“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.