For agricultural operations the Amerinds had various tools, which, though primitive, answered the requirements. Of the plough, or anything approaching it, they had no knowledge, the hoe being their chief implement. This was made of flint, the shoulder-blade of a deer or other animal, a turtle shell or some similar object. Spades were also made, often of wood, and in the Mississippi region of flint, but these are seldom found in the Atlantic division. In the Moki country corn is still planted with a dibble, a stick sharpened at one end and having on one side a projection to receive the foot, which pressed it into the soil. Having cultivated a crop of maize, the grain had to be reduced to meal before it would serve for winter use, and for this purpose mortars of wood and stone were used, and also the _metates_, or mealing stones. Other substances besides corn were also ground in the mortars, as seeds of grass, dried fish, nuts, grasshoppers, paint, etc. Sometimes natural depressions in rocks were utilised, but oftener small bowlders were worked into the desired shape and stone pestles were wrought out to accompany them. The cavity was of various depths. Those tribes growing little corn made mortars neither large nor deep, and some, like the Pai Utes, growing no corn at all, ground their grass seeds on a flat stone, while those relying chiefly on corn for food, like the Pueblos and the Mexicans, in the early days made large oblong mortars, of hard basalt cut out to a depth of six or eight inches, with sides not more than an inch and a half or two inches thick. While these were really mortars, the grain was not pounded in them, but crushed and rubbed into meal by means of another stone, flat and oblong, about four and a half inches wide and some ten inches long and an inch or two thick. When the Pueblos and Mexicans settled in permanent houses they departed from the old way of hollowing out these stones, and used instead a flat slab, set up at an angle of about thirty-five degrees in a frame of slabs of stone, or of wood, about six or eight inches deep. Several of these slabs were fixed in a row, usually three, and were each made to produce different degrees of fineness by the girls behind till at the last stone, or metate,[240] as they are usually called, the meal was of the required condition. See page 194. The Eastern Amerinds usually pounded their corn with stone pestles in wooden mortars. Some Western tribes used the same method. Diminutive mortars were used for preparing face paints, while others were children’s toys. The so-called cupped-stones have sometimes been supposed to be paint mortars, but, as pointed out in a previous chapter (p. 66), they may have been mostly used for roughing and shaping the ends of fire-drills. [Illustration: A MOKI THROWING THE PUTCHKOHU