Objects of copper consist chiefly of thin sheets of native copper rolled in such a way as to form tubular beads. Sometimes larger pieces of rude sheets of copper have been found. This copper must have been brought from some locality near Lake Superior, where copper-mining was carried on in prehistoric times.
Pottery or earthenware objects. Numerous fragments of pottery bowls, dishes, cups, and other vessels occur in some localities, usually in fields where the sod has been ploughed for the first time, and where the location is convenient to a stream or lake. Occasionally pottery sherds have been found at greater depths, even to two or three feet. In such cases they were evidently covered by olay and sands deposited from the overflow of the waters in some former period of time, no doubt many centuries ago. In some of the most ancient burial-mounds a few perfect vessels of pottery have been discovered. These are small urns with flaring rims and more or less decoration, the principal part of which consists in most instances of a continuous, deep groove running spirally around the entire body of the vessel.
Only one example of a pipe made of pottery has yet been reported from this region. This is a large pipe, having bowl and stem in one piece, found by the writer in a burial-mound in 1908. Both the stem and bowl are decorated with grooves.
The urns here referred to and the straight tubular stone pipes previously mentioned are precisely similar to most of those found by the writer in numerous mounds in Dakota some years ago. The shell articles, pendants, rings, and beads also afford strong evidence in support of the view that they who reared most, if not all, of the mounds of Manitoba and North Dakota were one and the same people.
THE STONE AGE IN UTAH
The remains of prehistoric and ancient people hitherto discovered in Utah consist principally of the ruins of various houses in the cliffs and valleys, and the contents thereof. Besides these there are ancient irrigation ditches of some size and importance in the southern part of Utah. There are also petroglyphs or rock carvings of various kinds upon the vertical faces of many of the rock cliffs; and what appear to be tracks or prints of the human foot in volcanic rock have been found in one or two places.
While the houses whose ruins occur in the broad valleys of Utah vary in size and in the number of rooms, and also in the structure of their floors and the interior finish of their walls, they may all be regarded as belonging to the same class of mud or adobe structures. The cliff-houses, however, differ in so far as some are stone buildings, others mostly adobe, and others small caves just large enough for occupation as dwellings or for use as storage-bins.
The more important artifacts obtained from the ruins of Utah are here enumerated and described:—
Objects made of Wood
Wooden pail or bucket, from a cave (see Fig. 632). This is formed by digging out a piece of the trunk of a tree.