CHAPTER XIV
CONCLUSIONS AS TO CHIPPED IMPLEMENTS
We have finished describing the chipped implements, and it is proper to offer some conclusions and deductions. If one will walk through the halls of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, or the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, or the Field Museum of Natural History at Chicago, one will observe that chipped objects are more numerous than any other class of artifacts on exhibition. Personally, I have examined sites in twenty states, and I saw but one section of the country where broken pottery exceeded chipped objects in quantity. That was the Chaco region in northern New Mexico and the San Juan Valley. Elsewhere spalls, flakes, discs, and broken chipped implements exceeded axes, pottery, or any other class of prehistoric artifacts. When we counted the specimens in the Andover Museum, November 10, 1906, we found that out of 55,928 objects, more than thirty-two thousand were of the chipped class. Our collection is general, representing most of the states in this country. The count indicated not only that chipped objects were more numerous than any other division, but that they were more numerous than all others combined.
The range in chipped objects is from the minute arrow-heads found on an island at Moccasin Bend, Tennessee (near Chattanooga) to large obsidian blades from California, or large unfinished chert implements on exhibition in the Peabody Museum, Cambridge. I have never measured these immense objects seen at Cambridge, but some of them appear to be fully thirty to thirty-five inches in length and the weight may be from ten to twenty pounds. One may suppose that when these large, roughly chipped, flint, oval-shaped objects were worked down, the completed form would be similar to those long, slender dagger- and sword-like objects on exhibition in the Missouri Historical Society and the Tennessee Historical Society collections.
What impresses me most is the skill of the ancient worker in flint—his ability to reduce the rough, unfinished objects of such size to the completed form.
Contrasted with these are the minute points, varying from one fourth to two thirds inches in length, which are found at Moccasin Bend, Tennessee. Colonel Young has made a large collection of these and there are numbers on exhibition in our Andover Museum. Why the aborigines left such numbers of delicate points, which in workmanship quite equal those of the Willamette Valley, Oregon, must remain a mystery. Possibly these were left on the island as “spirit offerings,” as in the case of the finely chipped objects found by Professor Holmes in the spring at Afton, Indian Territory.
The largest barbed or shouldered chipped specimen I have seen is in the possession of a lady near Bainbridge, Ohio. It is seventeen inches in length, and of pink and white quartz.
As has been remarked elsewhere in this book, such objects as the Tennessee “swords,” and the other unusual forms in obsidian from California and from the Hopewell altars, defy classification. In form, they may be included along with the rough turtleback, and crude knife, and highly finished knife, under “I. Type 1, without stem,” of the Nomenclature Committee’s classification.
Readers are requested to glance at all the illustrations presented and observe that the highly specialized barbed and notched implements may be arranged: (a) notches parallel to the base; (b) notches diagonal to the base; (c) notches on either side and in the base. Also that there is a distinct type with sides parallel or convex for half the length of the specimen, and that the point is sharply narrowed down, forming an appreciable angle to the sides of the specimen.
The harder materials, such as quartz, quartzite, and argillite, frequently reach a high state of perfection. But as a rule the less refractory the material, the finer the workmanship. Thus, it is natural that the points found throughout the eastern Alleghenies, in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania are not as highly finished as those of the central Mississippi basin. And again, the flint of the Mississippi basin, while beautifully worked, is not, on the whole, of as high average as that of the Columbia Valley. Yet the small points from Moccasin Bend, Tennessee, the “sun-fish spears” of Greene County, Ohio, the ceremonial “swords” of Tennessee, equal anything found on the Pacific Coast. While this is true, there are many crude implements in the Mississippi Valley for every finely worked object. But because of the predominance of obsidian, agate, carnelian, and agatized wood—all which materials are easily worked and of bright color—the Indians west of the Plains were able to chip exquisite projectile points and knives, that in the average are higher in workmanship than elsewhere. Had the Mississippi Valley tribes possessed as fine material as the natives from the Columbia Valley, I think that their specimens would have been just as well made. However, the Pacific Coast furnishes nothing better than those shown in Figs. 213 and 214.
Although chipped implements have been placed in a class by themselves, a few of them could be fitted into other divisions. A small polished stone celt may have been used in hide-dressing even as was a chipped flint scraper. Occasionally, as in the Ozark region, axes or hatchets were made of flint, and notched and hafted somewhat after the fashion of Eastern grooved axes, yet it was not thought best to place chipped axes in the same class with grooved and polished axes.