The stone age in North America, vol. 1 of 2Moorehead, Warren K. (Warren King)
History
The stone age in North America, vol. 1 of 2
Moorehead, Warren K. (Warren King)
Indians of North America -- Antiquities; Stone age -- North America
We have finished describing the chipped implements, and it is proper to
offer some conclusions and deductions. If one will walk through the
halls of the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, or the Smithsonian Institution
at Washington, or the Field Museum of Natural History at Chicago, one
will observe that chipped objects are more numerous than any other class
of artifacts on exhibition. Personally, I have examined sites in twenty
states, and I saw but one section of the country where broken pottery
exceeded chipped objects in quantity. That was the Chaco region in
northern New Mexico and the San Juan Valley. Elsewhere spalls, flakes,
discs, and broken chipped implements exceeded axes, pottery, or any
other class of prehistoric artifacts. When we counted the specimens in
the Andover Museum, November 10, 1906, we found that out of 55,928
objects, more than thirty-two thousand were of the chipped class. Our
collection is general, representing most of the states in this country.
The count indicated not only that chipped objects were more numerous
than any other division, but that they were more numerous than all
others combined.
The range in chipped objects is from the minute arrow-heads found on an
island at Moccasin Bend, Tennessee (near Chattanooga) to large obsidian
blades from California, or large unfinished chert implements on
exhibition in the Peabody Museum, Cambridge. I have never measured these
immense objects seen at Cambridge, but some of them appear to be fully
thirty to thirty-five inches in length and the weight may be from ten to
twenty pounds. One may suppose that when these large, roughly chipped,
flint, oval-shaped objects were worked down, the completed form would be
similar to those long, slender dagger- and sword-like objects on
exhibition in the Missouri Historical Society and the Tennessee
Historical Society collections.
What impresses me most is the skill of the ancient worker in flint—his
ability to reduce the rough, unfinished objects of such size to the
completed form.
Contrasted with these are the minute points, varying from one fourth to
two thirds inches in length, which are found at Moccasin Bend,
Tennessee. Colonel Young has made a large collection of these and there
are numbers on exhibition in our Andover Museum. Why the aborigines left
such numbers of delicate points, which in workmanship quite equal those
of the Willamette Valley, Oregon, must remain a mystery. Possibly these
were left on the island as “spirit offerings,” as in the case of the
finely chipped objects found by Professor Holmes in the spring at Afton,
Indian Territory.
The largest barbed or shouldered chipped specimen I have seen is in the
possession of a lady near Bainbridge, Ohio. It is seventeen inches in
length, and of pink and white quartz.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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