidences. The system of quarrying[1826] for flint best fitted for the tool-maker’s art has been observed by Wilson (Prehistoric man, i. 68) both in the old and new world, and in his third chapter (vol. i.) we have a treatise on the ancient stone-worker’s art.[1827]
Treating the subject topically, we find the late Charles Rau making some special studies of the implements used in native agriculture[1828] in the Smithsonian Reports for 1863, 1868, and 1869.[1829] The agriculture of the Aztecs and Mayas is treated in Max Steffen’s Die Landwirtschaft bei den altamerikanischen Kulturvölkern (Leipzig, 1883).[1830]
The working of flint or obsidian into arrowpoints or cutting implements is a process by pressure that has not been wholly lost. Old workshops, or the chips of them, have been discovered, and they are found in numerous localities (Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 75, 79; Abbott’s Primitive Industry, and Putnam in the Bull. Essex Institute), but Powell in his Report of Explorations of the Colorado of the West (1873) does not, as Wilson says he does, describe the present ways.[1831]
Wilson (Prehistoric Man, i. ch. 4 and 7) in an essay on the bone and ivory workers substitutes for the corresponding words usually employed in classifying stone implements the terms palæotechnic and neotechnic, as indicating periods of progress, in order that the art of making tools in horn, bone, shell, and ivory might have a better recognition, as of equal importance with that of making such in stone. Separate treatises are few. Morgan has a paper on the bone implements of the Arickarees in the 21st Rept. of the Regents of the University of the State of N. Y. (1871), and Rau’s monograph on Prehistoric fishing in Europe and North America, one of the Smithsonian Contributions (1884), involves the making of fish-hooks of bone. See also Putnam in the Peabody Museum Reports, and in Wheeler’s Survey, vol. vii.; Wyman’s contributions on the shell heaps, and the Journal of the Cincinnati Soc. of Nat. Hist. for such as have been found in the ash-pits of Madisonville. On shell-work there is a section in Foster’s Prehistoric Races (p. 234); a paper by W. H. Holmes in the Second Rept. of the Bureau of Ethnology (p. 179); and one on American shell-work and its affinities by Miss Buckland in the Journal Anthropol. Inst., xvi. 155.
From the primitive materials of stone, bone, horn, or shell, we pass to metals; but as Wilson (i. p. 174) says, “if metal could be found capable of being wrought and fashioned without smelting or moulding, its use was perfectly compatible with the simple arts of the stone period, as a mere malleable stone;” and to the present day, he adds, the rude American race has no knowledge of working metal, except by pounding or grinding it cold.[1832] The story which Brereton tells in his account of Gosnold’s visit (1602) to New England, about the finding of abundant metal implements in use among the natives, is questioned (Baldwin’s Ancient America, p. 62). We have the evidences of the early mining[1833] of copper extending for over a hundred miles along the southern shores of Lake Superior and on Isle Royale, in the abandoned trenches and tools first discovered in 1847; and in one case there was found a mass of native copper (ten feet by three and two, and weighing over six tons) which had been elevated on a wooden frame prior to removal, and was discovered in this condition.[1834] There are also indications that the manufacture of copper tools was carried on in the neighborhood of the mines (Wilson, i. 213); and chemical tests have shown that a popular belief in the tempering of metal by these early peoples is without foundation.[1835]
It seems to be a fact that while in the use of metals an intermediate stage of pure copper, as coming between the use of bone and stone and the use of alloyed metals, was not until comparatively recently suspected in Great Britain, the “peculiar interest attaches to the metallurgy of the new world that there all the earlier stages are clearly defined: the pure native metal wrought by the hammer without the aid of fire; the melted and moulded copper; the alloyed bronze; and the smelting, soldering, graving, and other processes resulting from accumulating experience and matured skill” (Wilson, i. 230). It is in the regions extending from Mexico to Peru that the art of alloying introduces us to the American bronze age. Columbus in his fourth voyage found in a vessel which had come alongside from Yucatan crucibles to melt copper, as Herrera tells us; and Humboldt was among the earliest to discover tools alloyed of copper and tin, and many such alloys have since been recognized among Peruvian bronzes (Wilson, i. 239). In Mexico, metallurgic arts were carried perhaps even farther in casting and engraving, and not only the results but the evidences of their mining places have remained to our day (Ibid. i. 248). It seems evident, however, that experimenting with them had not carried them so near the perfect combination for tool-making (one part tin to nine parts copper) as the bronze people of Europe had reached, though they fell considerably short of the exact standard (Ibid. i. 234). Doubt has sometimes been expressed of Mexican mining for copper, as by Frederick von Hellwald (Compte Rendu, Cong. des Américanistes, 1877, i. 51); but Rau indicated the references[1836] to Short (p. 94), which forcibly led him to the conclusion that the Mexicans mined copper to turn into tools.[1837] Among the Mayas, Nadaillac (p. 269) contends that only copper and gold were in use. Bancroft (ii. 749) thinks the use of copper doubtful, and if used, that it must have been got from the north. He cites the evidences of the use of gold. William H. Holmes discusses The use of gold and other metals among the ancient inhabitants of Chiriqui, Isthmus of Darien (Washington, 1887). As to iron, that found in the Ohio mounds, only of late years, has been proved to be meteoric iron by Professor Putnam (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Apr., 1883). Bancroft (i. 164) says iron was in use among the British Columbian tribes before contact with the whites, but it was probably derived through some indirect means from the whites. Though iron ore abounds in Peru, and the character of the Peruvian stone-cutting would seem to indicate its use, and though there is a native word for it, no iron implements have been found.[1838] There is not much recorded of the use of silver. It has been found by Putnam in the mounds in thin sheets, used as plating for other metals.[1839] He has also found native silver in masses, and in one case a small bit of hammered gold.
Wilson, in 1876, while regretting the dispersion of the William Bullock collection of pottery, the destruction of that formed by Stephens and Catherwood, and the transference to an English museum of most of the specimens gathered by Squier and Davis, lamented that no American collection[1840] had been yet formed adequate to the requirements of the students of American archæology and ethnology. Since that date, however, the collections in the National Museum (Smithsonian Institution) at Washington and in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge have largely grown; and especially for the fictile art and work in stone of Spanish North America the Museo Nacional in Mexico has assumed importance. The collection in the possession of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia,[1841] since transferred to the Philadelphia Academy, is also of value for the study of the pottery of middle America.
Rau has supplied a leading paper on American pottery in the Smithsonian Report, 1866; and E. A. Barber has touched the subject in papers at the Copenhagen, Luxembourg, and Madrid meetings of the Congrès des Américanistes, and in the American Antiquarian (viii. 76).[1842] W. H. Holmes has a paper on the origin and development of form and of ornament in ceramic art in the Fourth Report, Bureau of Ethnology, p. 437.