The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studiesWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
America -- Antiquities; Atlantis (Legendary place); Ethnology -- America; Indians of North America -- Antiquities
before us that even now the Stone period of its aborigines has not
wholly passed away, careful observation is required in determining the
probable age of stray specimens buried even at considerable depths.
But disclosures of an actual American implement-bearing drift appear at
length to have been met with in the valley of the Delaware. These show
the primitive tool-maker resorting to a granular argillite, the cleavage
of which adapted itself to the requirements of his rude art. Professor
Shaler, in a report on the age of the Delaware gravel beds, describes
this formation as occurring from Virginia northward to Labrador, though
it is only in New Jersey and Delaware that the accompanying evidences of
human art have been thus far recovered. The New Jersey drift is made up
of transported material, including boulders and smaller fragments of
granitic, hypogene, sandstone, and limestone rocks, along with
water-worn pebbles of the same granular argillite as the characteristic
stone implements recovered from it, to which, from their peculiar shape,
the name of “turtle-back celts” has been given. There is little true
clay in the deposit to give coherence to the mass. The type of pebble is
subovate, or discoidal, suggesting its form to be due to the action of
running water; and it seems probable that the stone was not quarried out
of the living rock, but that the pebbles thus reduced to a convenient
form were turned to account by the tool-maker. The researches of Dr.
Abbott have been rewarded by the discovery in the drift-gravel of
numerous examples of this peculiar type of implement, for which the one
material appears to have been used, notwithstanding the varied contents
of the drift-gravel in which they occur. As in the case of the French
and English river-drift, the fractured material is found in every stage
of disintegration. Professor Shaler says: “Along with the
perfect-looking implements figured by Dr. Abbott, which are apparently
as clearly artificial as the well-known remains of the valley of the
Somme, there are all grades of imperfect fragments, down to the pebbles
that are without a trace of chipping.” But more recent discoveries in
the Delaware valley point to remains of a still earlier age than those
described by Dr. Abbott. These naturally attracted attention to the
region; for there, for the first time, the American archæologist saw a
promise of disclosures corresponding in character to those of the
European drift-gravels. A systematic and prolonged series of
investigations accordingly carried out by Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson, under
the direction of the Peabody Museum, have resulted in fresh disclosures
of early American man. The Naaman’s Creek rock-shelter, carefully
explored by him, is situated in the State of Delaware, immediately to
the south of Mason and Dixon’s line. There in underlying deposits,
claimed to be of Post-Glacial age, rudely chipped points and other
implements, all of argillite, were found; and at a higher level, others
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