The jars have one or two handles, and are of many sizes, some being very large. Occasionally the jars are highly embellished externally by painted designs of various and interesting kinds. Similar bowls, jars, and pipes of pottery are found in both the valley- and the cliff-house ruins.
That the people who built and inhabited the cave- and cliff-houses and the valley houses were one and the same race of people can hardly be doubted. This was pointed out by the writer in 1894. The stone corn-mills, the pipes, the arrow-points, the bowls and jars of pottery, are similar. The house structures were, of course, slightly different, owing to the difference in their environment. But both peoples were agriculturists, both built small rooms or houses for storing corn, gourds, water, and implements, both had arrows for defense and the chase, and both manufactured superior pottery similar in the quality of the material and also in decoration.
THE STONE AGE IN DAKOTA
The former Territory of Dakota included that portion of the country now forming the States of North and South Dakota.
The ancient specimens of handiwork in the Dakota Territory of the early “eighties” comprised surface “finds,” which were mostly stone mauls, hammers, and axes, rude bone and pottery articles of old village-sites, and also various kinds of mound products.
The principal artifacts are here enumerated:—
Hide and Bark
Leather or tanned hide, found occasionally in mound burial-pits. Although evidently very old, it appears to have been carefully tanned, and to have been part of the hide of a buffalo.
Baskets made from the bark of the birch tree. These are small and are nearly all of similar pattern. Usually the basket consists of but one piece of bark cut in such a manner that it could be bent and fashioned into a neat basket and stitched together where the parts overlapped. Sometimes two and even three rows of holes are present, showing great regularity, and that a small needle and thread must have been used in the work.