The stone age in North America, vol. 2 of 2

by Warren K. Moorehead

In addition to corn, which is placed first, the Indians gathered wild rice in the North and koonti and tuckahoe in the South. Of these roots, it is stated: “It grew like a flagge, in the marshes, and when made into bread had the ‘taste of potatoes.’” There were also great stores of dried meat and fish put up in every village, quantities of maple sugar, squashes, beans, pumpkins, and an endless variety of roots and nuts.

We now know that there are seventeen separate foods for which civilization is indebted to the Indian.

Fig. 504 A. (S. 1–4.) From the collection of B. H. Young, Louisville, Kentucky. Rare forms of pestles from the Cumberland and Tennessee valleys.

What we should consider the simplest form of mortar is a question. Of course, the mortar, rather than the pestle, is the essential thing. Man must have something in which to grind or crush his food, and it did not matter to him whether the receptacle was wood, stone, or leather so long as it served the purpose, and it was of no consequence to him whether his pestle was a round stone, an oval, an elongated pestle or bell-shaped, or a flat mano stone. What he wished to accomplish, the reduction of grains or nuts or chunks of dried beef to flour, was of primary importance, and the agencies employed to obtain this result were secondary. Of course, he may have used elaborately ornamented and artistically worked pestles and mortars in the preparation of sacred meal; as to that I do not know. What I am talking about now is the common form of mortar and pestle.

Fig. 505. (S. 1–4.) Cast of a steatite bowl. Found near Lynn. Collection of Salem Museum. Salem, Massachusetts.

Wooden mortars, as well as wooden bowls, existed in many portions of the country. There are abundant historical references to these, and readers are referred to the Bibliography in this instance as in others. The natives smoothed the surface of a fallen tree-trunk, or the top of a stump, and, by constant friction of either stone or wooden pestle, soon wore out a mortar cavity. They also selected glacial boulders, convenient points of bluffs, ledges, etc., in various parts of the country, and worked out stationary mortars. These have been found in at least a hundred places in the United States. Aside from the stationary mortars, there were many small flat stones, and some large stones of convenient size on which grinding is evident for a considerable length of time, and as a result a depression varying from a few inches to a foot or more in depth occurs.

Paint stones are simply small mortars. Sometimes they are highly polished and well worked out, but usually they are rude and may be classed as small mortars, as they are receptacles for grinding. Fig. 501, from the collection of Mr. Solon McCoy of Mountain Home, Idaho, illustrates seven short pestles and seven small mortars, size one eighth, such as are common in the Southwest and not infrequent in most portions of the East. This illustration may stand as typical for all such forms in the United States. The pestles used in them were more properly rubbing-stones; the end is slightly flattened, more often they are round at either end. Great numbers of short oval pestles occur in the New England States, and the South. Fig. 504, from Mr. Holmes’s collection, illustrates three stone pestles; the one to the left may have come from any one of a dozen states, as the form is the same everywhere; to the right, the typical bell-shaped pestles of the Ohio Valley. In the centre, the pestle is bell-shaped, short, and has been highly polished, and there is a prominent depression in the centre.

Fig. 503, from the collection of Mr. J. A. Rayner, pictures fifteen pestles; all save four of the bell-shaped variety. The one at the top, the centre, is an ordinary cone, to the right of that, a pestle with two grinding surfaces, one at either end, which is rare. In the centre are two long, slightly curved objects which may be pestles or rollers used in preparing clay for the making of pottery. The variation in the bell pestle is from an ordinary plain form to that having a narrow top and an unusually broad, flat base. The pestles shown at the right in Fig. 514 are highly specialized forms from the Northwest. There are similar types in the Ohio Valley, as shown in Fig. 504 A, Colonel Young’s collection. But as a rule the natives of the Mississippi Valley paid little attention to artistic development of domestic tools, such as pestles and mortars. Fig. 502 is the ordinary large stone mortar common in the eastern United States. It ranges from a small paint-cup in which a muller no larger than one’s thumb was worked, to stationary mortars in glacial boulders, so large that they cannot be moved. Fig. 507 presents three mortars of lava, and some flat mortars of trap rock. These are from Mr. G. B. Abbott’s collection, Corning, California. The stones used on these are flat, or oval water-worn stones and not finished, like mano stones common to the Cliff-Dweller country.