(c) Bones used in head-dresses. (Figs. 552–53.) (d) Tracings on bone. (Figs. 564–65.) (e) Bone effigies. (Figs. 557, 567.) Bone objects in the United States were in widespread use, and they served many purposes. In the Mississippi Valley more of them were worked into beads and awls than into anything else, but on the Great Plains they were made use of for many purposes. The tips of antlers were sharpened and fastened on arrows. In the Mandan country, North Dakota, and elsewhere in the West where stone was scarce, the bones of the buffalo served as clubs, the shoulder blades as digging-tools, and the ribs were polished and ground to an edge and used as knives and scraping-tools. The teeth of carnivorous animals were mounted as ornaments, and long slender bones of the smaller animals were cut into beads. Bone and horn spoons were doubtless common in all parts of the United States. [Illustration: FIG. 538. (S. 1–1.) Typical bone awls from the collection of S. D. Mitchell, Ripon, Wisconsin. ] [Illustration: FIG. 539. (S. 2–3.) Blunt-pointed awls found with burials. Baum Village-Site, Ohio. William C. Mills’s collection. ] [Illustration: FIG. 540. (S. about 3–4.) To the left, bone awls made from the tarsometatarsus of the wild turkey. To the right, bone needles. All from the Harness Mound, Scioto Valley, Ohio. ] A larger percentage of bone awls have been recovered from village-sites than of other objects in bone, excepting beads. The ash-pits of village-sites preserved practically everything encompassed by them because of the preservative quality of ashes. Therefore, I have always believed that the proportion of bone awls to other things is no criterion as to the use of bone among the aborigines. In the caves of the Ozarks, during three seasons of exploration, we recovered upwards of a hundred bone awls. More than fifty were taken from the ashes of Kelley Cavern alone. It must be remembered that these caves, as is also true of the village-sites of central United States and the South, mark the residence place of natives where, perhaps, women predominated. Assuming that because of wars there were usually more women than men,—and I think that the early American history will bear out this statement,—the domestic arts were in excess of the other arts; and even if the persons engaged in domestic science were in the minority there would naturally be more cooking, garment-making, weaving, and general domestic science in vogue in a village or a cave or a cliff-dwelling than elsewhere. It is not surprising, therefore, that awls and hammer-stones, pestles and mortars, rough axes and hoes should predominate in such places. An unknown number of bone effigies and bone tools that must have been made and used by the ancient people have disappeared, because as in the case of textile fabrics they were not preserved unless buried in ashes.