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Table of Contents

THE QUARRY—BRIXHAM CAVE—BRIXHAM FLINT IMPLEMENT—FLINT RIDGE, OHIO—FLINT PITS—DRIFT QUARRY DEPOSITS—TRACES OF PALÆOLITHIC ART—LANCEOLATE FLINTS—ALMOND-SHAPED FLINTS—THE SHAWNEES—THE COLORADO INDIANS—CACHES OF WORKED FLINTS—SEPULCHRAL DEPOSITS—CAVE-DRIFT DISCLOSURES—ILLUSTRATIVE ANALOGIES—CINCINNATI COLLECTIONS—HORNSTONE SPEAR-HEADS—AMERICAN NEOLITHIC ART—FLINT DRILLS—MODES OF PERFORATION—FLINT KNIVES—RAZORS AND SCRAPERS—ARROW-HEAD FORMS—DISCOIDAL STONES—SINKERS AND LASSO-STONES—CUPPED STONES—ARCHÆOLOGICAL THEORIES—GEORGIA BOULDERS—HAND CUP-STONES—NEOLITHIC GRINDSTONES—ARCHÆOLOGICAL ENIGMAS—ANCIENT ANALOGIES.

If mere rudeness is to be accepted as the indication of the first artless efforts of man to furnish himself with tools, the investigator into primeval history may assume that in the rudest of the drift and cave implements he has examples of the most infantile efforts in the industrial arts. He may even indulge the fancy that in the large, unshapely flint implements recovered from ossiferous caves and alluvial deposits, alongside of remains of the extinct fauna of a palæolithic period so dissimilar to any historical era, he has traced his way back to the first crude efforts of human art, if not to the evolutionary dawn of a semi-rational artificer. It is a significant fact that no such clumsy unshapeliness characterises the stone implements of the most degraded savage races. Examples may indeed be produced, selected for their rudeness, from among the implements of modern savages. But Bushmen, Patagonians, Mincopies, Australians, or whatever other race be lowest in the scale of humanity, each display ingenuity and skill in the manufacture of some special tools or weapons. Nor is it less worthy of note that the commoner implements and weapons of flint and stone recovered from ancient Scandinavian, Gaulish, and British graves, from the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the Danish shell-mounds, and other European depositories of prehistoric industrial art, are scarcely distinguishable from the flint-knives, scrapers, lance and arrow-heads, or the stone gouges, axes, and mauls, of the Red Indians, or of the Islanders of the Pacific. Peculiar types do indeed occur; and the materials abounding in special localities, such as the obsidian of Mexico, or the greenstone of Tasmania, give a specific character to the implements of some regions; but, on the whole, the arts of the stone periods of different races, however widely separated alike by space and time, present so many analogies that they seem to confirm the idea of certain instinctive operations of human ingenuity finding everywhere the same expression within the narrow range of non-metallurgic art. Few facts, therefore, related to this branch of the subject have impressed me more than the essentially diverse types characteristic of the massive and extremely rude implements of the caves and river-drift. They seem to point to some unexplained difference between the artificer of the Mammoth or Reindeer period, and the tool-maker of Britain’s neolithic era, or the Indian savage of modern times.

Fig. 4.—Brixham Cave Flint Implement. (Evans). (½).

Sufficient correspondence is traceable between the implements of the cave-earth and the river-drift to assign them to the same era; and so to justify us in testing its arts by their combined disclosures. The ossiferous cave of Brixham, which has recently been subjected to an exhaustive scientific investigation, consists of a series of galleries and passages in the Devonshire limestone. They are partly natural fissures, and partly chambers hollowed out by the action of running water. Those have been refilled with gravel, red cave-earth, and layers of stalagmite, which were in process of deposition while the ursus spelæus, or great cave-bear, still haunted their recesses, and when the reindeer was a native of the neighbouring region. Though visited from time to time by man, Brixham cave had never been made his dwelling-place or workshop; and so it has revealed only his rudest tools. Of these, Fig. 4 is a characteristic example of a rude lanceolate implement, which embodies within itself some very significant glimpses of the era to which it belongs. The great valleys were excavated and refilled with the rolled gravel of the drift during the prolonged operations of ice and floods. But it is here seen that the violence of the floods extended even to the recesses of the caves. The implement has been broken into three pieces, evidently at the period of the original filling up of the cave. One portion was recovered buried in the cave-earth of the flint-knife gallery; another fragment lay far apart, under three and a half feet of earth, in a neighbouring gallery; while a third portion has escaped even the careful and discriminating search which resulted in the recovery of those long-dissevered fragments. It has to be borne in remembrance that every fragment of flint found in the cave-earth was preserved, whether showing traces of human workmanship or not. Thirty-two fragments were discovered in all; with an interval of nearly a month between the finding of the first and second portions of the implement figured here. A still longer period elapsed before it was noticed that they fitted to each other as parts of the same worked flint. Most of the fragments so found have undergone great alteration in their structure, and have become absorbent and brittle. How little chance, therefore, is there that any delicately formed flint-tool should be recovered in the rolled gravel-beds!

But the comparatively virgin soil of the New World has examples of like primitive workmanship in reserve, to illustrate the significance of some of those amorphous flints which bear the evidence of art, and yet seem almost too artless for any purpose of man. The valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries have a special attraction as the sites of numerous earthworks and other remains of a prehistoric race, known, from one prominent class of their structures, as the Mound-Builders. In more recent centuries, within the period of European intercourse with the New World, the same valleys have been occupied by warlike tribes of the Red Indian race; and now that an industrious population has supplanted their ephemeral lodges with the cities and farmsteads of the Anglo-American settler, the traces even of the latest aborigines seem primitive as those of Europe’s neolithic era. During the summer of 1874 I devoted part of the long vacation to an inspection of some of the most remarkable earthworks and other ancient remains of this interesting locality; and among other objects illustrative of its past history, I visited the Flint Ridge, a siliceous deposit of the carboniferous age, which extends through the State, from Newark to New Lexington, and has been worked at various points to furnish materials for native implements. Here I had an opportunity of exploring the ancient pits from which it is assumed that the constructors of the gigantic earthworks of the neighbouring valleys procured the flint, or hornstone, of which their weapons and implements were chiefly made. The point visited is on the summit of an undulating range of hills about ten miles distant from the city of Newark and its remarkable earthworks, hereafter described. At various points along the ridge, both there and in other parts of the State, numerous funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five to fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of mining may be seen in other localities, as at Levenworth, about three hundred miles below Cincinnati, where the grey flint, or chert, abounds, of which large implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the pits are in many cases covered with the fractured flints, broken up, and partially shaped as if for purposes of manufacture. There for the first time I looked upon true counterparts of the drift implements; and in the course of an hour or two had no difficulty in procuring specimens closely repeating many forms familiar among those common to the cave-earth and the drift-gravel of France and England.

We are apt to think of the old flint and stone-workers as merely picking up the chance materials suited to their simple craft. But the use of flint in the manufacture of sling-stones, arrow-heads, and other missile weapons, as well as of all ordinary household implements, and those of war and the chase, involved a constant demand for fresh materials, frequently procurable only from distant localities. It is what might be assumed, therefore, apart from any direct evidence, that a regular system of quarrying for flint nodules best fitted for the tool-makers’ art was pursued; and that a trade or barter in the raw material furnished supplies to tribes remote from the flint-bearing chalk or gravel. But also it appears from the interesting explorations of Colonel A. Lane Fox at Cissbury, near Worthing,^[33] and from those of the Rev. W. Greenwell, at Grime’s Graves, near Brandon, in Norfolk,^[34] that the flint nodules were not only quarried, but prepared on the spot; so that the miner carried off with him, not a mere load of flint nodules, as the modern manufacturer might burden himself with the iron ore: but flints of the required dimensions, roughly shaped for the final operation which was to fashion them into knives, scrapers, arrow and lance-heads, hatchets, etc. Precisely the same process is manifest in the remains found in the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio. Flakes or spawls, knives, scrapers, almond and lanceolate blocks, abound in the first crude stage of manufacture. In studying those on the spot, I was strongly impressed by the similarity of many of them to the ruder implements of the drift; and hence was led to surmise that in the latter also we have in many cases, not the artless implements which fitly suggest a maker correspondingly deficient in even such skill and reasoning as guides the modern tool-making savage; but only rudely-blocked flints, fresh from the quarry, and in a condition least susceptible of injury in the violence to which the tool-bearing gravels have necessarily been subjected. May it not be, moreover, that in some of the richest deposits of such worked flints in the gravels of France and England, we have really the dispersed materials of such quarry accumulations, and not the stray implements of individual hunters? In this way only can we satisfactorily account for the fact that such traces of primeval man are now successfully sought for on purely geological evidence. The archæologist digs into the Celtic or Saxon barrow, and finds as his reward the implements and pottery of its builder. But English geologists, having determined the character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French drift, have sought for flint implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the fossil shells of the same period, and with like success. They have now been obtained in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey.^[35] So entirely indeed has the man of the drift passed out of the province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up his “notes on further discoveries of flint implements in beds of post-pleiocene gravel and clay,” with a list of forty-one localities where gravel and clay-pits, or gravel-beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly be found, and subsequent discoveries have confirmed his anticipations.

It has been felt by many as an element which in some degree detracted from the otherwise incontrovertible force of this accumulated proof, that where the wrought flints are discovered in situ, they occur in beds of gravel and clay abounding in unwrought flints in every stage of accidental fracture, and including many which the most experienced archæologist would hesitate whether to classify as of natural or artificial origin. But on the assumption of regular quarrying and working in the flint-bearing strata, such traces of palæolithic art may be expected to occur in the river-gravels, as a geological formation in which the requisite material abounded; and which, moreover, in its latest reconstruction belongs to the river-valleys best adapted to be the habitat of post-glacial man. They are, in fact, the localities to which the experience of the archæologist would direct him when in search of the traces of rude hunting and fishing tribes; but also they are the same mammaliferous strata to which the geologist turns when looking for remains illustrative of the extinct fauna of the post-glacial age.

Fig. 5.—Lanceolate Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio, (2/3).

In and around the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio, are now to be seen the accumulated results of centuries of mining and quarrying, extending in all probability from the era of the Mound-Builders to the extinction of the Miamis, Shawnees, and other recent occupants of the Ohio valley. Swept by floods into the lower valleys, the smaller fragments would be broken up and disappear; and only such specimens would survive unchanged as in the valley of the Somme have startled archæologists by their numbers; and tempted sceptics to assign their origin to accidental fracture in the beds of gravel and unwrought flints in which they chiefly occur. In Fig. 5 a worked flint is shown, picked up in one of the pits on Flint Ridge, in Licking County, Ohio. A small piece has been broken off the point by recent fracture. Its analogy to one familiar type of drift implements can scarcely admit of question. This, it will be remembered, had never been removed from the pit, and doubtless represents the material thus roughly blocked out, from which the old artificer designed to fashion a finished tool. Another common type is shown in Fig. 6, roughly chipped into the crude form of an almond-shaped blade. Some of the specimens acquired by me are weather-stained from long exposure, and others discoloured and brittle; but many of them exhibit little traces of the effect of time. It may be doubted, indeed, if any of them can be regarded as of remote antiquity; though, doubtless, the ancient Mound-Builders

Fig. 6.—Almond-shaped Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio. (2/3).

derived the materials for their stone implements from this inexhaustible source; and specimens of the same class of worked flints are frequently met with in the vicinity of the mounds, and even among their contents. Flint-flakes, and rudely-fashioned knives and scrapers, are so common in the ploughed fields, that they are spoken of generally throughout Ohio and Kentucky by the name of “spawls.” It is difficult, indeed, to make a selection from the abundant materials illustrative of this part of the subject. The supply of flint, or its hornstone and chert equivalents, was inexhaustible; and its natural fracture and cleavage resulted in forms which frequently required little labour to convert them into useful household implements. The examples thus far figured were obtained directly from the Flint Ridge pits; but equally characteristic specimens lie intermingled with the finished axes and arrow-heads turned up by the plough, or recovered from the mounds. In the example figured here (Fig. 7), from the original ploughed up in Sharon Valley, Licking County, Ohio, in the vicinity of a large mound, the reader cannot fail to recognise an analogy to a familiar class of implements of the drift.

Fig. 7.—Leaf-shaped Flint, Sharon Valley, Ohio. (2/3).

The Shawnees, who last occupied the region now referred to, were a numerous and warlike tribe, who according to Indian tradition had come from Georgia and West Florida into the Ohio Valley. But they became involved in the French wars, joined in the famous conspiracy of Pontiac in 1763, and were nearly exterminated in a battle fought within two miles of the city of Newark. To them must, no doubt, be ascribed many of the flint and stone implements so abundant in the neighbouring valleys, as well as the partially worked flints in the numerous pits along Flint Ridge. But the material for the largest implements is here inexhaustible; and the natural lines of conchoidal fracture equally controlled the workmanship of the Troglodyte of the Drift, and the most recent Shawnee or Chippewa arrow-maker.

In the great mounds which abound throughout the region watered by the Ohio and its tributaries, delicately-wrought knives and arrow-heads, prized axe-heads, plummets and hemispheres of hæmatite, elaborately carved pipes, and even pins and bodkins of bone, lie buried along with the largest lanceolate and oval-shaped flints; or blocks of the same material, rough-hewn, as brought from the pits. A general and well-founded idea prevails that the old Mound-Builders, and, in some cases also, the modern Indians, were in the habit of making caches of flint-blocks, so as to protect the material from exposure to the atmosphere. The modern English gun-flint makers entertained the same idea, believing that a certain amount of moisture present in the flint was necessary for working it with ease, and that it lost this by long exposure. Professor J. W. Powell, in his report of explorations of the Colorado of the West, made in 1873, thus describes the method pursued by the Colorado Indians in the manufacture of their stone implements: “The obsidian, or other stone of which the implement is to be made, is first selected by breaking up larger masses of the rock, and choosing those which exhibit the fracture desired, and which are free of flaws; then these pieces are baked or steamed, perhaps I might say annealed, by placing them in damp earth covered with a brisk fire for twenty-four hours; then with sharp blows they are still further broken into flakes approximating to the shape and size desired. For the more complete fashioning of the implement a tool of horn, usually of the mountain sheep, but sometimes of the deer or antelope, is used. The flake of stone is held in one hand, placed on a little cushion made of untanned skin of some animal, to protect the hand from the flakes which are to be chipped off, and with a sudden pressure of the bone-tool the proper shape is given. They acquire great skill in this, and the art seems to be confined to but few persons, who manufacture them, and exchange them for other articles.”^[36] No doubt some of the simple bone implements found in the mounds were used for this purpose. I was shown recently, in Cincinnati, some well-made arrow-heads, the work of Dr. H. H. Hill, who informed me that his sole implement was the bone handle of a tooth-brush.

Among the many interesting disclosures due to the researches of Messrs. Squier and Davis, was the discovery in a mound of “Clark’s Work,” one of the largest earthworks in the Scioto Valley, of what may fairly be regarded as a magazine of such flint-blocks, fresh as from the quarry. Many of them are half a foot in length, but they vary in size and shape. Out of an excavation six feet long by four wide, nearly six hundred were taken. They lay regularly stacked, edge-ways, in two layers, one above the other; and the explorers estimated that the whole deposit might amount to four thousand discs of hornstone, roughly prepared for future manufacture.

Fig. 8.—Flint Implement, Licking County, Ohio. (1/1).

Blocks of flint from ten to twelve inches in length, fashioned in like manner into the nucleus of a lance or spear-head, have occurred from time to time in Denmark, France, and Belgium; and are to be looked for elsewhere: since implements of flint are common in many localities where the material out of which they are fashioned is wholly unknown. Those are rightly conjectured to be the raw material, which, like pig-iron, was thus ready to be turned to the special uses of the artificer. No doubt, by barter and traffic in various ways, such material for the flint-workers of Europe’s and America’s different stone periods was disseminated from centres where native flint occurs; just as in the later copper and Bronze periods of both continents the prized metals were diffused through remote areas. But it is only in localities where the flint abounds that implements, or even blocks or nuclei, of the largest size are of common occurrence. Fig. 8 represents one of the class of smaller rudely shaped flint implements recovered from a large mound in the vicinity of Newark. It indicates, alike in the discoloration and the change of the dulled surface, characteristic evidences of considerable antiquity. Thus buried in the mounds, or scattered about in the furrows of every ploughed field, slender flint-chips, knives, or spawls, with arrow-heads, axes, and other relics both of the Mound-Builders and their Indian successors, abound. The huge rough-hewn block of flint or hornstone takes its place as fittingly beside the delicately finished implements, as the prized lump of unwrought hæmatite, the large pyrula, or even the mass of copper or galena. Possibly they were deposited in the sepulchral mound to furnish to the dead the materials from which to fashion implements adapted to the new life on which he was about to enter. More probably, however, they were laid there simply as part of the ordinary furnishings adapted to the daily experiences of life. But if the Palæolithic tool-maker fashioned anything akin to the more delicate implements, the vicissitudes of diluvial and other geological changes have left few and partial illustrations of such finished handiwork of the Drift-folk. Their cave-dwellings did indeed admit, under specially favouring circumstances, of the occasional preservation of bone implements, the smaller knives and lances of flint, and other comparatively delicate objects used in indoor work; and the value of these as illustrations of the habits and usages of the ancient Troglodytes can scarcely be exaggerated. But even those owe their preservation to processes akin to that which fractured and dispersed the fragments of the Brixham Cave implement; and which, in the more violent rearrangement of the river-gravels, must have generally reduced any carved bone or delicately worked flint to indistinguishable fragments. The exceptions indeed are exceedingly rare of finding in the gravel-beds a single bone of any animal so small as man.

The caves also undoubtedly embody in the contents of their silt and stalagmite the industrial implements of a later period than that of the river-gravels; and, as in the case of Kent’s Cavern, even preserve the evidence of a succession of occupants belonging to distinct eras, and probably to essentially diverse races of men. But it is only in exceptional cases of special interest that the cave-drift discloses traces of actual habitation, the refuse heaps of the kitchen, the broken or stray tools, and even the flint-cores, hammer-stones, and flint-chips, which indicate the workshop of the ancient tool-maker. Mr. Evans figures hammer-stones of various kinds, made of diverse pebbles and of chipped flint; and others from the French caves consist of flint-cores with the prominent surfaces worn round by their use as hammer-stones in the process of chipping the flint into the desired forms. One of this class of implements now in my possession, of light grey flint, and bearing manifest traces of long use, was turned up in a ploughed field in Licking County, Ohio. Another example in my collection was presented to me by Mr. W. L. Merrin, who picked it up in the vicinity of one of the pits on Flint Ridge, among the broken flakes and nodules which showed where the old flint miner had been at work. The cave deposits embedded animal remains and human implements in part by the same processes which in neighbouring river-valleys were burying the works of man alongside of the bones of the largest fossil mammalia. In the former, at times, the silting up was by a process sufficiently gentle to preserve unharmed the minuter traces of the cave-dweller and his arts; but as a rule there have remained to us from that remote Palæotechnic era, only the larger and ruder implements, corresponding as it were to the axe of the woodman, and the mattock or plough of the field labourer, which were alone capable of withstanding the violence of floods, and the like elements of geological reconstruction.

Enough survives to us, from the disclosures of a different character in the actual cave-dwellings of the Men of the Drift, to confirm the idea that we have as yet obtained a very partial glimpse of the arts of that remote dawn; and that we may watch with interest every fresh disclosure calculated to lessen the wonder excited by the large lanceolate or ovate worked flints of that era: rude enough at times to be ascribed to some irrational Caliban, rather than to a human artificer. It may perhaps be thought that I have yielded too ready credence to a fanciful analogy; but as I explored the deserted flint pits of the Shawnees, and the ancient quarry of the Ohio Mound-Builders, or picked up in the furrows of their desecrated earthworks huge half-formed ovate and spear-shaped blocks of hornstone akin to those of the European drift, it seemed to me like a glimpse of light illuminating the obscurity of that remote dawn.

The whole region of Ohio and Kentucky is rich in remains of the old flint-workers. In the Granville, the Cherry, Sharon, Hanover, and other valleys around Newark, in the vicinity of Dayton, and at Fort Ancient, in Warren County, Ohio, all of which I had special facilities for exploring, as well as in numerous other localities throughout the State, flint and stone implements abound. In Cincinnati I examined large collections, chiefly obtained by searching along the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries after the spring floods. Occasionally fine specimens may be observed in situ, projecting from the eroded bank, at a depth of about twenty inches from the surface; but the greater number are picked up in the silt and gravel left by the falling river, while many more must be buried in its bed: to form, perchance, a subject of study for future generations, in the reconstructed river-valleys of a newer world. Their number indeed is astonishing, in the contrast which the virgin soil of the New World thus presents to the rare traces of Europe’s neolithic arts. One enthusiastic collector, Dr. Byrnes, of Cincinnati, told me that his most successful gleaning had been at a point near the junction of the Little Miami and Ohio rivers, where in one day he found upwards of seventy stone implements of various kinds, exposed by the ice and spring floods, on the river banks.

Fig. 9.—Flint Hoe, Kentucky. (1/3).

Many of the flint implements are finished with exquisite delicacy, to the finest serrated edge; while, no doubt owing to the abundant material, they are frequently on a scale considerably surpassing those of the European neolithic period. In the collections of Dr. Hill, Dr. Byrnes, and Mr. Hosea, of Cincinnati, I made drawings of flint-knives, spear-heads, and hoes, measuring nearly eleven inches in length. Fig. 9 shows an example of the latter implement, reduced to one-third, linear measure. It was found by Dr. Hill, on the river edge of the Ohio, near Smithland, Kentucky, and fully illustrates the character of the flint hoe. The broad end has been worked to an edge, and is fractured from use; while the narrow end terminates in a flat unworked surface, showing the natural texture of the nodule from which it has been made. The same collections above referred to include spear-heads of dark hornstone, from 6½ to 7 inches long, of which upwards of fifty were found on a farm in Casey County, Kentucky. On another farm in Jackson County, Indiana, the owner’s curiosity was excited by the large size of two or three spear-heads of dark grey hornstone turned up by the plough; and on digging down he found about ninety stacked edge-ways, one tier above another. Specimens of them examined by me in different collections measured from 4½ to 5 inches long. One of the smallest of them is figured here full size, Fig. 10. Along with some of these large spear-heads, Dr. Hill produced several beautifully finished leaf-shaped blades, chipped to a fine edge, measuring upwards of 5 inches long. They are worked in a pale grey hornstone speckled with white. Twelve of these were ploughed up in a level between two large mounds, near Brookville, Indiana; and ten perfect, with numerous broken specimens of a rarer type of large arrow-head, equally well finished, were found in the vicinity of another mound, near Anderson’s Ferry, a few miles below Cincinnati. The number of such implements in this region is astonishing; and frequently the beauty of a piece of milky-quartz, yellow chert, or pure rock crystal, appears to have stimulated the workman to his utmost dexterity in the manufacture of serrated, dentated, and elaborately finished blades of various forms.

Fig. 10.—Flint Spear-head, Indiana. (1/3).

In the collections I have named, as well as in those of Mr. Cleneay and Mr. James of Cincinnati, and of Mr. Merrin and Mr. Shrock of Newark, the examples of flint and stone implements number many hundreds, and would require a volume not less ample than Mr. John Evans’s comprehensive monograph of The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain, to illustrate their details. I shall limit myself here to a few examples selected from among those peculiar to the neolithic art of the New World which offer any suggestive hint relative to the origin or use of objects already familiar to the archæologist. Perforated teeth of bears and other animals occur among the mound relics; shell beads are still more abundant; bone and horn pins and lance-heads, and a peculiar class of stone implements, most frequently made of a striated, grey or blue shale, perforated with two or more holes, are all of common occurrence. The chief varieties are shown in the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, Fig. 136, p. 237. Some of them bear so near a resemblance to the bracers, or guards, found in British graves, and supposed to have been worn on the left arm to protect it from the recoil of the string in the use of the bow, that I am inclined to ascribe the same purpose to them. But others are curved at the edges, and frequently of too large a size for this purpose. The latter are also occasionally formed of copper. One example of this class of implements, or personal decorations, obtained from the Lockport mound, and now in the possession of Mr. Merrin, measures 5·30 by 3·80 inches.

Fig. 11.—Flint Awl, Mayville, Kentucky. Fig. 12.—Flint Drill, Cincinnati.

The frequent occurrence of drilled and perforated stone and shell implements, tubes, pipes, etc., accounts for the finding of a variety of awls, or drills, made of flint and stone. Not only perforated shell-gorgets, stone tablets or guards, plummets, and the like relics, but also beads, bears’ teeth, and other pendants or personal ornaments of various kinds, have been found in the mounds. They correspond to some extent to a class of perforated shell and bone implements met with in the ancient cave deposits of France and England; and the flint awls or borers by which they were drilled have been recognised among the rarer objects of the neolithic period found in England, France, Denmark, and in the Swiss Lake-dwellings.^[37] Figs. 11, 12 are good examples of two types of such tools in use by the ancient flint-workers of the Ohio Valley. Fig. 11 was found by its present owner, Mr. James Pierce, near Mayville, Kentucky. The square butt which forms the handle retains the natural shape of the block of yellow chert of which it is made, while the chipped surfaces of the blade show the dark grey colour of the core. Fig. 12 is a larger and ruder example of the flint drill, from the collection of Dr. Hill, of Cincinnati, probably designed to be attached to a wooden haft, and used for operations on a larger scale. A more carefully finished small flint-awl, with a neatly worked handle, but unfortunately broken at the point, was presented to me by Mr. Merrin, of Newark, who picked it up in a field in that vicinity. A drill of a different kind is shown in Fig. 13, also from the collection of Dr. Hill.