Deposits, or caches, contained not only discs but elaborate blades and oval forms. The latter are the most common. The delicate leaf-shaped blades found in many of the caches could have been used as knives without further workmanship, or notched and barbed and employed as spear- and lance-heads. More slender spears were produced by chipping from the sides of the leaf-shaped implements and barbing. These caches represented the stock in trade of the aboriginal merchant rather than the possessions of a warrior or priest. If a warrior or chief, or any other man, buried his possessions, we should find in that cache objects not entirely of one class.
The number of these caches, their widespread extent, and the fact that all of them tell the same story, are to my mind clear evidence that when the greatest villages of ancient times from Pittsburg to Mandan, from Lake Itasca to New Orleans, and from Bangor to Los Angeles, were inhabited, there were numerous aboriginal traders and artisans who traveled from point to point disposing of their wares.
Curiously enough, caches of other than chipped objects are extremely rare, and I have never heard of a cache of bird-stones, problematical forms, or of “bicaves.” There have been a few caches of axes and hematites. Squier and Davis’s great find of two hundred pipes in an altar of the “Mound-City” group near Chillicothe, Ohio, can hardly be called a cache.
CHAPTER XIII
HAMMER-STONES AND HAMMERS
These were classified by the Committee under chipped implements as “IV, chipped stone,” although most of them are not chipped. But they were much used in shaping chipped objects, and I have left them in the place assigned by the Committee.
| 1. Spheroidal. | ||
| 2. Discoidal | (a) “Pitted.” | (Figs. 205, 206.) |
| (b) Not “pitted.” | ||
| 3. Elongated | (a) Grooved. | (Figs. 207, 209, 210.) |
| (b) Not grooved. |
The types of stone hammers and hammer-stones are fully described by J. D. McGuire in the American Anthropologist, in volumes 4, 5, and 6. Mr. McGuire has devoted more study to the manufacture of hammer-stones and stone hammers than any other person, and has made a number of implements using the stone hammer and fragments of other stones to reduce irregular surfaces. I quote from Mr. McGuire’s article in the Anthropologist for October, 1891:—
“An examination of these objects will demonstrate that three types probably contain them all.
“First. The oblong or flattened ellipsoid having a pit on one or both sides; the pits probably being intended as finger-holds to relieve the index finger from the constant jar occasioned by quickly repeated blows on a hard surface. The periphery of these will often be found quite smooth, at other times rough, according as it has been last used as a hammer or as a rubber, although hammers of hard and tough material, when used on stone of similar character, wear away on the periphery as though rubbed. Often one or both of the flattened sides shows the effect of rubbing, as in Fig. 1.
“Second. The spherical implement slightly flattened at the poles showing a battered and commonly a smooth surface. These two types may be considered as common all over the world.