CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF THE AUTHOR E 78 N6AI3"" ""'""""V Library v.1-3 i)iilliiiiliiii«M^^^^^ 3 1924 028 653 ill ' Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028653123 Arch^ologia Nova C^sarea vjL-^^^. Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D. "As qaaint old Sir Thomas Browne happily pots it: 'Time which antiqnates antiquities and hath an art to malie dnst of all things, hath yet spared these minor monaments,' and I am heartily glad of it." 1907 TRENTON, N. J. MacCrxlush & QUICLEY, Frihtisks. 1907 PRKKACE. BECAUSE two relics of the one-time occupant of the open plain or the pathless forest are found during the same day, it by no means follows that the two objects were once in the possession of the same individual or that they were fashioned at practically the same time ; yet, based upon such an absurd assumption is the view so strenuously insisted upon by the coterie which, after a most superficial glance at the territory in question (the tide-water area of the valley of the Delaware), finds itself limited to denying the dis- coveries of others who have borne the heat and burden of the day in actual exploration. It is scarcely complimentary to the average intelligence that those who testify in the role of experts should ofifer negative evidence as of greater value than that which is positive. Unsuccessful themselves in the finding of arti- facts in place, after careful search — not only the asserted search, but the care attending it, problematical — they would feign blot out of existence, by a toss of the head or scratch of the pen, all evidence of man's antiquity. Success has attended these unscrupulous efforts far more generally than should have been the case, or would have been, had the sub- ject been treated honestly, as questions purely geological or historical are supposed to be. Possibly the most glaring instance of this disingenuous treatment of the subject was based on the absolutely im- possible examination of sewer trenches in the streets of Trenton, N. J., during the progress of their excavation. It admirably illustrates my contention. With a gratuitous diagram to make it the more delusive, the statement was made (Geol. Jour., I, 1893, pp. 15-37) that on the present immediate shore of the river rudely chipped argillite im- plements vi^ere found in abundance, but that there occurred no trace of such objects in the gravel at any significant dis- tance from the river. In other vi^ords, that no such objects are ever brought to light when digging cellars, sinking wells, excavating for sewers or water mains, or any other deep removal of masses of earth. This is an absolutely erroneous statement as to the actual conditions, and reprehensibly so, because based on what should have been realized as insuffi- cient knowledge of the region. The author heads the paper above referred to with the question : Are there traces of Glacial Man in the Trenton Gravels? Little wonder that he replies negatively to his own question. Negative evidence was his sole quest. No speculation as to his own origin by palaeolithic man could have been more wild, illusory, and often insanely gro- tesque than these frantic efforts of modern archaeologists to blot from history's page the existence of men whose man- hood was yet as an unfolded bud. And the more strange, too, because theoretically man ought to be as old here as the so-called Trenton Gravels. Antiquity is called for when we survey the field as a whole. The study of aboriginal lan- guages demands the lapse of many centuries. Yet, when special evidence of such antiquity is offered, the archaeologist becomes suddenly afraid of his own shadow and thinks the holding aloof for additional and yet more strongly con- firmatory evidence is sanely valorous. Such attitude per- manently holds back the truth. When, by means of a spade, we explore the ground be- neath our feet, after having previously carefully examined its surface, we are confronted by a condition which seems to be one of positive character, and yet it is as illusory, often. 5 in reality, as it is unquestionable in appearance. So many possibilities are there clustering about the inhumation of objects that it is rash indeed to measure antiquity by the depth at which any artifact may occur. Just as a warm day in January does not mean that June will be ushered in to- morrow, so an implement made and used by an Indian, so recently as when a neighbor of the white man, may occur at a depth that startles the discoverer. May startle, but should not, for the whole range of possibility is to be considered. Certainly no hole was ever dug and re-filled without abun- dant evidence of the fact. A tree torn by the roots from the ground, as in a notable tornado that leveled an orchard, leaves a deep hole in the ground. Springs that trickle patiently far beneath our feet wear away the soil until a blind cavern is formed, and then occurs a great slumping in the field, and the one-time level ground becomes the sides of a ravine. Intense cold has cracked the earth wide enough and these fissures have remained open long enough for an object as large as the ordinary arrow-point to drop from a few inches beneath the surface to a depth of six or seven feet. A trifling brook, that has rippled over the surface for centuries, may be turned aside and forced to flow in quite another direction, and the old course be so completly cov- ered up that when discovered it has all the appearance of a relic of another geological era. The deep burrowing of many a mammal may be the cause of a recent relic's deep burial, and a cloud-burst, flooding a sandy area, may wash from gravel, where it had been an integral part of the de- posit, a rude artifact and leave it upon the new-made sur- face, exposed to frost and heat for the first time in many centuries. I have witnessed all these things. I have been confounded many times. I have learned to be cautious. Still, notwithstanding the confusion that confronts the student of the earth's immediate surface, there are yet re- maining evidences of comparative fixity, and we can, through them, determine the major and widespread changes, dis- tinguishing such from the minor and purely local ones. Were it not so, we might well despair of reaching to any conclusion concerning, approximately, the earliest appear- ance of man. It is to be regretted that geology is not, as yet, more of an exact sciaice, and not until it ranks with astronomy and mathematics will it be able to set permanently at rest many of the petty doubts that vex the archaeologist. It is true that when treating of Laurentian rock, coal deposits or beds of cretaceous marl, the terms used are dependable, for there is no possibilty of a human skull appearing and grin- ning a contradiction, but when we near the present and dig in, but not beneath the "pleistocene," "quaternary," "glacial" or "recent," or whatever term may be applicable to some par- ticular point, then it is, that if gathered here, an association of geologists are scattered, like startled sheep, if asked the simplest question. An archaeologist must be his own inter- preter of geological conditions. If not equal to this, he is a. mere collector of relics, and whatever the value of his speci- mens, his opinion is little worth. Probably no river in the United States presents as im- portant and comprehensive a series of archjeological hori- zons as does the Delaware, from- a short distance above its tidal flow to its final merging with the sea. The reason is obvious. The terminal moraine is but about fifty miles away. From it is derived the strata of post-glacial de- posits of sand and gravel that fonn so marked a feature of the valley southward O'f the extension of the ice-sheet. The immediate surroundings, prior and during glacial activity, now and then at a significant elevation above the flood-line, were heavily forested and inhabited by an extensive and varied fauna, and not a condition is discoverable inimicable to the highest interests of primitive man ; but did he dwell here at that time? Did he know, in this region, the reindeer, the moose, musk-ox and mastodon ? Did the walrus gambol in the Delaware's icy waters? Ay, there's the rub! All that which has been set forth as evidence has been contemptuously set aside as having; any archaeological sig- nificance. If objects found suggestively deep were offered that were unquestionably artifacts, then they were intrusive objects, or, if the conditions forbade intrusion, then the arti- ficiality could not be demonstrated, and the sweeping con- clusion of these modernists was, and is, that referring all artificiality to the historic Indian, the purposes of archaeo- logical research are accomplished. Whatever their entire significance may ultimately prove to be, the fact remains that large rudely chipped but dis- tinctly fashioned implements of metamorphosed slate — argillite — which are indistingtiishable in pattern from Euro- pean palseolithic implements, have frequently been found in deposits of gravel, the history of which is unmistakably that of the closing activities of the glacial period, and so far as they were concerned, there was no evidence of such artifacts having become inhumed subsequent to the deposition of the containing bed. A distinction should ever be drawn between the expression of an opinion and the statement of a fact, but such distinc- tion seems generally toi be lost sight of when treating of the archaeology of the Delaware valley ; by those, at least, who deny the glacial phase of such archaeology. Possibly ex- treme timidity may be the explanation of this unfortunate state of affairs, but far more probable is it that a cultivated strabismus reverses the order, and placing the gravel on the surface and the soil beneath, necessarily makes the older appear the more recent. Be this as it may, there is certainly more confusion of impression than infusion of fact in the archasological references we find in scientific jouirnals, g'ov- ernment reports and the homelier State reports concerning our surface geology. If we are to accept the dicta of the many who have dilated on the subject, it would appear that whatsoever we must ascribe to man, be it bone or artifact, if found in the earth, is to be held as an intrusive object and really belonging on the earth. As it happens, fossils old as and older than the tertiary beds are found upon the surface. Do they belong there? The geologists can readily tell you why they do not. Let a theoretically ancient trace of man be found where floods have washed the surface of a field and the geologist's insistence is that, being of human origin, it never was else- where than on the present surface ; that it could be brought from beneath after an aeon of burial is preposterous. Happily for those interested in the final acquisition of the truth as to^ man's career in America, the geologist is yet to be born, with vision so penetrative and glance so terrible that doubt will flee at his approach. The geologist cannot so readily explain the artifact. His decisive manner, in the one case, is changed to sad uncertainty in the other. His yea was yea, and nay, nay, when discoursing of a shell, but now, confronted by an artifact or humian bone, we are treated to endless poly- syllabic circumlocution. Ignoring, then, the literature of the subject, which bears no more important relation to the river valley than the clouds of dust and smoke that continually traverse its length, I returned, some years ago (November 20, 1901), to the rocks and accumulated material that fills the spaces between them and sought again to have theni tell their own story of the past. Now, at the conclusion of my labors, I do not ■find that it differs materially from that which I suggested was such histoi-y, thirty-fi-\-e years ago. It may not be out of place to include in these prefatorial remarks passing reference to the fact that, in the interests •of several museums, a most competent, careful and tireless explorer has 'for many years been at work in the same locality that has been for so long the scene of my own labors. His purpose, as set forth by the directors of the several museums, was primarily to demonstrate the untenability of the position I have maintained concerning man's antiquity here, since 1872 (American Naturalist, Vol. VI, March, 1872. "The Stone Age in New Jersey."). The results of Mr. Volk have been confirmatory in many ways, and he is fully convinced of the correctness of my views. Unfortu- nately, there is no likelihood of his voluminous reports being published. Happily, the river itself rolls on in its quiet, summery way, or rushes its winter's accumulation of ice impetuously toward the sea, unmindful of the strange stories told of it. This is fortunate, for in the telling of its own story we have glimpses of past history brought to lig'ht, easy enough to recognize as such, if we have the inclination to do so. The river speaks in no unknown tongue; she offers no' hiero- glyphics over which we are required to puzzle. All is plain as day to those who choose to seek the truth for themselves and avoid as they would a pestilence all theorists and the carping critic. Whether or not a wise caution, whether, on any grounds, worthy or not of defense, it is not my purpose to discuss, but the indisputable fact stands that man is usually — we might, perhaps, say invariably — averse to studying his own, or a species allied to himself, precisely as he would another or all mammals. This, since the dawn of learning, has been the lO inclination, albeit without warrant, of every student, to con- sider himself and all of his genus, if not his species, sub- species or race, as absolutely without the bounds of those accepted methods of investigation that apply to the inferior foi-ms of life, or, in other words, that man is not amenable to Nature, but to himself and the Supernatural. So long- as this disposition prevails in anthropological studies, so long will confusion enveil the object studied and the pro- gress of knowledge be retarded. In the following pages I am concerned only with that people which held in their possession the valley of the Dela- ware river prior to the seventeenth century. Whether they were here by right of conquest, or peaceful occupation, or direct descendants of a less cultured folk of a preceding geological period, probably cannot be determined without some lingering shadow of a doubt, but this point is not so important as an historian might deem, for whether the sequence of event that I hope tO' demonstrate is that of gen- eration following generation, or the elimination of one people and succession of another, is of little moment. The point is, there was a day when never a human foot had pressed the turf of this river valley, and the day dawned when the valley lay before man, with its sparkling waters flowing through miles of up-lifted rock and then idly spread- ing over sandy plains until lost, at last, in the insatiable sea. What was the career of this initial irruption of manhood in the valley ? It seems at first glance that the improbability of ever knowing is equal to or greater than our desire to possess the facts. But effort, if rightly directed, is a solv- ent of many difficulties that, idly regarded, appear impreo-- nable. In this instance the right direction, as I regard it, is in studying the historic Indian and his ancestors or pre- decessors, as the case may be, as a feature of the region's fauna, along with the deer, beaver and opossum and noth- II ing more. In this light his relics are of historic value, in part, and others more of the nature of true fossils. So doing, we encounter fewest difficulties and the facts we gather are intelligible and satisfy all our longings for knowledge of the past. But once we associate the Indian with other peoples and grouping all as something other than a phase of mam- malian life, that moment theory becomes rampant and dire confusion follows. There appears to have always been a certain miscon- ception on the part of geologists who have taken up this question, in that they held that the age of any deposit wherein an artifact may occur is the crowning point of the whole controversy. It is really not a matter of the slightest importance, and the wrangling of experts and savans sim- ply stands for so much energy wasted. The aim has been on my part, and I believe I started the ball to rolling, is to demonstrate a certain sequence of event, as already speci- fied. It is not a matter of moment whether this started in pre-glacial, glacial or post-glacial time. Did it start at all? Accepting the proposition that it did, the question of probability arises as to whether the appearance of man in America was likely to have been at so late a date as post- glacial. There would be no physical barrier to man en- tering the continent during glacial times, if its shores were reached south of the area affected by the ice, and certainly it is within the bounds of possibility. We know as yet too little of South and Central America and the West Indies to assert that nothing can be expected of that region and that the northern region, Behring's strait and adjacent terri- tory, was the sole scene of the initial immigration. Surveying the entire outlook and seeing, as I claim I do see, the three horizons of palaeolithic, pre-Indian and In- dian, here in New Jersey, I incline to the view of pre-glacial 12 occupancy of the country, but if this is demonstrated to have been impossible, it by no means affects the question as to that sequence of event for which I have contended. The material upon which the following report is based consists of th^ author's personally-collected specimens, now in museum of Princeton University, and grateful acknowl- edgment is here made of the pecuniary assistance, so gen- erously provided by Messrs. M. Taylor Pype and Junius S. Morgan, of Princeton, without which the collections could not have been made and this report thereon published. C. C. A. Three Beeches, Trenton, N. J., Feb. i8, 1907. arch.:eologia NOVA CiESAREA IMPLEMENTS AND ARTIFACTS. A SERIOUS difficulty confronts us when we attempt to place a proper value on the term "primitive," as applied to mankind at the outset of his career, or that period when the influence of pithecoidal propensities was almost lost. Cer- tainly this far-off day in human history ante-dates man's appearance on the North American continent, judged by the traces of his presence as yet discovered. Still, the ad- vance toward what is now recognized as humanity was not strongly marked. Mentality had not the animal under ab- solute control. The animal was not yet convinced that in- tellectuality was altogether and under all circumstances wholly desirable. There was constant struggle, while ape- like chatterings were giving way to mumblings and cries that were scarcely more suggestive and intelligible. A marked feature of advance was not so much the use of natural objects for defense and other purposes, for monkeys know the value of a weapon, as when a cocoanut is dropped in a pre-determined direction, but in the selection of objects peculiarly suited to their several purposes. When ancient man first faced a gravel bed, with a gleam of intelligence in his countenance, and noted the infinite variety of shapes and size of the pebbles, that moment was the daybreak of his intellect, and when his hand grasped a selected stone and he used it, rather than his fist, to effect a purpose, that day implements were brought into existence ; a new idea, a new world, a new train of thought was started on a career that is yet pushing onward, and will continue its irresistible journey till the end of time. i6 The implement, therefore, ante-dates the artifact, mean- ing by the former any natural object that man has put to use to further his endeavor. To-day, if I pick up a pebble and with it crack a nut, that pebble, for the time being, becomes an implement. Obviously, such use may leave no trace behind it, and if stones were used but once and tossed aside and another chosen when next a need occurred, it would be in vain to seek for evidence of man's presence, but it is quite within the range of probability that stones peculiarly well adapted to certain uses were retained, and so the idea of property dawned upon the primitive mind, and such chosen stones — now implements — would show the efifect of wear and tear in time, and I doubt not but that speci- mens often, which have been gathered from gravel deposits, having attracted the attention of the archaeologist when in search of "conclusive" evidence, are discarded as indefi- nite, when really they are as much a proof of man's exist- ence as the desired palaeolithic artifact. I think this, because on many a village site, associated with the most special- ized forms of stone implements, we find battered and slightly-chipped pebbles that are not, as there found, objects of doubtful significance. Replace tliem by similar objects from the gravel, as can easily be done, and not an archaeol- ogist lives who can tell the one from the other. The difficulty is enormous of determining between such abrasions, fractures and rubbing of surfaces as natural forces bring about and those resulting from the use of a stone by man as an implement. It is so often impossible that the attempt had better not be made, for though the archaeologist may be able to satisfy himself, he will fail to convince anyone else, for, as experience has shown, it needs but the negative nod of ignorance in office to nullify the results of honest toil in the field. Nevertheless, such thank- less undertaking should not be always shunned. It must 17 ■not be forgotten that man existed undeterminable thousands of years ago, and when his manhood dawned, and for long afterwards, he was leaving scarcely more traces of his ele- mental culture behind him than do the anthropoid apes of to-day. Surely, a battered pebble is scant evidence of man's presence so long ago as when the melting up-river glacier was pouring its mighty flood down the valley of the Dela- ware, and while there are pebbles and pebbles and marks of violence and marks of violence, is there or not the remotest chance of unquestionably distinguishing between those that are referrible to nature and those referrible to man? I have in mind a high, dry, sandy field, to which Nature never carried a pebble. Nothing but sand, and this resting, twenty feet below, on clay. Yet, stones are not uncommon, from pebbles not larger than a pigeon's egg to boulders of considerable weight. There is no contradiction here. Every stone was brought tO' where it now lies by the Indians. Not all show signs of use, but by far the greater number tell their own stories of playing the role of implement. They are worn away in places by reason of continued and violent contact with other equally hard or more resisting objects, "pecking," as it is usually termed; they are rubbed down until their polished surfaces fairly glisten; some have been exposed to fire and are cracked and discolored by the heat ; some, doubtless, were gathered because oif their color, and were treasured as ornaments, or, when nearly globular and small, used in playing games. Whatever the history of these pebbles, altered and unaltered, as a whole, here they are, and have in common the archaeological significance of having been brought to a village site by the villagers. In two respects they are of great interest in their bearing on the question of the traces of man in the "Trenton Gravel." They show how all-important a part pebbles played in man's career at its outset, and, again, the slightly battered 2 AB i8 specimens of the village site are duplicated by pebbles, simi- larly abraded, occurring in the gravel. This brings us, in turn, to the question of the possibility of distinguishing between naturally and artificially battered pebbles. He comes nearest the truth probably who, holding in check the too often reckless enthusiasm of the archaeologist, avoids also the cold-blooded caution of the geologist. The mark left by the sudden contact of one stone with another may or may not be very conspicuous, but it invari- ably (?) has the character of a single occurrence of such contact. If, again, these same pebbles should come in con- tact and another trace of like violence be left, the chances are certainly infinitesimally small that such marks should be at or practically at the same point. Pebbles as a mass, after having been smoothed to uniformity of surface by water- wearing, are, when violently agitated, which seldom occurs, irregularly pitted; but, on examining the selected pebbles from the village site, the battered specimens have abraded surfaces only at certain points, and, these are just those that would be exposed to violent contact, if used as hammers, as in pecking away the surfaces of other stones, as when pebbles were shaped to axes, celts and pestles, or in the humbler use of cracking nuts or crushing seeds in a shallow mortar. We never doubt the artificial origin of such pecked surfaces. Now, it happens that we occasionally find pebbles in the gravel with a trace of this localized pecked-away or battered surface, and such specimens are worthy of a good deal of serious consideration. If we found them on the surface of a field, their claim to archseological significance would never be disputed, but, occurring in the gravel at some depth, there is a possibility of a "natural" origin of the abraded surface, and so all such objects are per- emptorily ruled out of court. This may be a safe procedure, so far as the judges are concerned, but so doing is far away. 19 possibly, from the actualities involved. We can come to no positive conclusion, it may be, but of this I am sure that the probability is largely in favor of many a battered pebble that is now, and for centuries has been, a constituent part of the gravel deposit, having become battered because uised as an implement. What has always been urged as an insuperable difficulty to the presence of man in the Delaware valley at the time of the last general re-assorting and re-depositing of the irregular gravel beds that now constitute so marked a fea- ture of the valley at the head of tide-water is that humanity, in such primitive condition as to be dependent on pebbles for implements, could not have reached this distant point of the Atlantic seaboard from the center of distribution of mankind. As to this, we do not know where such center was, or centers were, if more than one. Ctertainly, this is an important matter, not yet finally determined. The Asiatic origin of American man is nothing more than an assump- tion, and I hold that as time does not enter into the question at all, there is no greater difficulty in a mi'gration of such primitive man or his gradually spreading over a vast terri- tory than in the migration of any other mammal, and the difficulty decreases when we look upon it as a very gradual dispersion and not a predetermined effort to go up and possess the land in any one direction. The most formidable objection that I can see in the existence of strictly pre- glacial man is the, as yet, complete absence of any trace of him. We prefer facts to theory, just as we have them in abundance in the valley of the Delaware, where the popular theory of his non-existence finds scanty basis. The battered pebbles and an occasional flat one from which a few very suggestive flakes have been detached, hold the attention of the collector, who is ever hoping for more tangible evidence of man, and, as I have felt for many years, deserve to be considered more seriously than they have been. 20 THE PALEOLITHIC ARTIFACTS. And what now of that associated form, the palaeolithic artifact? Indeed, it may well be asked, what is it? Is there a type of implement than can readily be recognized as something separate and apart from an unfinished object of a later pattern ? When we speak of a palaeolithic artifact as a pointed object, from five to eight inches in length and the product of man's handiwork, we have gone over the entire range of certainty, and all subsequent comment must necessarily be suggestive and forever subject to change of view. As no European ever saw a native American use such a tool or weapon, as the case may be, it is obviously but conjectural how he did use it; but that there was one or more definite purposes in the mind Oif its fabricator is certain. That it was not a "simple" implement, as suggested by Brinton, is probable, as to hold it in the hand would have been awkward, and blows with it not particularly effective, except in hand-to-hand encounter, which probably was not the chief occupation or amusement of primeval man. If, in those days, man was quick tO' pick a quarrel, such an object as a paleolithic im- plement would be far more effective as a weapon, if hafted, and so it is not a rash conclusion to reach that such man had a wit equal to the invention of a handle to his favorite weapon. Thus armed with a "compound" weapoii, as Brin- ton calls them, he whoi wielded it was not ill equipped to meet the attack of any foe. Implements of obsidian, as rude, if not more rudely fabricated, were recently and may yet be in use among the South Sea Islanders. The undis- putable palaeolithic artifact has, since the day of its use as the armature of ancient man, been largely reproduced in the fashioning of more specialized implements, and this has led 21 tO' much confusion in the minds of lay readers, through the amusing whims of strenuous modernists, who have ex- amined — not explored — the territory in question with nota- ble lack of critical acumen and apparently with no serious intent. The result of such conclusions as were reached and given to the public — with which admissions in conversa- tion do not tally — is that all unspecialized artifacts are "Indian rejects." The truth is, the resemblance, as stated, is purely accidental, and the differences ever existing are readily detected by those whose studies have not confined them too closely to the museums. It must, too, never be forgotten that the circumstance of occurrence, the condition oif object and whether associated or dissociated, so far as unquestioned recent artifacts are concerned, must be ever kept in view. Apparently, this care has not been exercised by those who desire that evidence of antiquity shall not materialize. The distinction between historiography and archasology has not been suspected. The former has been held to be equal to all the demands of the conditions obtain- ing, and the latter, while perfunctorily referred to, has not been recognized as what it is, but as something that really had no case in court. Considered collectively, the palaeolithic artifacts are made of argillite, a metamorphosed slate that is readily shaped under moderately skillful manipulation, the fracture under pressure or well-directed blows being conchoidal, and so all the excellency of flint, for such purposes, is present. While this material, argillite, is in situ, not far above the limit of tide water — about twenty miles — the earliest inhabitants of the Delaware Valley were not necessitated to seek any out- crop of the mineral, inasmuch as large boulders of the same were everywhere to be found, where the glacial floods had spread out a deposit of gravel. These detached masses were 22 utilized and the indications are, were used long before their origin was known to the primitive chipper. It is altogether safe to assume that the region of occurrence in place of this argillite was inaccessible to the men who first chipped the boulders that were scattered over the habitable areas. An Indian "reject" made five hundred years ago and a palaeolithic artifact made probably five thousand years ago, if the material is identical, would, it is natural to suppose, present different degrees of weathering or surface decom- position in some measure consonant with their relative age, but this is not necessarily the case. The older object, if so buried as to be protected from corrosive agencies, may re- tain a freshness of surface that has long been lost by the "reject" lying near the surface and alternately exposed and buried and subjected to frost, heat and erosion by wind- driven sands. This is the history of many an Indian relic, and often we find them so far altered that the definition of the chipping and minor features of design are obliterated ; but a true palaeolithic artifact from gravel undisturbed for centuries is practically the same as when fabricated, and only the sharp lines indicative of detached flakes have been worn away. They often have a freshness of surface that is dis- turbing to the advocate of antiquity, and the collector is puzzled to fit his ideas to the object that seemingly is of very recent origin. This must ever be borne in mind, and then confusion is not likely to arise. It is in the museum or the library that trouble comes. When in the field — his only proper place — the archaeologist realizes, as he can nowhere else, what changes in the region have takai place, and the distribution of newer and older conditions are distinctly defined; in short, the procession of the ages passes by. Again, such ancient artifacts are found singly. Among a million pebbles, a deeply buried stratum of sand, beneath a narrow band of clay, anywhere where deposits through icy 23 floods and floating ice occur, deep or near the present sur- face of the field, we may look with some confidence, but necessarily the chances are against their discovery. These chance relics of forgotten time, dropped by accident and at once buried by the shifting sands, have been left from then till now, as a veritable pebble among pebbles, hidden effectively from any destroying agency and remain recog- nizable but mute witnesses to the men who roamed this river valley when every feature of it was wholly different from what now obtains. The true artifact is a finished implement. The same cannot be said of the Indian "reject." The palaeolith, if desired, could be readily reduced to smaller size or even to a different design, but the true reject shows why it is such, and that further expenditure of effort would be in vain. The "fault" in the mass of material selected is plain or its generally intractable character apparent, and so the reason for rejection evident, but this cannot be said of the un- doubted palaeolithic artifact. It is as much a finished imple- ment as an arrow-point or a grooved stone axe. There is yet another point to be considered. In the immediate valley of the river, these ancient implements are either buried and exposed by digging or are found in the talus where an escarpment is gradually crumbling away; but they are not confined to such areas, but are found buried or unburied, as the case may be, miles away from the river's shore or such adjacent land as was affected by its activities as the outlet of a glaciated area. Palaeolithic man was not a semi- amphibious creature and dependent on water as much as land to lead the life he did. He may have been much as is the Greenland Eskimo of to-day, but not necessarily. His was no insignificant territory, even here in New Jersey, for the coast line was then different, and much land, now lost to us, was familiar to him. This, I unhesitatingly assert. 24 because what I believe to be true palaeolithic artifacts have been found in the southernmost counties of the State. I have found them in both Atlantic and Cape May counties, and throughout the whole intervening aixa, from the present coast line to the immediate valley of the Delaware, they occur singly, and usually where the ordinaiy Indian relics do not occur. Often so worn by exposure to the shifting sands, to frost and rain, they are not readily recognized, when seen apart, but when a series are brought together, the lines of original fracturing can be traced by aid of those that have been protected from weathering. There is a limit to this, however, and many a perfectly smooth pebble of arg'illite, with no definition of chipping remaining, may have been a sharply defined artifact in its day, just as we know that many a now shapeless splinter of the mineral was an arrow-point, because of some slight tell-tale feature remaining. This view is strengthened by the fact that water-worn artifacts occur in the bed of the river, so smooth and even polished that the thought of their having been once chipped would not occur were the practiced archaeologist not able to trace the lines that once were prominent, notwithstanding the grinding and polishing to which they have been subjected. Placing one such beside another that has escaped erosion and the same history, so far as artificiality is concerned, can be seen to apply tO' both, but seen alone, the eroded or smoothed one might be readily passed unrecognized. What to many has seemed a valid objection to the view of a one-time occupation of the valley of the Delaware by paljeolithic man, is that raised by the results of an examina- tion — in no case exhaustive — of the conditions obtaining in the immediate vicinity of the occurrence of argillite in situ. Here, amid a mass of flakes, splinters and chippings in- 25 numerable, are found unfinished implements and rejects that bear a marked resemblance to the claimed ancient finished artifacts found miles distant. Why, it is triumphantly asked by the explorer of the non-tidal reaches of the valley, are not the scattered objects — the so-called "palseolithic" im- plement — simply those unfinished forms which the Indian "elected to retain and carried away with him, or, if found in the immediate valley, might they not have been carried down by the freshets since Indian times? These questions demand that they be very carefully answered. They are very pertinent and apparently present serious objections to my view. Had I not intimate knowledge of the conditions both in the non-tidal and tidal areas, I should be perplexed, but as it is am not disturbed, as the two points, the tidal and non-tidal, have really nothing in common, so far as the archaeology of the entire river valley is concerned. As I have already pointed out, the objects found in the tidal areas were made — ^if made in pre-Indian time, as I claim — of argillite boulders found on the spot, and this is the more probable because the ice at present, and equally true of it in Indian time, does not transport masses of stone as large as an average palaeolithic implement. A careful ex- amination of the ice as it has floated from the up-river regions and accumulated in the tide-water shallows, shows that nothing of greater bulk — in stone — than sand and robin's-egg pebbles are transported, and the number of the latter is very inconsiderable. If not floated, or, more prop- erly speaking, carried by the ice, may they not have been rolled along the bed of the river? Doubtful, to say the least, and if so, their journey, under such circumstances, of some twenty miles would leave such indelible marks that the fact of their transportation after this fashion would be obvious to all. Chipped implements, as already pointed out, which tiave been subjected to much water action, present unmis- 26 takable evidence of such exposure, and are readily recog- nized as such when compared with upland specimens. These water-worn artifacts are not, as I claim, intrusive objects,, but integral parts of the gravel deposit which now forms part of the present river's bed. It must be remembered that the action of the ice, when moving, as when there occurs a "break-up" in the spring, is different in the up-river and tidal-river localities. In the former the ice is largely grounded, and, when moved, neces- sarily pushes the gravel before it, so that a clean, sandy beach of an island that one summer may be free from; large pebbles, may be covered with them the following season, but when these same cakes of ice reach the deeper tide- water they float and so cannot aid in the transportation of aii)^hing not encased in them. After many a year's search, I have found no ice-encased pebbles that were one-hundredth the bulk of an ordinary argillite artifact. Buoyant articles, as wood, eggs and shells, have been frequently found, but never a stone that would weigh a pound or two. This up- river ice, reaching the gravel bluff at Trenton, rests against it and is often piled to more than half its height. The bluff itself is not materially affected by this ice, and when the force of the accumulated waters dammed by the ice causes the gorge to give away the break never occurs along shore, but near the middle of the stream, and long after the river is clear and navigation is resumed the shore ice remains where- originally lodged, and slowly melts away. It is the water- freshet, due to great rainfall, that undermines the bluff at times and causes it to crumble. This has been going on for so long a time, and so rapidly since the deforesting of the country, that the river is now far wider and shallower than when the Indian dwelt along its banks. Not a colonist of the seventeenth century, could he return, would recognize the Delaware of to-day as the river that was so attractive when he saw it first. 27 Other explanation than transportation from the rock in situ, must be sought for the presence of those implements found mingled with the gravel and now exposed to view. Mr. W. H. Holmes has suggested that an Indian, walking along the river shore, chose a pebble and attempted to fashion a blade. The mineral failed to lend itself satisfac- torily to the implement-maker and he tossed it aside. Here, centuries later, we find this "reject," and presumptuous, is it, indeed, to look upon it as anything else. Why could not an Indian walk upon exposed gravel and pick up a pebble as well as we can to-day ? There are two considerations to which we must give heed when this question is asked. We are, in the first place, tacitly informed that the Indian was given to chipping stone in this haphazard way to supply a sudden need upon the spot, all of which is a gratuitous assumption, for though argillite boulders and pebbles were available, there was, doubtless, selection of material exercised, if we may judge from the fact that argillite artifacts, as we find them, show no evidence of intractability, and could have been reduced in size; hence, in no sense can the term "reject" be applied to them. The impracticability of reducing a piece of argil- lite to desired shape would be so early recognized that real failures would have more the appearance of frost-fractured stone and be little suggestive of human interference. Then, again, if the object as found has been lying undis- turbed on the river shore for centuries — two centuries at least — ^why is it that the chips are not there also? These are never found under such circumstances. In fact, they are very rarely found at all in the gravel where the implement itself occurs, and yet in numbers they exceed the "reject" or finished object at least as ten to one. Furthermore, we are asked to believe that the river shore where we find rude implements is the same to-day as when the Indian wandered 28 along it centuries ago. Everywhere the river shows clearly how the never-resting tidal flow wears away the shore, car- rying sand and fine gravels from one point and spreading it elsewhere to form a sand bar, it may be, and turning the channel from one side of the stream to^ the other, and so ex- posing long reaches of the shore tO' wasting, that for many a year had been fixed and apparently secure. Often the mud is entirely removed from the underlying gravel, and abundant traces of Indian occupation are brought to light, and, less frequently, so' strong a current attacks a given point that even the gravel is moved and deep holes are formed, to be filled in time with the wasting shore from a point perhaps a mile away. This is the story of the river of to-day, and so it has been for centuries ; and yet we are asked to believe that we can fill the moccasin prints of the Indian by walking now along the water's edge. I submit that it is asking a great deal too much. It has been suggested that rudely chipped implements, when found on the gravelly shore of the river, have fallen out from the bank and rolled down from where they had long been lying. This is not at all improbable; but how does this modernize the object, when the gravel extends quite to the surface? The pebbles and bowlders at the top of the bank are clearly as much a part of the deposit as are those at its base, and while the surface may be — is, in fact ■ less ancient than the deeper gravels, still they can not be dissociated ; and it is a significant fact that we find, on the gravel at the foot of the bluff or other exposure, only the rude argillite objects at the water's edge or on the flat laid bare at low tide, and not a general assortment of the Indian's handiwork, including pottery ; and we roust not overlook the fact that the "gravel-bed" implements bear evidence of all the conditions to which the gravel itself has been subjected — this one stained by manganese, that incrusted with limo- 29 nite; this fresh as the day it was chipped, because lost in sand and water and not subsequently exposed to the atmos- phere; that buried and unearthed, rolled, scratched and water-worn until much of its artificiality has disappeared. The history of almost every specimen is written upon it, and not one tells such a story as has been told about it by the originator and advocate of the "Indian-reject" theory. As I have already mentioned, it has been stated in the most positive manner, which only positive evidence could warrant, that artifacts have not been found in situ in gravel deposits at a distance from the river, and such, if there wer£ suchj as appeared to be in the gravel, were recent intrusions. This statement, in its several parts and its entirety, is abso- lutely incorrect, and no excuse can be offered for its publica- tion. It is to be explained, however, because avowedly predetermined. Wherever the glacial gravel of the Dela- ware tide-water region is found, there palseolithic implements occur, as they also do on and in the surface of areas beyond the gravel boiuidary. We accept, notwithstanding the un- scientific source of the suggestion, the statement that post- glacial floods inhumed all traces of man found beneath the superficial soils, and find that, if these traces are considered in that light, some mysterious power was behind the sense- less flood, and always buried argillite palaeolithic implements far down in the gravel, and then selected argillite artifacts of more specialized 'forms for the overlying sands and reserved the pottery and jasper arrow-points for the vegeta- tion-sustaining soil. This, as stated, is absurd, but such is the order of occurrence of the traces of early man in the upland fields. Much stress was laid by this same author upon the nega- tive evidence of failure to discover artifacts when extensive excavations for sewers were made in the streets of Trenton. It is not at all strange that no palaeolithic implements were 30 forthcoming. The digging in question was always so nar- row, so deep and generally so dripping with moisture that it was impossible to examine the sides of the excavations, and so treacherous withal, this gravel, that as the dirt was removed the trench was planked to prevent caving. No human being ever could or ever did make any critical exam- ination of these sewer trenches, and all that could be done was to examine the gravel as thrown out, shovelful at a time. This I did for many days, and never was aware that there was another Richmond in the field. As we all know, when a hole is dug, the dirt from the bottom is on the top of the heap thrown out. Now, it does happen that I found at the very crest of a ridge of gravel thus tossed out from the trenches, two artifacts, which were forwarded to the Pea- body Museum, Cambridge, Mass. And what if nothing were found ? Negative evidence at most. But consider the territory explored! We might as well think we know a field by following its fences. Mr. Holmes hoped to find a grain of dust on a thread of gossamer, or, what is far more probable, was desperately afraid that he might do so. This really is all that need be said on this phase of the subject. It would be strange, indeed, if the Trenton gravel, with traces of man therein, should contain no other evidence of animal life. Such a condition would greatly complicate the question, and we might well look askance at asserted evi- dence of a human being living under such. It must be made apparent how he could have lived, and this is done by the occurrence in the same deposits of a wide range of mam- malian life. The report of the State Geologist, for 1878, informs uis : "There has been found in the tei-race of modi- fied drift at Trenton the tusk of a mastodon * * * the inference seems plain that the climate at that time (i. e., ■during the deposition of the Trenton gravel) admitted of 31 the growth of animals Hke the elephant in size and habits." To this I would add an extract from a paper by the late Samuel Lockwood, on mastodon remains from; New Jersey. He remarks, in the conclusion of his most interesting account : "Two facts have much impressed me — the great geo- logical antiquity of the mastodons as a race, and the very recent existence of the individual we are discussing. The race began in Miocene time; this individual lived in the quaternary age, and well up into the soil-making period. There is little if any differentiation of the molars. The cusps, or teats, on tlie crown are high and prominent, although I think it must have been one of the very last of its tribe. Though the race came before those great castors now extinct, this individual was contemporary with the existing beaver, and doubtless with the aboriginal man. "It is singular that in the present controversy respecting the subsidence of a part of the eastern coast-line of the United States, I have never seen the testimony of the mas- todon put in evidence. As already said, this animal has run through a long stretch of geologic time. I saw a tuisk taken from the Trenton gravels of New Jersey which belong to the ice age, or glacial epoch. I have part of a tusk taken from the shore in Monmouth county. New Jersey, after a storm. This storm from the sea had washed away the drift which covered an ancient swamp, in which this relic, with other bones, had been entombed. But that swamp had been far inland, sufficient for a depression to exist far enough away from the action of the sea to enable it to support a non-marine, sub-aquatic vegetation. The subsidence had allowed the sea to come up and uncover that creature's grave. Last summer, at Long Branch, I saw a fine masto- don's tooth which was taken up by fishermen out at sea. I have also some fragments of a mastodon's tooth, besides 32 an almost entire one of remarkable size. * * * *• It was given me as coming from Long Branch, where it was obtained so long ago that its history was forgotten. I detected upon it the microscopic skeletons of marine bry- osoa, the same species that I have often found on the shells of ouir modern oysters. This tiny animal can only attach itself to a clean anchorage in the clear sea-water. Hence* this tooth was evidently got from the sea; and, more, its old grave of mud or peat w:as long ago invaded by the sea and churned up, so as toi float it away, leaving the tooth on the clean, sandy ocean-floor. "So it is plain that the mastodon came into what is now New Jersey ere the ice-sheet began. It receded south before it. It followed the thawing northward, and so again pos- sessed the land. It occupied this part of the country when- its shore-line was miles farther out to sea than it is to-day. Here it was confronted by the human savage, in whom it found more than its match; for, before this autochthonic Nimrod, Behemoth melted away." The list of mammals known to have lived here at this time is not a long one, but it is suggestive. Leidy has reported the walrus from New Jersey, and Cope states r "The Greenland reindeer was a resident of New Jersey when the walrus was on its shores and when the climate resembled that of its present home." True, except that all the indications favor the view that the climate was not so arctic as at present in the range of the reindeer. The moose, according to Allen, probably "in glacial times inhabited the eastern coast of the United States southward to Virginia." Mr. Volk has found one bone, referred by competent authority to the musk-ox. The seal still wanders up the river, and doubtless, centuries ago was a common feature of the river's icy waters. Sbrely the land was ripe for human occupation, and it would be far more strange if it 33 could be proved that it was not so occupied, than is the offered demonstration that palseoHthic man shared the regfion with these creatures. The conditions were more favorable here, then, than now confront the boreal race of the con- tinent, the Eskimo. The relation of this arctic race toi the historic Indian has been much discussed, and it was to be hoped that the exhaustive explorations of the gravels about Trenton, by Mr. Volk, would bring to light crania that would settle the question for all time, but such skulls as have been found under conditions indicative of vast antiquity (but three in number, so far as I am aware) dO' not bear out the Eskimo theoiy. Dr. Hrdlicka states them — two of them — to be southern rather than northern in type, the other not sep- arable from the Indian. Notwithstanding this discouraging result, the question remains a prominent one, and the literature of the subject is too extensive to be ignored. I will return tO' this discussion on a subsequent page. THE PRE-INDIAN IMPEEJCENTS. Whether, with the subject as presented, the reader looks favorably or not upon the solution of the riddle of the rude implements to which I have applied the term "palaeolithic," the archaeologist stands on a firmer footing and need be less apologetic when treating of that other phase of the sub- ject, that of the practically exclusive use of argillite and the evidence of this use ante-dating that of quartz, jasper and the allied silicious materials. To the assumed — I think, demonstrated — palaeolithic man, this mineral was as iron to us, his main dependence. Not that he knew nothing of the availability of other and 3 AB 34 even better adapted material, but no other material more fully met the requirements of his limited needs. Time, however, wrought its changes then, as it does now. There was slowly brought about such alterations of climate as affected him vitally. Of greatest moment was the gradual cessation of strictly glacial activity and the river began to wear something the appearance that it now has when at a freshet stage. Change the environment and the habit changes. This is a fixed law of Nature. Man's habits changed. The "palseolithic" implement, tool or weapon, as the case might be, came to be looked upon as we look now upon the pre-historic bronzes of our remote predecessors. The new conditions had made new men of the descendants of their ancestors of the Ice Age. They aspired to better armature and, can we doubt, the change of the fauna and increasing wariness of game made such change in hunting implements imperative. It is still possible to drive a nail with a stone, but we prefer a hammer. With this specializa- tion of implements came the necessity for more careful inspection of the unworked material and the source of the original supply as boulders and pebbles was found up the river valley, some twenty miles above tide water.^ Naturally it became a place of importance, and how important is evi- dent from the traces still remaining of the implement-mak- ing industry. It clearly foreshadowed the steel trust of to- day. That the entire output of argillite objects, large and small, and of every pattern, should be referred to so important a manufacturing centre as about Point Pleasant, is not more strange, perhaps, than that we now think of Pittsburgh or Bethlehem when we see some vast construction of iron ; but ' H. C. Mercer : various papers by, in Proc. A. A. A. S., 1892, 1893 ; "Science," June, 1893; Amer. Nat., 1893; Publications, Univ. Pa VI 1897. 35 -not all manufactured metal comes from these points. Early in our career as a nation, down in the "Pines" of southern New Jersey, iron was gotten from bog ore there and made available with charcoal as fuel. So, precisely, long before the American stone age man discovered Point Pleasant and the argillite out-crop, he had a supply of this material, equal to his needs, in the boulders scattered not only in the immediate valley of the river but over the surface of the land that was habitable, when the river itself was yet choked with ice. The locality has been frequently visited and much written of, but this litei'ature has largely the defect of being pre- pared for a purpose, that of modernizing the arrival of man in the region. It is clearly evident that no archaeological survey of a limited area is sufficient to warrant a compre- hensive conclusion. This fact has not been recognized, and while the various papers treating of the region are marked by accurate description, the inferences drawn that because palasolithic-like objects — mostly "rejects" — are found here, the isolated and older weather-worn and water-worn objects of superficially like appearance of the tide-water region, are identical in age and origin — all this is quite unwarranted. Under a walnut tree, not long ago, I found a slab of stone and battered pebbles that had been used in ridding a great heap of nuts of their hulls. The abraded surfaces were precisely such as are seen on every "hammer" found on an Indian village site. Ergo, the battered pebbles are nothing earlier, at most, than colonial occupation. This fairly rep- resents the "logic" of the conclusions reached by some who have given the argillite out-crop close attention. Close, surely, considering the details given, but not close enough. The locality is clearly one with the more specialized argillite man, traces of whom are found unequivocally associated with the gravel-capping sands that overspread the Trenton gravel throughout much of its extent. 36 At the argillite out-crop we have, as I have seen demon- strated by excavation on two occasions, evidence of industry when argilhte was solely in demand, and here there was always a commingling of the rudest with the most elaborate form of implement. They could not be dissociated in any way, and clearly, under such circumstances, any object that bore resemblance to a pateolith was necessarily a rejected blocking out of something of more definite character. This is significant and more so that chips of all sizes outnumber finished objects, hundreds to one. Now, this is not appli- cable to argillite as distributed throughout the river valle/s tide-water extent. The conditions there, differ absolutely. Again, and of equal importance is the fact that nearer the present surface of the same locality, where the greatest variation of forms of small implements, arrow-heads, drills, scrapers and knives occur, pottery is also present and points of jasper and quartz. The introduction of these silicious materials for weapons and implements did not cause the abandonment of argillite. Steel forks and pewter spoons are still tO' be bought at hardware shops. The man here in the Delaware valley, undertermined centuries ago simply passed from the argillite to the quartz age, but no more discarded the former mineral for the latter than do we, in our iron age, give up the use of copper. The argillite out- crop in the river valley nearest to the tide-water region is post-palseolithic, but at its incipiency, pre-Indian, if by the term "Indian" we mean the advanced savage of the day of the continent's discovery by the Norsemen or later, by Columbus. Returning to a consideration of the territory, where tidal- action occurs, the omnipresent argillite arrow-point is suggestive in other lines. We are not, here, concerned so^ much with the origin of the mineral as with the object itself. The extreme degrees of decomposition, that we now find 37 does not occur at the mineral's outcrop. Supposing it to have been abandoned about three centuries ago — certainly, not later — that lapse of time has not sufficed to weather the specimens left there to any such degree as we find on the fields extending across the State from Trenton to Cape May. Many an isolated arrow-point, as now found, preserves its shape but has small hold upon its original value as a weapon. Not only its surface but almost to its heart, it is reduced to the consistency of chalk. A core alone remains by which, in many cases, we can trace it back to the argillite in place, a hundred miles or more, away. Not all argillite is the same in consistency. Its chemical make-up varies a good deal. The elements attack it in different ways, and while the gfreater number are uniformly decomposed, others are pitted or honey-combed, the carbonic acid in rain water having eaten out every trace of lime; and still others are not only weathered to the point of non-recognition as artifacts except by the aid of a graded series, but are encrusted with limonite, itself a condition that indicates a greater age for the argillite points than those made of jasper or quartz, as these have as yet escaped such incrustation. I have examined thousands and tens of thousands of arrow-points of all materials ever used and have never, here, in New Jersey, found any with limonitic incrustation, except those of argillite. This does not arise from any peculiarity of the mineral inviting such incrustation, for pebbles of every kind known to the Trenton gravels shoA\^ marks of it, but never, I hold, a quartz or jasper arrow-point but is as clean and sharp to-day as when it was chipped. Fortunately for the interests of archaeological research, there yet remain areas that have been undisturbed since the days of the Indian. Forests have flourished and decayed and grown again; the tide has ebbed and flowed through 38 many a marsh ; upland swamps escaped the desolating hand of Improvement; not every acre converted into a smiling- field, but wearing, rather, a sardonic grin. Nature can tell her own story when given half a chance, and man figures in it, here, in the sands of South Jersey. He is one of the many illustrations that illume her pages; not in the same chapter with her fossil shells and bones, but nearer to some of the latter than geologists have been willing to admit. Rambling, in search of relics, over the country and look- ing for them, not on ploughed fields or wasting sand banks, but where the chance of success is most remote, it sometimes happens that an arrow-point is found, or some larger chipped implement of unknown use. The question of its origin instantly arises, but in such a case, we can only refer it to chance and so- know nothing more than before we picked it up. This is true of one or a few such discoveries, but, retaining the objects we find, after years of such search- ing, we find that a light is thrown over a series that failed to be detected when it fell on one alone. These isolated objects are scattered fairly evenly and often occur where, under present conditions, man could not have lived, and it is safe to assert, so far as the tide-water region of New Jersey is concerned, that the scattered relics are fully ninety-five per cent, of argillite. Surely, there is significance in this. Again, taking all the relics that have been gathered from the same area, I believe it will be found that those of argillite so largely outnumber those of other material that the pro- portion is suggestive of the jasper and quartz figuring as the proverbial exception to the rule. The latter are the gath- erings from village sites and burials ; the former are found, as are the pebbles, as if broadcasted by Nature and not through man's agency. This means that argillite man pre- ceded the chipper of flint, and this in turn does not mean that 39 former was simply the grandfather of the latter. There is no such scattering of the relics of the historic Indian over the entire surface of the southern counties of the State as there is of these rude argillite flakes and knives, and many, if not most, now so weather-worn that many have passed the stage of absolute certainty of recognition. Based on an estimate of thousands of relics of the his- toric Indian in every county of the State, which is quite within bounds, what of the tens of thousands of the older implements of argillite? Is it not inconsistent with the as- sumption, seriously set forth, that an estimate can be made in years of when man first pressed foot on the soil of New Jersey ? If then, the evidence points to what I have suggested as a Pre-Indian people, who were they and what their rela- tion to the historic Indian? If we had as firm, ground to stand on as is our confidence when given to taking a stand on the question, light might, ere this, have been thrown on the subject. The problem of the most ancient man in America is complex, and probably the conclusions finally reached on the Pacific coast, in mid-continental regions and along our Atlantic seaboard, will not be quite the same, beyond the fact that the invasion of the continent by man is a subject within the scope of geological research. Granting the one-time existence of paleolithic man, we can only wonder from whence he came, so firmly con- vinced are geologists that the parental stock was no strictly American mammal. However, given time enough, any- thing within the bounds of reason can occur, and there is immensely more time in the past than has elapsed since the first of the Lenni Lenape saw the Delaware and it is a most reasonable conclusion that wild beasts had not this great section of the earth's land surface all to themselves. Ac- cepting as the simplest and probably safest conclusion that 40 the pre-Indian, argillite man of the glacial sands was a descendant of palseolithic man, to what known race can we liken him? We most naturally think of the existing Eskimo, and surely it is a tempting theory to see in them a survival of that ancient race of the Delaware valley. A great deal has been written in years past, favoring this view, and it is of such weight that it should not be forgotten when the results of later archaeologists are presented. A forcible objection that has been urged against the as- sumption, as it was held to be, of a pre-Indian occupancy of the Atlantic seaboard, is the difficulty of realizing that a people sufficiently advanced to make so well-designed a weapon as the argillite spear-head should not have utilized stone in various other ways to meet their wants, precisely as the Indian did subsequently. No other form of imple- ment than these spear-heads was clearly associated with them, except when found on the surface, and so not clearly separable from the true Indian implements associated there- with. Recently, the occurrence of a stone hammer, traces of fire — charcoal — and a flat stone bearing marks of a hammer or rubbing-stone, at a depth of nearly three feet below the surface, has rendered it quite probable that a proportion of the surface-formed relics of these patterns should be regarded as of other than Indian origin. If we examine a series of the stone implements of the only other American race — the Esquimaux — we will find that not only is the variation in pattern very considerable, but that pre- cisely such forms of domestic implements as are now in use in the Arctic regions, among the Chukches, are common "relics" in New Jersey. In his recent volume of Arctic explorations. Professor Nordenskiold describes a series of stone hammers and a stone anvil, which are used together for crushing bones. ^ Every considerable collection of stone "Voyage of the Vega," New York, 1882, p. 483. 41 implements gathered along our sea-board, anywhere from Maine to Maryland, contains numbers of identical objects. While many of these hammers and mortars are unques- tionably of Indian origin, no valid reason can be urged that a proportion of them are not of the same origin as the argil- lite spear-heads. Indeed, grooved stone hammers have been found quite deeply imbedded in the sand — as deep as the usual depth at which argillite arrow-points occur; but this, of itself, is scarcely significant. So unstable is the surface of the earth where sand prevails, that the actual position, when found, of any single specimen, is of little importance. It is only when thousands have been gathered with great care, and under the most favorable circumstances, that any inferences may be drawn. This is true of the argillite arrow-heads, of which thousands have been gathered, and presumably true of the hammers and mortars, because such implements are common among an American race which uses also such spear-points as are so abundant in New Jersey. The similarity between a Chukche spear-point figured by Nordenskiold^ and an Esquimau spear figured by Lubbock^ and the New Jersey specimens is very striking. Of course, such similarity may be considered as mere coin- cidence, but that it has an important bearing on the ques- tion becomes evident when the many circumstances sug- gestive of a pre-Indian race on the Atlantic sea-board are collectively considered. Singly, any fact may be held to be of little or no value ; but when many of like significance are gathered together, they are self-supporting, and the one cen- tral fact becomes established. Basing the supposition that palaeolithic man was not the ancestor of the American Indian, because there is evidence warranting the belief that "the Indian was a late comer " Ibid., p. 571- ^"Primitive Industry," chapter xxxi, p. 453, Salem, Massachusetts, 1881. 42 upon the extreme eastern border of North America — indeed,, the oldest distribution of the American races does not ante- date the tenth century," and therefore "the appearance of the Skrselling (Esquimau) in the Sagas, instead of the Indian, is precisely what the truth required"^ — basing the- supposition thereupon, it was suggested^ that in the Esqui- maux we should find the descendants of that oldest of all. mankind — homo palceolithicus. Having given the strictly archseological reasons for dis- sociating certain of the stone implements found in New Jersey, let us now briefly refer to the historical evidence bearing upon this question. Have we any references to Esquimaux dwelling in regions significantly south of their present habitat ? If there are such, then it is at once evident that the weapons and domestic implements of such people- must now be buried in the dust of their ancient southern dwelling-places, and, these same spots being subsequently tenanted by the Indian, his handiwork must also be mingled with that of his predecessors. The literature of this subject can be sufficiently outlined" by reference to two authors. Major W. H. Dall, in "Tribes of the Extreme Northwest,"* remarks: "There are many facts in American ethnology which tend to show that orig- inally the Innuit of the east coast had much the same dis- tribution as the walrus, namely, as far south as New Jersey." I submit the rude argillite arrow-heads found in certain- localities in such abundance, and at a significant depth, as an additional fact, tending in the same direction. ' "Popular Science Monthly," vol. xviii, No. i, p. 38, November, 1880, New York. '"Peabody Museum Report," vol. ii, p. 252, Cambridge, Massachu- setts. " "Contributions to North American Ethnology," vol. i, p. 98, Wash- ington, 1877. 43 In B. F. De Costa's admirable resume of Icelandic liter- ature^ there is given abundant evidence — ay, proof — ^that the people dwelling along the coast of Massachusetts, 900 to 1000 A. D., were not the same race that resisted the Eng- lish on the same coast six centuries later. The descriptions of the people seen by the Northmen show that, of whatever race, they were well advanced in the art of war, and used not only the bow, but hatchets and the sling. They were "men of short stature, bushy hair, rude, fierce, and devoid of every grace."^ It need, therefore, only be remembered that the relation- ship between the true palaeolithic implements and those of more advanced finish and design is evident to every one who carefully examines a complete series. At the same time, the student is confronted with reliable historical evidence of the occupancy of the Atlantic sea-board by the Esquimaux as far south as New Jersey. Does not the impression derived from strictly archaeologi- cal studies, that all the stone implements of our eastern sea-board are not of one origin, go far to confirm the posi- tion of the historical student that an earlier race than the Indian once resided here? De Costa remarks : "During the eleventh century the red- man lived upon the North American Continent, while the eastern border of his territory could not have been situated far away from the Atlantic coast. In New England he must have succeeded the people known as Skrsellings. Prior to that time, his hunting-grounds lay toward the interior of the continent. In course of time, however, he came into collision with the ruder people on the Atlantic coast, the descendants of an almost amphibious glacial man." This "amphibious glacial man," I submit, is he who ■ "Pre-Columbian Discovery of America," Albany, 1868. '"Popular Science Monthly," November, 1880, p. 38, New York. 44 fashioned the rude palaeolithic implements, that, with bones of extinct and Arctic mammalia, are now found in the gla- cial drift of our river-valleys; and his "descendants," a rude people, with whom the Indian finally came in contact, were those who fashioned the plainly finished arg-illite arrow- heads and spears that are now, in part, commingled with the elaborate workmanship of the latest race, save one, that has peopled this continent. The above eleven paragraphs, written more than twenty years ago, expressed my views then and substantially do to- day, but I am not so much inclined to the "Eskimo" feature of it. As already mentioned, such crania as have been dis- covered do not point in that direction, and possibly to crani- ology we shall have to look, for a final solution of the problem. THE HISTORIC INDIAN. The celebrated Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, traveled throughout Central and Southern New Jersey in 1 748-' 50, and in his description of the country remarks ■} "We find great woods here, but, when the trees in them have stood a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty years, they are either rotting within, or losing their crown, or their wood becomes quite soft, or their roots are no longer able to draw in sufficient nourishment, or they die from some other cause. Therefore, when storms blo-w, which sometimes happens here, the trees are broke off either just above the root, or in the middle or at the summit. Several trees are likewise torn out with their roots by the power of the winds. * * * In this manner, the old trees die away continually, and are succeeded by a younger generation. Those which are thrown down lie on the ground and putrefy, sooner or ' Travels into North America, by Peter Kalm, London, 1771 vol ii p. 18. . • , 45 later, and by that means increase the black soil, into which the leaves are likewise finally changed, which drop abun- dantly in autumn, are blown about by the winds for some time, but are heaped up and lie on both sides of the trees which are fallen down. It requires several years before a tree is entirely reduced to dust." This quotation from Kalm has a direct bearing on that which follows. It is clear how, to a great extent, the sur- face-soil was formed during the occupancy of the country by the historic Indians. The entire area of the State was covered with a dense forest, which, century after century, was increasing the black soil to which Kalm refers. If, now, an opportunity offers to examine a section of virgin soil and underlying strata, as occasionally happens on the bluffs facing the river, the limit in depth of this black soil may be approximately determined. Miscroscopial examina- tion of it enables one to determine the depth more ac- curately. An average, derived from several such sections, leads me to infer that the depth is not over one foot, and the pro- portion of vegetable matter increases as the surface is ap- proached. Of this depth of superficial soil probably not over one-half has been derived from decomposition of veg- etable growths. Indeed, experiment would indicate that the rotting of tree-roots yields no appreciable amount of matter. While no positive data are determinable in this matter, beyond the naked fact that rotting trees increase the bulk of top-soil, one archaeological fact we do derive, which is, that the Hint implements known as Indian relics belong to this superficial or "black soil," as Kalm terms it. Abundantly are they found near the surface ; more spar- ingly the deeper we go; while below the base of this de- posit of soil, at an average depth of about two feet, the argillite implements occur. This is the condition in the 46 immediate valley of the Delaware and along the in-flowing streams, where, in every case, there was a deciduous forest, but inland, where pines only grew, and the "soil" was re- placed by sand, there the surface contains both argillite and jasper, but what are the real conditions? The jasper and quartz are essentially confined to the vicinity of the water courses, while the argillite is scattered everywhere, with- out reference to any physical condition that now obtains. This can scarcely be an accidental happening. The examination of many a so-called "village site," but what was probably but twO' or three wigwams with a single cooking-place in comnnon, has shown that while argillite occurs, it is apt to be but a small proportion of it, and not unfrequently it is entirely absent. I have explored exhaust- ively more than one such site, and not found a trace of any other than silicious material, and not always where the finest examples of handicraft occurred. On the other hand, it not unfrequently happens that an area of an acre or more of sand, nearly devoid of vegetation and exposed for years to rain and wind until it is now a plain that has every appear- ance of having been a hillock or a ridge, and here argillite will be found exclusively. Surely this suggests the use of that material prior to jasper and quartz, for we know positively these were in use last or just previous to Euro- pean contact and the introduction of fire-arms. Argillite, it is true, was never discarded, but it was not likely to have been used exclusively by certain groups of Indians while others made use only of silicious stone. That would indi- cate such a class distinction as we now have, but was cer- tainly unknown in Indian time. Tabulating a series of "finds" along the Delaware river's immediate shore and inland for a distance of a mile or more, it was found that in proportion as jasper and quartz were abundant, there was also the finer grades of pottery, and 47 where the whole range of worked stone was present there was a comparative absence of argilHte objects, except the broad blades, probably used as agricultural implements ; but where argillite arrow-points and knives are very abundant — hundreds of them — there was little else and only the rudest pottery. This was determined to be the rule after years of examinations of thousands of acres of land. As might be expected, there are some notable exceptions. I am not, however, disposed to look upon them as a serious objection to the view I have expressed. In archaeology as elsewhere, insuperable difficulties as they seem to be, constantly arise, but it is lack of comprehensiveness of knowledge that mag- nifies and makes over-much of trifling matters. Place a sixpence near enough your eye and you can blot out the world. Many do this and argue accordingly. There are notable instances of the commingling of the rudest and most elaborate of Indian handiwork, a commingling that makes any attempt at dissociation apparently hopeless, but this arises from taking only a superficial view of the condition. The general character of the locality must be carefully con- sidered. If it is one eminently desirable for habitation and has been so, if we may judge from what now is found, since early post-glacial or even in strictly glacial time, then its supposed continued occupation for centuries after centuries need excite no wonder, and the traces, as claimed, of occupa- tion by an earlier and later people would necessarily gradu- ally accumulate, just as almost all the cities of importance along our inland rivers and many coast-wise towns were originally Indian villages. The features that attracted the colonists were quite the same as those that influenced the Indian. There is another view to be taken. By trenching an Indian village site, where the present surface presents a hopeless commingling of jasper and argillite, the story of the 48 earlier or argillite period is told so plainly that no doubt can be entertained thereafter. We know how true this is of ancient cities in the so-called civilized world, and the applica- tion of it can be made here with just as good a reason and assurance of as tangible results. Again, we cannot escape erroneous impression, if we do not, when in the field, consider the changes effected during the last three centuries ; those wrought since the advent of the European settler. The Indian let well enough alone. He scarred the face of the earth but little. His scattered fields were not of vast extent and natural plains were culti- vated. Extensive clearings of the forest were not under- taken, and when fires occurred. Nature repaired the damage in her own time and way. The Indian, in short, kept in touch with Nature just as closely as. the European persist- ently holds her at arm's length and delights in destroying her choicest work. Could an archaeologist have visited the valley of the Delaware in advance of the destroying hordes that have blighted it now- more effectually than ever locusts swept a western plain, he could have turned the later pages of the earth history here and made for us clear as noon-day much that now is dark as night. They were not torn then nor displaced, but lay, one upon the other, in proper position. Now, there are but the veriest fragments left, and it is an almost hopeless task tO' piece them together and be able, here and there, to read a little. What, I submit, has been read, and about which there is small room for discussion, is that so- long a,gOi that even dreamy tradition has. framed no fabu- lous story of a simple fact, man appeared upon the scene, and from that distant day until now his presence has not been wanting. It is scarcely necessary to continue with illustrative exam- ples showing the changes since maximum glacial activity that have occurred. We have, if my own field work — and 49 that of Mr. Volk — has not grossly misled me, both an earlier and later argillite horizon — the palaeolithic and the pre- Indian. It is analogous possibly to the traces of man in the loess of Kansas and Nebraska. [Since these pages were written, my attention has been called to an article on Nebraska's ancient (?) man in the Century Magazine for January, 1907, by Prof. H. P. White Sand 4 m. •.'..:■.'..■.: .'J'J'^ii-- Pre-Gladal Gravel. Pig. I. Human bones beneath stratified deposits, discovered by E. Volk, 1899. (See also Hrdlicka on Trenton Crania. Bui. Amer. Mus. Nat Hist. vol. xvi, pp. 23-62, 1902.) Osborne. The author raises our hopes, at the outset, that here we have something definite, at last, but we conclude the perusal, finding ourselves precisely where we started, in the dark. 4 AB 50 A foot-note, however, it seems to me, is somewhat sug- gestive. Prof Osborne calls therein attention to the fact that Mr. Holmes suggests the Nebraskan finds as of the Blackfeet Indian type of cranium. If the crania of the North American Indians have developed into "types" and the skull of a Delaware can be distinguished from that of an Iroquois, and those of Canada from those of Texas, has not the Indian been on the continent a long time that such differentiation should have been brought about? Is evolu- tion such a rapid process that bones can be so readily affected? It can be understood that soft tissues may be influenced promptly, comparatively speaking, by change of environment, but is this equally true of the bony frame- work? Would evolution be as likely to affect a bone, be- cause the demands made upon it varied a little ? It is always possible to hang a new hat on an old peg, and we generally do so. Why may not Nature have much the same old fashioned way of doing things? But competent craniolo- gists accept the "types" of skulls as demonstrable, and must it not have been a very long time since the changes became established, and a longer one before the change commenced and during it ? A fact (?) like this establishes the antiquity of man in North America as distinctly, as unequivocally, as the dispersion of his artifacts throughout the surface soils and their less frequent occurrence in the under-lying gravel.] Further exploration, I do not anticipate, will lead to reach- ing any other conclusion, and leaving these phases of the subject, what now of the antiquity of the historic Indians ? INDIAN LEGENDS. Legend, as the Walum 01am; inscribed tablets, as the Lenape stone and the wild guesses of the closest student, have led to as many views of the origin and antiquity of the Delaware Indian as there have been those who have paid any attention to his existence, and their name is Ivegion. SI The Walum Olam has been translated, but far too much importance is placed upon it as accurate history. Legend, based upon facts, the particulars of which have been long forgotten, lost all sense of number, as applied to years. "Once upon a time," as in our fairy tales, should be the opening words of the Walum Olam. It records a migration, but does not specify the length of time required to accom- plish it. Names, apparently of individuals, may as reason- ably be looked upon as groups of individuals or as dynasties.^ The mysterious, all comprehensive, encyclopedic Lenape stone, with its mastodon, the lightning's stroke, the tragic end of man and beast and various symbols of we know not what, is, if all else of Indian handiwork is considered, far beyond the skill of an aboriginal artist. The specimen has been, most wisely, relegated to the limbo of obscurity. All evidence, centering in the stone itself, points to its fraudu- lent character. It is known that the Indian was in possession when the European adventurers came, with their fair assertions and with foul intent. This is all we know, perhaps, and it may be, all the rest is speculation. But, in less than three cen- turies, much colonial history has become vague. The sharp outlines of the facts have been worn away in passing through the minds of generations and it is not, probably, at all unreasonable to hold that a broken stone or a fragment of a shell speaks with greater accuracy than the so-called history that remains to us. A potsherd lying in the soil, to-day, speaks as unmistakably of the one-time presaice of ' Certainly nothing can be more unfortunate than for the archae- ologist to turn genealogist and so closely reckon the past as to reach the conclusion that the Delaware Indian came into this valley some four or five hundred years ago. Absurdity can go no further. Caution should be exercised in the ascription of antiquity, but not to such extent. 52 an intelligfent man, as a marine shell embedded in solid rock is eloquent of an ancient sea. It is a legitimate question that one asks : for how long a time was the Indian in possession? As he did not know, and when questioned could give no reply that was at all helpful to the earlier seekers for information, it follows, logically, that our only resource is such traces of himself as remain, comprehensively considered. "Indian relics," as we gather them from the surfaces of newly-ploughed fields, suggest time past, but not antiquity. They lead us little farther back than the English coppers and colonial coins with which they are associated. The circumstances of the occurrence must be more definite than accidental bringing to the light when fields are cultivated. Fortunately such conditions are available when field-wO'rk is systematically undertaken. Quite as prominently as hunting and fishing, agriculture and war entered into the lives of the Delaware Indians, did the fictile art. They were potters, too, of no mean skill. To-day, nothing indicative of the Indian is more Avidely scattered than potsherds. Curiously enough,. I have found them when the most careful search resulted in finding nothing more. The ware was not a mere moulding of raw clay. I demonstrated this, some years ago, by test- ing samples in our modern porcelain kilns. It was shown that the material had been so prepared that it resisted shrinkage or distortion under an intense heat; one far higher than the Indian potter could command. And here, the question at once arises, whether the Indian is an immigrant, who forcibly displaced a predecessor, absorbed another race or found an unoccupied but once inhabited country, and however coming, did he bring a knowledge of pottery with him? Here we are groping where there is lack of light, but the comprehensive con- sideration of the subject, for which I have contended. 53 throws, I think, a ray of light into the Cimmerian darkness, and the impression is born, if it does not wax very strong, that the art of pottery making was unknown in pre-Indian time or very rudely practiced, and that the Indian was not an accomplished potter when he began his career in this region. Be all this as it may, whenever we find traces of man that include potsherds; prior, of course to European coloniza- tion, we may feel assured that we have to do with the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. When such traces of early man are not so associated, we may have evidence of inhabi- tation here of a pre-pottery age. It is scarcely necessary to add, no trace of pottery ever occurs in the glacial gravel or those earliest of post-glacial deposits, of sand, small pebbles and an occasional boulder. THE INDIAN VILIvAGE. What I have recognized as a "village site" is such evi- dence of continued occupation as baked and charcoal- charged earth, due to the presence of fire on one well defined spot for a considerable period ; an abundance of heat- cracked pebbles, showing that hot stones were used to bring water to the boiling point ; often a distinctly paved hearth ; potsherds innumerable; bones, often charred, of animals used as food — including human (?) bones; many broken implements of stone and some of bone; and often, imple- ments that appear to have been lost, forgotten when a mov- ing took place or were discarded for like objects of better design or finish. Usually we find one and often two or three hand mills or querns for crushing maize, seeds and nuts, their Tachquahoakan, and in some instances the upper as well as lower stone is found. 54 Under peculiarly favorable circumstances, there can be traced with some slight degree of convincement, the precise wigwam sites surrounding the fire-place, but this latter is not always the centre of a circle. A good deal depended upon the "lay of the land" and occasionally it appeared as if a protected fire and oven was used rather than an open one,, with pots in the embers and hot ashes. It happens, also, that we sometimes find traces of a long-continued fire, with bushels of heat-cracked pebbles and not another trace of man's one-time presence. Here, it is probable, pottery was baked, and we have in these traces all that remains of an Indian's primitive kiln, though what part was played by the burnt pebbles, I do not see at all clearly. Again, we may find pottery and a few arrow-points and two or three stone drills and scrapers. If the ground shows no discoloration or alteration of texture, such as fire produces, the occupancy of the spot was likely but temporary. On the other hand, mills or querns are often found, often weighing from thirty to fifty pounds, without any trace of other object of human interest near them. If a "village" once existed, every ves- tige has been removed. I suggest that these were permanent querns and, when in use, were surrounded by nut-bearing trees, the fruit of which was gathered in season and carried to the "village" nearest by. It quite frequently happens that a single foiTn of imple- ment will be found in large numbers and in such close, as- sociation that the suggestion of burial for purpose of tem- porary concealment arises. Such a cache, if scattered by the plough, gives in time the appearance of a village site, by reason of the abundance of the objects now scattered over a considerable area, but the absence of potsherds shows that the objects found are not evidence of a one-time dwelling- site or even a period of transient occupation. When an abundance of arrow-points and spear-heads, and no other 55 form of stone implement associated with them, occur on a comparatively limited area, the impression of a battle hav- ing been fought naturally, perhaps, occurs to the collector; but no unmistakable trace of a pre-historic battle-field was ever discovered or is likely to be. Certainly, we have no record — now historic — of any Lenapean Napoleon who on the sandy plains of South Jersey met his Waterloo. The single arrow-point that we now find as we ramble about the fields was more likely to have been shot at a deer than at a human foe, and large numbers in a little space more than probable is but the dispersion of a cache, beg^n when the plough first up-turned the sod and has continued ever since. Battle, murder and sudden death were no doubt common enough, but all this is but inferential, based upon the knowledge we now have of savage life, but this state of affairs once obtaining, does not call for elaborate battle- fields that we can now trace. The palaeontologist can build up an animal from a single bone, but from a single arrow- point to elaborate a tragedy is not the province of a practical archaeologist. If the village site, as positively determined, was a feature of the present surface, it might be said of them, that they were occupied and abandoned at or near the date of the arrival of the European settler, but such is far from being true of them. They occur, distinctly, under such a variety of conditions that they establish a range in time of vast significance. Some are so deeply buried that changes have taken place since their abandonment which required a long series of years to accomplish. Others again have been abandoned and re-occupied, and a layer of undisturbed soil, gradually accumulated, lies between the relics of the earlier and the later occupation. More significant, perhaps, than all else, is the abundant evidence of protracted occupation in situations that are now wholly uninhabitable. Beauti- 56 fully illustrative of this, are the village sites in the present lovif -lying meadow land along the river, and which is subject to overflow at any time; a heavy rain, even, bringing the river to a freshet stage. These meadows are now but five feet above high-water mark. Digging to that depth or even less, in some places, we come to water and find also ashes, charcoal, pottery, implements in abundance and the bones of animals used as food. All we find, at the horizon of the water and below it, goes to show that the village site was one long and continuously occupied, and very marked must have been the physical changes tO' have rendered the place uninhabitable, as it now is, and to account for the accu- mulation of from three to five feet of alluvium that now covers it. Nothing was buried, but all gradually inhumed. The assertion that the spot was temporarily occupied and abandoned at short notice and re-occupied when conditions again became favorable, is but another example of that gross ignorance of the real conditions which, as when treat- ing of palaeolithic man in the same region, characterizes its author. Archaeological impressions should never be based on a single discovery, but too often attempt is made to balance a cannon ball on gossamer. Those who oppose all evidences of antiquity deliberately blind themselves and then insist that no one can see. To preserve the slightest semblance of consistency, they are forced to do so. No upland village site, of which I have any knowledge, has proved so fruitful of evidence of advance in savage life as those of this meadow tract, so exhaustively and scien- tifically explored by Mr. Volk. They exhibit the Indian at the high-water mark of his career and certainly such a peo- ple would never have dwelt on so unsanitary a spot as it now is and from which they were constantly likely to be driven by a rise in the river. Especially unlikely is the choosing of such a location, if then as now, when not a 57 thousand yards distant they could have built their homes -at an ideal spot, fifty feet above the river and with an out- look that commanded a wide reach of the river valley. Un- questionably, when the pottery-using, flint-chipping Indian came to dwell here, the river, comparing that time with the present, was not the same ; the j.neadows were not as they -are now, the creek near by — now nearly silted up — that then flowed directly into the river, was quite another stream. Just what the changes have been or how brought about, is for the geologist to decide, but vast changes there have been, and Mr. Volk's view that the village site he unearthed was one of significant antiquity cannot be successfully con- tradicted. The purely gratuitous assumption of Mr. Holmes that because one piece of pottery found by Mr. Volk was deco- rated after the manner of Shawnee fictile ware, that such pottery dated from the almost historic period of the Shaw- nee settlements along the Delaware, has no bearing what- ever on the antiquity of the site. The fact is, the ornamen- tation of pottery as made here was so indefinitely varied and at times truly artistic, that near approaches to the specimen found by Mr. Volk are not unknown and that one vessel might readily have been designed and decorated by a Del- aware who had never seen or perhaps heard of a Shawnee. Inter-tribal commerce, too, must be taken into account. Considering that I have discovered Catlinite pipes and beads, that must have come from Minnesota, and obsidian arrow- points, flakes and scrapers that either came from Utah or Oregon, and that many a southern and western form of implement, ornament and pipe has been found hundreds of miles distant from where it was made, it is not at all incon- ceivable that even pottery, fragile as it is, might have been brought from a distance, or, even a fragment of a vessel, the decoration of which, taking the fancy of a potter here, have been copied. 58 Nor is this all. The village site was also a place of burial.. Now, while the Indians in New Jersey had no one or fixed' burial custom, as every archaeologist who has worked in the- field well knows, it is extremely improbable that one of the methods of disposing of the dead was by immersion. I hold that no better evidence can be had that this meadow tract was practically an upland one, during Indian time and not subject to such frequent and complete overflow, than that it was used for burials as well as a dwelling site. The elevated plateau so near by, to which reference has been made, is full of graves. They may be expected whenever one elects to dig, and no trench of any considerable length but exposes one or more. The accounts of early visitors to this country contain many a notice of burial customs, but none of where the body was placed in water. It is of first importance, finally, to consider the extent of this village site, the home not of a few but many families and the vast amount of material Mr. Volk and others have recovered from the spot, all O'f which goes to show that the period of occupation of this river-side and creek-side site was a very protracted and continuous one. Still another consideration of village sites, and one per- haps of more importance in its bearing on the question of the antiquity of the Indian than all else, is the fact that as yet there has been no strictly argillite village discovered such as I have described as "Indian." All such are char- acterized by much pottery, by artistically fashioned pipes, jasper and quartz implements, polished stone celts, gorgets, amulets, trinkets for personal adornment and the quern. Argillite implements were always present, but, as we have seen, the use of this material was never abandoned. On the other hand, a village site proper, with its fire-place, hearth, potsherds and argillite implements exclusively, or traces of a single habitation or even a number of them that was 59 marked only by argillite and no pottery, has not yet been found and I suggest that after an experience of more than thirty years a-field and finding nothing of the kind is evidence of some vahie, negative though it be, and worthy of attention. I beHeve such argilHte villages never existed. The pre-Indian user of argillite was strictly a nomad and more of a savage than the Indian, and the wider distribu- tion of argillite than quartz and jasper is due to his wander- ing habit. He appears not, as an "argillite" man and unacquainted with pottery, to have acquired the village habit. THE INDIAN SHELI.-HEAP. A feature of the archaeology of the region herein treated; of and more particularly so of the seaboard of the State, parallel to the river valley but fifty miles away, and not unknown to many an inland stream, whether flowing into- the Delaware or the Atlantic, is the shell-heap. The late Dr. Samuel Lockwood, years ago, gave an excellent account of those he had examined with critical care, near Keyport, N. J., and many references have been made to the deposits of shells through man's agency, occur- ring along the coast wherever the edible molluscs were readily obtained in quantities, but the age of these artificial deposits has been overlooked by recent writers who have essayed so earnestly to modernize the pre-European occupa- tion of the country. Not one of the very many shell-heaps that I have examined but must be ascribed to the historic Indian, but the beginning of many such shell-heaps was in remotely pre- historic time. Some, indeed, so far as I could determine, contained no trace of pottery, but not one but had quartz and jasper chips and broken implements. Argillite was. 6o often present, but I could never find it exclusively so. Shell- heaps, then, it is fairly safe to presume, are all Indian in origin, but since their beginning, there has been a decided sinking of the shore line and the base of more than one well- defined heap has been found to be at least four or five feet "below low-water mark. These heaps were started on what at the time was firm earth and dry earth, for the Indian was no lover of a damp or clayey soil. It is true, the coast has been said to be sinking pretty steadily and, as a geological phenomenon, at no laggard's pace, but we have no evidence that such subsiding has been progressing with no remission. Very true, more than one original light-house stood where now is open sea, but such sinking of the land as the shell- heap hints of, was not a matter of yesterday and enormously farther back in time than loss of shore-line within the memory of man. We can see, as we stand on one of these ancient shell- beaps, a different country surrounding us, a different fauna prowling in the adjacent forest. We can see the Indian from the main land coming hither for his winter's supply of shell-fish and truclging back again to his forest- hidden home. The teeming past is widely unrolled on such a spot, and nowhere else can we get a better, a more compre- hensive view of the Indian's career than by these great heaps of shells that year after year, layer upon layer was builded up, to remain, as they do still, enduring monuments to these wild red men of the woods. Returning again to the village sites deeply buried now in the present flood-plain of the river, we find, when careful search is instituted, something very nearly akin to a coastwise shell-heap. The mussels — Unionidce — were not despised as food. Many a considerable layer of the shells, with ashes, charcoal, fire-cracked pebbles and potsherds, is iound, and the significance of the distance below the present 6i surface, at which they occur, must not be overlooked. The turf above them is not the rapid heaping of mud displaced from a nearby point, during a flood. Absolutely no trace of cataclysmic action is to be traced. All goes to show a gradual accumulation of soil, and a new surface formed that covered the shells, and it was in time itself covered, so that many a defined stratum now rests upon the spot where the mussel hunter gathered his harvest from the river or the tributary- creek. There is some evidence of a considerable difference in the ages of these fresh-water heaps of shells, but none are so distinctly old as to lack unmistakable traces of the Indian. All have potsherds, but these, in one instance, on Crosswicks Creek, were so rude and only a few argillite flakes found with them, and the depth of the accumulation of shells, taken together, were eloquent of a past sO' remote that the Indian himself may be looked upon as a feature of antiquity and not a recent comer. It cannot be objected that the water of the river was, if we go back significantly far, too cold for moUuscan life, for deep in the gravel, at an inland point, Mr. Volk and I found a valve of a Unio' and since then other specimens have occurred in like position. The shell-heaps on the seacoast point unmistakably to a remote past, and I am not sure that much the same antiquity can be denied the similar deposits in the river valley. There is still another phase of this feature of the one- time savag^e life prevailing here. Marine shells are not uncommon at a horizon just below the alluvial deposit, still forming, that now constitutes the immediate flood-plain, where the river is hemmed in by a bluff that permits the highest stages of water only to reach its base. This allu- vium is almost as tenacious as clay and sustains an exceed- ingly rank vegetation and vigorous forest growth. It over- lies a nearly white sand and small pebbles, much as the present river bed now is. 62 Were these shells but few in number, we might well con- clude that they had been brought hither by the Indians when returning fromi the coast, or some point on the bay shore, more than one hundred miles down the river, but these shells are too abundant and the species too varied and many too small tO' be of value as implements or as food. Their presence rather suggests that the salt water reached, in at least earliest Indian times, as far as now the tide extends. If SO', a marked change, indeed, has taken place in the levels of land and water, and all since palaeolithic — and his imme- diate successor, pre-Indian — man had passed away. We need not wonder at the antiquity of the Indian, but may marvel, indeed, that any one should question it. With these marine shells are potsherds, arrow-points and charred bones of deer, bear, and other mammals and many fishes. THE OBLITERATED BROOKS. The fields are far from level on the plateau that parallels the river on its eastern side. They have for centuries, as fields, been subjected to the wear and tear of innumerable intersecting brooks and by many considerable streams that flow directly into the river. The result has been to create broad valleys like those of Crosswicks and Assunpink ■Creeks. These have their Indian village sites scattered for miles along the immediate banks of the streams. A far less prominent feature of the land, as it is to-day, is the spring brook, seemingly now as it has ever been; but this is an error. The brook may prove of much archaeological signifi- cance, when we come to trace the country's history back to pre-colonial times. Some of these small brooks are extra- ordinarily tortuous and several miles in length. The slight depression in the surface along their course is so incon- spicuous that we scarcely notice it, until at length, it nears the face of the bluff facing the river valley. Here the brook bank becomes precipitous and the stream at last enters the 63 flood-plain of the river through a short but deep ravine, having worn its way down to near tide level from^ the plateau's surface, fifty to one hundred feet above it. As simple brooks, these Httle water courses would not figure importantly in Indian history, but it would appear that some of them were considerable streams centuries ago. The deforesting of the land, the draining of the swamps and cultivation of the soil have aided in lessening the vol- ume of water, and changes with which man was not associ- ated have undoubtedly taken place. Whatever the causes, the evidence is irrefutable that many an insignificant brook Fig. 2. Cross section of obliterated brook. Drawn from photographs. Artifacts were found at junction of the sand and clay, beneath the broad band of clay, which was overlaid by a deposit of washed, white sand. This was covered by a foot of sand and as much of the surface soil. of to-day was a considerable stream in days gone by, and where we can step across the trickling brook an Indian might easily have floated his canoe. Then, there are other beds of upland streams that have been dry for ages, but still they can be traced. Cross sections made where these narrow valley-like depressions of the present surface occur, tell the whole story so far as the one-time brooks are concerned, and in prac- tically every case, it is an archaeological story. The mod- ernist may have much to say about intrusive objects, but this will not hold. These cross-sections show stratification and of material, too, that did not permit the passage of artifacts. See Fig. 2. 64 One such cross-section exhibited, just beneath the present soil, a deposit of tenacious clay, it overlying a compact layer of nearly white sand and this in turn resting on coarse pebbles. The pebbles had been the bed of the stream for a time, then the sand gradually accumulated and at last clay, washed from a great deposit near the surface and miles away, had been brought down and settled where I had found it, at a bend in the channel of the ancient brook. The archffiological interest of it all consisted in the occurrence of pebble-hammers and chips or flakes, artifacts as unmis- takably as an arrow-point. To-day, there is not a trace upon the surface of the field indicating it was traversed by a broad and shallow stream. A brook, at present, runs not far away, that may be the same stream deflected from an older course. Often, in mid-summer, it is nearly dry, and again, after heavy rainfall is almost a raging torrent. Such brooks are common, but this one has a history not common to them all. It finds the meadow or flood-plain level after passing through a ravine, fifty feet in depth. In October, 1903, the river was so swollen that the flood-plain was sub- merged and for about two hundred yards of its length, the brook was reversed, so to speak, the river flowing up the gorge. In this we had a return simply to the original or an earlier condition, when the present meadows were per- manently under water, and the river here a wide lake. When this brook, then, was a wider stream and before it had cut its way down to the flood-plain level, Indians were dwelling near its banks, and at a depth of something more than six feet, Mr. Volk* found human bones, either intentionally buried or drifted to the spot during a freshet. It certainly cannot be said, in such a case as this, that the changes that have taken place have all occurred within his- " Crania of Trenton, N. J. By Ales Hrdlicka. Bulletin, Amer. Mus_ Nat. Hist. New York, igo2. 65 toric time. These upland brooks may well have been spark- ling in the sunlight when the Delaware was yet a glaciated stream. They were the drainage outlets of the high, dry, habitable land that extended from the river to the sea. They are much diminished since that distant day and some have, as already pointed out, wholly disappeared. The majority are now reduced to the minimum of continuance. May it not be that many a stream, to which the Indians gave no name save "Sipotit" — a little brook — was a water course of importance to the argillite man of an earlier day? Could we reconstruct the surface of the region and be- hold the land before the river had retired tO' its present bed, we would see marked differences and to our vast relief, no commingling of argillite and jasper and hopeless confusion of artifacts ancient and comparatively modern. THE ADVANCE OE SKIIX. Attempts to trace advance in skill, whether as chippers of flint or manufacturers of pottery, have not been at all fruit- ful of satisfactory results. It can as safely be said that some were skillful and others not, in what they undertook, and so the great range from rude to elaborate of all their handi- work. Much, too, depended upon the material available, and yet when various localities are compared and arrow- point makers' workshop sites are examined critically, an im- pression is invariably had that possibly the ruder work did indicate an earlier day. I would not be inclined to place much value on this, were it not that some localities have in their surroundings, the depth at which the artifacts occur and every other circumstance appertaining to the "find," what may be called "collective evidence of age" ; something very real to the explorer when in the field, just as when a jasper and an argillite horizon are compared, but unfortun- 5 AB 66 ately not transmissible to the reader by either words or pic- tures. Whatever the ultimate conclusion of the practical archaeologist, there is no escaping the comprehensive one that the historic Indian, comparatively recent comer as he is, is to be treated archaeologically as well as historically. Among the many hundreds of grooved stone axes that I have gathered, one very recently found is coated with limonite and in this respect differs in no way from millions of coated pebbles found in the so-called Columbia gravel. It was not found in a deposit of bog ore or near any spring whose waters are surcharged with the metal in solution, but on a high and dry field, where no other moisture was reached save rain-fall. This axe flatly contradicts what I have stated in a preceding page and have always maintained, that no distinctly "Indian" object was so encrusted, but argillite objects were often found in this condition. I let the two statements stand, but submit this axe, one of marked artistic design and finish, as evidence of the antiquity of the Delaware Indian. Mr. Volk inclines to the belief that the grooved axe is a comparatively recent implement of the Indian, as he failed to find it in any of the trenches he dug and from which such a vast amount of archaeological material was taken. I should say, from what I have observed, that it is not of common occurrence in graves, where the ungrooved, pol- ished celt is often met with. The limonite, as deposited on this axe, could not have been, I am assured, rapidly deposited. The chemical change involved was one requiring a long lapse of time. Why all the other thousands and tens of thousands of Indian relics should have escaped, I do not know. They appear to have done so and so far are held to be not so very old : this single axe tells a far different story and strengthens the view that 67 as surely as that not all relics could be of the same age, so there may have been a decided advance between the first Indian implements and those last made. CONCI^USION. Having set forth as clearly as it was within my power to do, the several reasons for the belief I have so long enter- tained as to the antiquity of man in the valley o^f the Dela- ware, I desire, in conclusion, to refer briefly to a condition obtaining which perhaps has more significance than all else that can be produced bearing upon the subject. This con- dition, most happily not a matter of dispute, is the vast quantity and wide dispersion of what we know collectively as "Indian relics," but which I have endeavored to separate into wholly distinct, and in a measure, unrelated classes. Subjecting to closest scrutiny and without bias, alike the upland field and the low-lying meadow, the forest and the swamp; tracing the course of every inland creek and the shore-line and islands of every river; taking into compre- hensive and possibly exhaustive consideration every condi- tion under which the traces of pre-historic man are found and contemplating their number, literally millions, there are but two conclusions possible at which the archaeologist can arrive; either there was a dense population that was here for not a long period, or a sparse population which occupied the territory under consideration for very many centuries. A dense population calls for what we may truly call Indian cities, but of such we have not been able to find satisfactory traces. It is true that a place situated as is the present city of Trenton, N. J., at the head of tide water would naturally be a centre of commercial activities and interests. Such localities as surely and logically attract as a magnet does iron filings. It has been a town site always, ^ 68 we might say, and as it attracted the aborigine, attracted the European settler and never was founded by an individual as have been most towns of which we have knowledge as to their origin. The falls of the Delaware — its original English name — has better claim to be called a centre than a town. People there were continually coming and going, but the resident population may have been small. It was a busy place but not what we now call a city. It possibly never knew quiet until the Indian was dispossessed and then it slumbered peacefully for two hundred years. The Indian, depending largely upon hunting and not inconsiderably upon agriculture, had no need for a large town and it is doubtful if the most populous ever ran much into the thousands, but where the location was, by reason of its convenience, i. e., easy O'f access by both canoe and over-land, it became a fixed condition from the very begin- ning. As such, we can understand why the relics we collect should be in such numbers and beaten so deeply into the soil that some have reached at length to a depth that nears the horizon of an earlier people. With one such former site of an Indian town I have loqg" been familiar and am thoroughly convinced of its moderate population, extending over centuries rather than a dense population which tarried here but a number of years. The relics that we now find, the varying character of the graves and the significant depth of the cooking sites, all give an impression of antiquity and suggest improvement in cei'tain directions during the continuance of the town, as such. It may be said that every stream of sufficient volume to permit of canoe navigation had a "town" upon its banks, and villages and single settlements or a single family were at every desirable, if not at every available point, and here relics are still found in abundance, but between each of these many streams lies a wide stretch of land, thai heavily 69 forested, and what of such territory? Certainly it would require a lot;g| time for the personal possessions of these aboriginal villagers to be scattered over the entire surface oi the State, and they are so scattered and in numbers that have a great deal to do with the question of the antiquity of their one-time owners, and I do not include the omnipresent arrow-point in this consideration. A word now with reference to them. There are over five million acres in New Jersey, and if we allowed one arrow- point to an acre, this number, brought together, would fill no trivial space in a museum and would be impressive in more than one direction, but while there are many acres where they seem to be absent and possibly may be, but I am not convinced of it, tliere are others where these same little arrow-points are so abundant that we are probably within bounds in allowing at least one to the acre, 'for the whole State. We leave it to those who' are statistically inclined to estimate the time required to make and to lose them and the probable population that used these five millions of arrow- points, bidding them remember always that the ruder argil- lite artifacts outnumber them, perhaps, ten to one. But little need be said in this final summing up of this dis- cussion of a vexed question. That the region was pro- foundly affected by the glacial conditions of thousands of years ago, no one can deny ; that an arctic fauna wandered over the plains that escaped the encroaching ice, no one doubts ; but was man a member of that fauna? My claim is that he was. Time passed and other conditions came into being and man of less primitive mould replaced the ice-age nomad. He passed, and the Indian we all know, the his- toric iRed man came upon the scene. Lpoking back to the day when I first picked up an arrow-point and gave it serious thought, and recalling all pertaining to ancient American man that I have seen since then, the record of the 70 past does not seem to-day one difficult to read. Indeed, I hold that it never has been, and maintain, as I have done since the questioning of man's antiquity in this region began, that the manifold attempts to modernize all traces of man on the eastern coast of North America can safely be relegated to the limbo of misdirected energy. Studied in the proper spirit and after the needful preliminary study of archaeology as a whole, the student will find himself, when in the field — ever a more desirable place than the museum — face to face with evidences of an antiquity that is to be measured by centuries rather than by years. Archaeologia Nova Cssarea No. II BY Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D. " The sky will take on a deeper bine, the inn will shine more brightly, the world will eTerywhere appear more beaatifnl, when theory is reduced to its proper position as a servant, and facts alone are acclaimed our masters." 1908 TRENTON, N. J. MacCeEwsh & QUIGLSY, Pkiniees. 1908 PREFACK. IT HAS been maintained that the term Archaeology does not apply to North, Central or South America, but that this considerable portion of the earth's habitable surface was not a scene of human activity until Asia, Europe and Africa and the isles of the South Seas had been so long populated that humanity was an old and not very creditable story, and then about the dawn of what we know as the historic period some wandering unfortunates from other lands found some one of the three Americas, and finally drifted intO' the other two. According to these authors, and they are about all who have given attention to the subject, the history of America is about the heaviest, dreariest, most somnolent matter ever preserved in print, until Columbus made his discovery, or possibly from the supposed visit of the Norseman, four or five centuries earlier. All this may be true, but, happily for those archseologically inclined, the probability of its so being is still an open ques- tion, and, despite the earnest, and we hope sincere, efforts of the ethnologists to modernize every phase of the subject, the thought will persist in coming to the fore, when field- work is in progress, can all this be within the range of his- tory, or, at most, on the shadowy border of it, just prior to Columbus sighting land in the Antilles? Whatever may be the merits of the question, whether or not Nature makes any sudden leaps by way of varying the monotony of supposedly very orderly and leisured evolution, it does not seem creditable that the Americas should have remained unknown until all other lands were occupied, and that even people should have accustomed themselves to the rigors of superlative heat and cold before the tempting plains and forests, with temperate, if not irreproachable, climate should be discovered. If all this happened, as asserted, how finally was the continent reached, and from what other country did the discoverers come? Unfortu- nately, the ethnologists have been too busy with details of pottery ornamentation, origin of earthworks and genesis of problematical objects of Indian handiwork to take up so considerable and really important a subject as Man's origin in America. They admit they do^ not know, and it is under- stood among the elect that they do not care. The chief canon of their ethnologic law is that whatsoever might have happened yesterday could not, by any possible means, have happened the day before. It is to be hoped that a day will come when the pen and spade can lie down in peace, and what is found by the man in the field, and what is said of it by the man in the museum, will be the truth, the whole truth, and, better than either, nothing but the truth. It is not a scientific, which is simply a common sense, procedure tO' consider the conditions of a limited area, such as a single river valley, without correlating these with those of the whole country, or, at least, a significantly large part of it. Certainly it is wholly without warrant to give the valley of the Delaware consideration as to archseological or ethnological significance on the supposition that it is some- thing separate and apart from' the land north, west and south of it. The general pre-history of the country, so far as it has been deciphered, tends undoubtedly to show that the general spread of the Indians, as we know them, occurred a long while ago, sufficiently long agO' to^ bring about change of language and customs, and if exploration is a natural impulse, then it is inherently improbable that so considerable and readily accessible an area as the valley of the Delaware and imtnediately adjacent country should have been unsus- pected, unknown, unvisited and unexplored until a few centuries ago, when everywhere about it, save its eastern seaboard, was the home-land, and long had been, of Algon- quin and Iroquois. Many parts of the world were unknown to the civilized nations of Europe and to us until within quite recent time. EViscoveries have been made in our own day, but nowhere, unless some coral island in the Pacific ocean, was it of unin- habited land. Some species of the genus homo was there, or very recently had been. So, too, if the L,enni Lenape knew nothing of the valley of the Delaware, where they finally became a prominent factor of aboriginal politics, until some five or six hundred years ago, did they or not find the region uninhabited then, and, if so, had it not been? It is difficult to reconcile what has been seen and found here in the two centuries since the Indians' departure, with the eth- nologist's view of extreme modernity. The reader who patiently plods through the manifold chapters of the Jesuit Relations, and even when he turns to the less practical but no less earnest relations O'f the Mora- vian missionaries among the so-called Delaware Indians, cannot avoid vexation that these enthusiasts were so pro- foundly concerned with undemonstrable problems and so little concerned with the actualities they confronted. The Indian in his home, unaffected as yet by the blight of an exotic civilization and his mind untroubled by vagaries of foreign mystics that were wholly beyond his powers of com^ prehension, as they have ever been a profitless source of wordy worrying and without tangible results where they originated — this man, this distinct species of man, had he been exhaustively studied by those who had the golden opportunity, would not now be, to so great a degree, a mys- tery in many respects and the fruitful source of unfruitful discussion. Collating' all that has been recorded by these Moravian missionaries, who were eye-witnesses of the daily lives of the continent's native race, we are more impressed with what they failed to make note of than with what they seemed to consider of first importance. It was this overlooking of the details of daily existence that has resulted in later time to so much speculation as to the probabilities and led to the preparation of ponderous tomes that too often, on matters of most interest, leave us at the colophon where we were, at the title page, in ignorance. The author with a pet idea is elaborately exploited and the Indian lost sight of. Neces- sarily, the opportunity once afforded can never re-occur. The Indian that was, is not. The archaeologist, to-day, re- places the historian of nearly three centuries ag-o- and his is no light task, if, gathering the fragmentary evidences of the Indian's one-time presence, he endeavors to reconstruct the past. He feels "like one Who treads alone Some banquet hall deserted." Yet, wandering a-field or patiently digging where a wig- wam once has stood, he can scarcely refrain from giving his imagination reasonable play and placing, when he finds a relic, its fashioner before him, in suggestive attitude and sur- roundings. The fauna, the flora, the physical conditions of the region's pre-historic days pass vividly before his eyes. For the moment, the past is the present and the archaeologist is himself a red-skinned rover of centuries long gone. Such an experience is delightful if one's heart is really in his work, but it is equally dangerous. The imagination is a most valu- able servant, but a bad master. It delights in the demolition of fact and enthrones fancy, however tottering the throne may be. He who finds an Indian relic today is justified in asking himself what was its use? Did he not do so, the object has, to him, no greater significance than a pebble or a clod of dirt. He mtist be concerned about it beyond the recognition of its artificial origin, but unless caution now steps in, he may wander anywhere but in the right direction. It is nearer to certainty than merely probable that could some of the old- time Indians return, they would be astounded at the strange stories told of them and righteously indignant at the theories that have been propounded concerning their innocent selves. The archaeologist is ever between the devil and the deep sea, fearing to suggest too much and equally afraid of asserting too little. Unquestionably the Indians that held in possession the valley of the Delaware and all the land eastward, extending to the sea, and westward to the Alleghenies, were a people with a history when the portentous shadow of the European fell upon their homes. They had had a career, and now, the insidious white man among them, this was to close in sorrow, to the eternal shame of the intruder. The question arises : Can this career be traced by a study of those imperishable relics, that, lying in and on the earth, are mute but none the less eloquent witnesses tO' m'an's exist- ence here when the continent was unknown to the more ad- vanced races of Europe ? The date of man's appearance on this globe has not yet been determined, and if science is not wholly astray the fateful day of over-stepping the line dividing brute-hood from man-hood cannot be determined save in a vague, approximative way and equal uncertainty hovers over the continental divisions of the globe. When first in Asia, Africa or Europe, when first in the continental islands of the Pacific Ocean, is as undeterminable as when that day dawned and men stood upon an American shore, or, far less probably, ceased, somewhere on the continent to be 8 pithecoidal with anthropoidal tendencies and became anthro poidal with pithecoidal tendencies, which, by the way, he has never lost. That mankind orig-inated in America has been seriously considered and the question ingeniously if not very convincingly argued, but what we know of the history of the world as a whole, tends to combat this view. Whether man originated at some one or at several centres is another mooted point. My own belief is that evolution at more than one locality and the most marked races, four at least, now existing are, as we ordinarily understand consanguinity, un- related. That is, relationship reaches farther back than the date of the acquisition of manhood, and here we rest. My concern, in this brochure, is with man in North America, and in one very little comer of it, at that, and not with the suggestive ape-like creatures of tertiary time. Their bones are not crumbling in American soil, it is safe to say, or some examples thereof would be resting, ere this, in the depressing atmosphere that envelops a museum shelf. In brief, we cannot leap into the dark and landing on a firm footing, travel over the route that America's aborigine took when he commenced his long upward and onward progress. It is left to the archaeologist to reverse the direction and taking up, as he may, in their order, the long line of misty and musty yesterdays, see how far he can go on this ghoul- Hke journey. It is his cheerful pastime tO' play with dead men's bones and ponder over whatsoever these bones, when clothed in quick flesh, left behind them. Success may attend, but no great measure of it has been accorded any one indi- vidual. The result of archaeological labor, to date, is grati- fying save in this, there is more that we would like to know than there is confidently held that we do know. Snakes do not charm birds nor does any species swallow its young, of that we may be positive, but antiquity never fails to charm' mankind and all too often steals away his judgment. Did, however, we know that every vestige of these one-time people was a product of their skill just prior to the advent of their irresistible enemy, the European, inter- est would soon flag when looking over an array of pots and kettles, implements of agriculture or weapons of war and of the chase. One object of its kind would be too like another, and our imperious appetite for novelty would not be appeased. Not so, as matters are. No two objects are alike except in a general and really unimportant way, but what is of paramount importance is that as relics are gathered, whether a single object or a significantly associated series of different objects, such finds, however frequent, do not give us the same impression. History does not repeat itself in this instance. An arrow point in one field may stand for nothing but itself, while in another field the like object may be meaningful beyond our grasp at a moment's notice. We are reminded, in the latter case, that it is the surroundings as well as the object that have meaning, and unless they are fully considered before the object is removed, the fact that is of value beyond any number of objects vanishes forever. That all objects should be practically of the same age is, of course, absurd, but how much older are the first objects made on the spot than those made near the day of the In- dian's departure ? It is a question that cannot be answered in an off-hand manner. To do so has been the fashion of those associated with one archaeological institution, and a tendency thereto has not been lacking in other directions. It is simply avoiding the main feature of interest centering in American archaeology, and reduces the subject to the commonplace level of historical research. That the relics of a defined locality, such as this of the Delaware valley, carefully, and, as near as possible, ex- haustively gathered, do show a suggestive interval that 10 comes within the scope of antiquity is my own impression, and to demonstrate the probability, if not certainty of this, is my present purpose. In brief, when did the Indian come to the Delaware valley ; how many centuries elapsed before he was driven out of it ? Did palaeolithic man of the glacial age and his descendants, "argillite" man, die out and so leave the country uninhabited until the pottery-making, flint- chipping Indian came upon the scene ? Was there, instead, a continuous occupation from' the Ice Age to the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century or earlier? When an Indian relic is exhibited at a gathering of scientific folk or attention is called thereto, where more fortunate people are together, there are always endless questions asked, but very rarely is there an intelligent reply. No one seems willing to commit himself to an opinion and rarely indeed does a pro- fessional archseo'logist, dealing with matters American, have the courage of his convictions. In the "Handbook of American Indians," Part I (Wash- ington, D. C), p. 6i, we find the following: "From the Glacial gravels proper there has been recovered a single object to which weight as evidence of human presence during their accumulation is attached; this is a tubular bone, re- garded as a part of a human femur and said tO' show glacial striae and traces of human workmanship, found at a depth of twenty-one feet. On this object the claim for the Glacial antiquity of man in the Delaware valley and on the Atlantic slope practically rests." This fanfaronade by W. H. H. is about as near a fair statement as we might expect. Bracketed as having discussed this find are the names Putnam, Mercer and Holmes, not one of whom could have given the subject exhaustive study, and significantly, all three uncompromising opponents of the view of antiquity. Mr. Holmes rejects all other asserted evidence from the same locality. If we "regard" the bone as human — there is II really no doubt of it — ^the probability that the man who once had exclusive possession thereof was a creature of what we know as material wants. The vegetable world did not supply them all, and so weapons of some sort were necessary to subdue the animal world. It is of some significance, I claim, that more than twenty years before this fragment of a femur was found by Mr. Volk, the writer had found a con- siderable number of artificially shaped stones, and mostly so shaped as to be of use in capturing such animals as dwelt in and about the icy waters that were laying down, in times of flood, the gravel wherein this ancient fragment of a femur was found. Wholly ignored by Mr. Holmes, but elaborately discussed by competent craniologists, is the human skull that was taken m'any years ago from practically the same gravel deposit as the femur, and about one mile northwestward or up the river from it. Its history shows conclusively that it was, when found, a constitutent part of the gravel deposit. There is no possibility of its having been an intrusive object, nor that the gravel had been disturbed by any freshet or flood of comparatively recent time. The first appreciative notice of this skull is by Dr. Frank Russell, in the American Naturalist, Vol. XXXIII, No. 386, February, 1899, p. 143. The 9.uthor discusses the human remains purporting to have been obtained, to date, from gravel deposits, and, therefore, assumed by the discoverers thereof, to be of greater age than any surface-found remains or relics. Dr. Russell considers the skull from the cranio- logical standpoint only, and concludes : "From^ the evidence supplied by the Trenton skulls themselves the conclusion is inevitable that they are of modern Indians, probably of the Lenni Lenape." Before considering some of the author's arguments in favor of this particular skull's modernity, let the question of 12 the value of position as indicative of antiquity be taken up. This Trenton skull was found at a depth of twelve feet in distinctly gradually deposited gravel, if one may judge from the character of gravel exposures made within a short dis- tance from it, cellar and sewer excavations. The stratifica- tion is not, so far as observed, pronounced, but there are strata or seams of sand, not strictly horizontal that suggest alternate periods of torrential flow and comparative quies- cence. The mass as a whole is very compact and boulders of large size are everywhere scattered through it. It is evident, of course, that if an object is of positively known origin, its age is fixed by that fact, and the depth at which it m'ay occur when an excavation is made is of no significance It is necessarily an intrusive object. Brickbats from the bottom of a well sunk in Columbia gravel are post- Indian in spite of strenuously asserted position when discov- ered; but this rule applied by Dr. Russell to crania will hardly hold good, for if the femur found by Mr. Volk is human, doubtless the individual it suggests was the pos- sessor of a skull, and human skulls may be very old and yet very modern in contour. Now, this Trenton cranium is not of usual shape and simply because it comes within the range of possibilities among Lenni Lenape crania, does not prove that it is one. It varies toi a marked degree from the ordi- nary skull as found in Indian graves, and these vary among themselves to a considerable degree. The principal point is, does not the fact of its position when discovered set aside all probability of its being an intrusive object? A cranium, however thick, and this one is abnormally so, would inevi- tably be crushed beyond recognition if transported by a flow of water of sufficient force to carry with it such material as that with which it was surrounded, i. e., if water alone was the transporting agency. Dr. Russell expresses the opinion that a short journey of this kind was practicable, consider- 13 ing the specimen's structural strength. I do not. But it is very supposable that the specimen was frozen in a mass of mud and sand, and this congealed mass carried as the accompanying gravel was might travel a long distance and m'eet with no accident. As received by the gentleman from whom I obtained it, it was partly filled by sand and a slight admixture of clay that ensured cementation of the mass. This suggests that it was an old, fragmentary skull prior to its journey to the giravel deposit in South Warren street, Trenton, where it again came to light. Again, Dr. Russell is wholly at sea concerning the physical geography of the region, and I am sorry to admit largely because of the obscurity of a communication of mine to him. He remarks : "Though the surface of the ground where the skull was found is twenty feet — it is thirty feet — above the ordinary level of the Delaware, the locality has been over- flowed in recent years, so that existing agencies could have swept skull and gravel into place and buried them beneath strata of sand and gravels and huge ice-rafted boulders. The length of time that has elapsed since the skull was deposited in the gravels is probably very great, though of course it is not geologically ancient." A most unwarranted conclusion and gratuitous assumption. As a matter of fact, while the area where the skull was found is within the present flood- plain limit of the river, there is no evidence that any flood in hrmdreds of years has done more than wash the surface for a few hours, as I have once known it tO' do during the dam- ming of the river temporarily by choking with ice the present channel of the stream. The present surface of the ground was covered with water, but not a trace of earth-removal was discernible when the waters retired. No flood is on record, covering this area, that had power tO' transmit coarse gravel or even fill slight hollows with fine sand. The day of such 14 floods was not so decidedly post-g-lacial that it comes within the historic period or the indefinite pre-historic period when man was unquestionably a dweller by the river's side. This skull, be it remembered, was over-laid by twelve feet of coarse material, and the floods that transported this gravel and "ice-rafted boulders" were those when there was occa- sional re-occurrence of torrential floods that only characterize the glacial period in the days of its activity. All possibility of recent, i e., historic rather than glacial transportation and re-deposition is absolutely out of the question, considering the physical conditions that now obtain. If right in this, then the skull in question is of geological significance rather than historic, despite its craniological conformation. Again, the old bed of the Assunpink creek, to which I referred in my communication toi Dr. Russell, and upon which he builds with much confidence, his conclusion, was a bed of the stream! at the initium of its career as a water) course, when no longer a part of that greater stream; which made what is now New Jersey, southeast of it, an island. This was obliterated during the closing centuries of the glacial period, when a slight elevation brought about the present Atlantic ocean and Delaware valley water-sheds. The ancient creek was a result of such vast but gradual change and the channel of the creek at present was formed and the older one gradually obliterated so long agO', that to date the deposition of the skull in question back to. the exist- ence of the creek's earlier or initial channel is toi ascribe to it an antiquity that is more than vaguely pre-historic. It carries it to a past so' distant that it concerns the geologist fully as much as the archaeologist. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, in the Bulletin of the American, Museum of Natural History, Vol. XVI, Article III, pp. 23-62, New York, February 6, 1902, has given this same 15 skull most scholarly consideration. He says of it: "To diagnose the exact ethnic character of this specimen is a problem full of difficulties. * * * ^hg g]^^\\ ^an hardly be considered a normal one. * * * j^n j-^^t may be said positively is that in its general form', as well as in its main measurements and indices (q. v.), the * * * skull approaches much more the crania of the Lenape than it does those from Burlington county and Riverview ceme- tery; in fact it has nothing in common with these latter. * * * It seems to me equally impossible toi positively declare that the skull either is or is not a Lenape skull." It may be grossly presumptive for me to comment upon the decision of such an authority, but I cannot withhold my con- viction that the position of the skull when found goes a long way toward demonstrating that it is not the cranium of a Delaware Indian of distinctively post-glacial time. Dt. Hrdlicka's most recent utterance with reference to the other supposedly ancient skulls refers them to the people of the northwestern coast of Germany and Holland. There is a certain degree of pertinence in this suggestion, as New Jersey had Swedes and Dutch settlers within its boundaries, prior to the English. Skulls, not Indian, but old in a historic sense, are not unlikely to occur, and even dissociated crania, for more than one Swede and Dutchman was captured by the Indians and murdered, possibly eaten, and so isolated skulls of such captives can be explained ; but all this, not only pos- sible but probable, does not affect the cranium found in deep gravel, which is not a normal "Indian" skull. No reference to European settlers can explain its occurrence, and while one swallow does not make a summer, one such find as this cranium does establish man's antiquity in the Delaware valley. If not, archaeology is a sham and not science. It has never been made quite apparent why a change in cranial characteristics should tal4) A lapse of twenty-six years and much extended observa- tion now requires of me to recall the above, as to the distri- bution of this marked form, of implement. They are found throughout the entire area of South Jersey, or that part of the State which was not affected by glacial conditions be- yond receiving floods of icy Avaters and in the river's imme- diate valley floods of ice. This is more than half the whole State, and was everywhere occupied by a comparatively fixed population. The historic Indians had a name for every stream and a village somewhere on its banks. The traces thereof are unmistakable, but all over this territory, up-hill and down-dale alike, and often far from any water where fish are found, these fish-spears are to be gathered in considerable numbers. I hold to the name. Considering their shape and their unquestioned adaptability to spearing fish, from our point of view, and the fact that so many have 39 been gathered from the shores of considerable streams where fish are still abundant and where village sites give evidence of a fauna more suggestive of a food-supply than do the streams at present. The Indian knew no game- laws, it is certain, and often indulged in "wholesale slaugh- ter," as we would call it, but still there is no evidence that common sense was not exercised, as a rule, and no species of fish was ever exterminated by them. Then the name, Nota- maeishican is to be kept in mind. The Indian used some sort of a spear, and this pattern is most likely to be the one in question. They are essentially an argillite implement, and many of them are very old, and some are so decayed that only the practiced eye would recognize their artificial origin. The same form in jasper rarely occurs, and I have never seen it in quartz. How rapidly argillite disintegrates is an open question. Break one of these old and crumbling spears in half and a core will be found that is of almost flinty hardness, and readily scratches glass. The softer coating of semi-decomposed stone seems to be a pretty permanent protective coat to the core, and in such state the implement is insured a fairly protracted continuance; but change gradually does go on, for some specimens have been found that barely retained their shape and suffered from even careful handling. May we not infer from these condi- tions that thousands of these spears have long since crumbled into dust ? It is surely a warrantable assumption that abundant as are these objects still, they represent in but meagre fashion what has been. Much concerning their significance that applies to ancient argillite implements of a far ruder pattern, i. e., the palaeolithic type, applies to these assumed fish-spears. They are now found upon the surface. Every rain washes the sand from many a score and then they are covered again when the wind shifts these same sands when dry. How so 40 fragile an object has so generally escaped destruction, ex- cites surprise. Neither the tread of the horse or the ruth- less plowshare seems to do more than push them aside. Their number is incredible in some localities. In the valley of one small stream, where the sand is deep and has not been materially disturbed, except by Nature's own forces, I have known more than one hundred to be found during a few hours' search, and one marked feature of the condition of discovery was, that often a dozen or more would be found in contact, indicating that they had been buried or left on the surface, and gradually the sand heaped over them. Cer- tainly such is the case of a cache of fifty or a hundred or more, and such deposits have been frequently unearthed. Hundreds are found upon the surface, associated with unquestionable relics of the Indians, and so why not class them as such? By most archaeologists this is done; per- haps by everybody but myself; but I hesitate to consider them as only a common form of Delaware Indians' handi- work down to historic time for more than one reason. That these Indians made and used them is not questioned, but there is not a particle of evidence that they were in common use to the very last, as colossal ignorance has confidently declared. There is surely significance in the fact that they are a characteristic form of the deep sand deposits, and are found at the very base, often, of ancient sand-dunes, far from the surface and where never a trace of jasper, quartz or pottery occurs. If these sand hills are recent and all the argillite fish-spears made by the historic Indian or his grandfather, as has been claimed, then why has not all the handiwork of these people been inhumed? It is precisely the same condition as that pointed out by me years agO' of the assumed palseolithic implements of the Trenton gravel. They have been called "intrusive objects" and "unfinished implements" and "rejects," and endless plausible and un- 41 plausible suggestions made by those whose only aim is to modernize every trace of early man, ignore facts when pos- sible and distort others when the attempt is not too glaring. Pottery, however, decides the matter. It never occurs in the gravel and if not, why not, if the palaeolithic implement is an intrusive Indian object. Nature never did and never would take the trouble to discriminate. When she disturbs the surface every object upon it is treated alike. There is no selection and never yet has a stone axe, polished celt, jasper arrow-point or pottery been found in situ in a gravel deposit. What has been found is what might be expected, the rudely-chipped pebble that marks the beginning of arti- facts. Was the condition of significantly deep inhumation of one form of object with absence of Indian handiwork found upon the surface peculiar to a very limited locality, there might be some explanation that would fit the case and no other origin than that of the historic Indian be indicated, but this is not true. These fish-spears, or whatever they may be, so strongly suggest throughout so wide a territory that they are old, to a great extent ante-date the general use of the jasper, that I am still convinced that my view, as expressed in 1881, is substantially correct. When the bow was invented, it evidently soon followed that the arrow was made more effective by arming its point, though this really would have been unnecessary if hard wood had been used, but bow and arrow, spear and spear- head alike had a beginning, a primitive form of which it may be truthfully said, "lost is lost, and gone is gone forever." Certainly the primitive arrow-point is beyond reco'gnition. That a splinter of rock with an acute point and cutting edge should attract attention and suggest value as an addition to an arrow is quite in the course of natural events, once the bow was invented, or if, as has been claimed, the spear 42 preceded the bow, then the armed arrow is but a smaller form of that weapon, differently projected. Here we are groping hopelessly in the dark. The initial form of fabri- cated arrow-point is unknown. Naturally, splinters of stone of available shape and size, of accidental origin, would not supply the demiand, and the art of flint-chipping was culti- vated. This established, the design of the point was a matter of chance quite as likely as that the various shapes had each its own purpose, except perhaps the most elaborated and bizarre forms. Whatever the age and origin of arrow-point making, and however uncertain the student may feel in dealing with the problem, this at least is not open tO' discussion, the art as practiced here at the "ffalles of the Delaware," the head of tide-water, the meeting-place of conditions that are infinitely varied, where the hills cease and the plains commence, a once beautiful spot, now nearly covered by a hideous city, here reached its highest development and flint work that commands the admiration of all who appreciate the outcome of skill, is still tO' be found in this one time favorite dwelling- place of early man. At least one "king" of the Lenni Lenape lived within a few rods O'f where I am now at wock. As seen from his wigwam, he had a varied landscape before him. Forests fended off the chill north winds and a wooded flood-plain of the river, seventy feet below, stretched far away to the south. Hereabout every industry known tO' homekeeping Indians was pursued, and here, even to this day, traces of all such industries are still found. As potters, as implement makers, as designers of amulets and ceremonial objects, and carvers in stone of curious pipes, as cultivators of the soil, they were eminently successful, and this, so confidently stated, is all shown by the excellence and abundance of their 43 handiwork. One old king, at least, had the very best that was to be had, about him. Gathering here and there some trace of this ancient folk, a potsherd, an axe, an amulet, or the far more common arrow-point, it is well to let the object lead you back to forgotten centuries, as it will, if you so desire. The mind is more easily influenced than we suspect, and with an Indian relic in hand, we can see, in a sense, the man who made it, and not only him, but his associates, and the ploughed field becomes again a village site. Unless we do this, the real purpose of exploration is wanting, and the gathering of specimens becomes as monotonous and meaningless as dry- as-dust statistics. The head of a spear, the point of an arrow, unless the one-time owner thereof is pictured to^ the mind, are, alike, nothing. And be it remembered, he whose vision is thus penetrative and constructive, is not necessarily a visionary. THE ANCIENT QUARRYMAN. The doctrine of resemblances, which is scarcely worthy of the name "doctrine," and cannot be elevated tO' the plane of a scientific theory, seems to have been the actuating motive in the preparation of Mr. Mercer's^ report on the antiquity of man in the Delaware valley. Wholly opposed to the view of any evidences of antiquity being derived from the products of aboriginal skill and that tradition and folk- lore must be given respectful consideration, Mr. Mercer pounces with great glee upon what may possibly combat if not annihilate the view of antiquity, and overlooks the main ^The Antiquity of Man in the Delaware Valley, i. Introduction. II. Ancient Argillite Quarry and Blade Workshop on the Delaware River. By Henry C. Mercer. Publications of the University of Penn- sylvania, vol. vi, p. 85. Illustrated. Ginn & Co., Boston, Mass., 1897- 44 features of the ground he explores, which are all important in determining the archaeological significance of the locality. The student is under obligations to the author of the report under consideration for its valuable details. They give a lucid and correct idea of the physical conditions as he un- earthed them, but as to his conclusions, that is wholly a different matter. As so often happens, the broad distinction between as- sumption and fact is overlooked and many a conclusion is based on the former and yet set forth with all the confidence of results that rest undeniably upon the latter. The assump^ tion is invaluable in archaeological research. There are too few facts to work with, and reasonably assuming this and that, the worker in the field can progress satisfactorily and comes at last either to demonstrate that his assumption is vin- warranted or that it is not an assumption at all, but a fact. The all-important point is to keep the two separate and be quick to discard the assumption when it proves to be valueless. Too many archsologists are strangely loath to part with a pet theory. It is hard, and often means that the labor of a life-time has been in vain. Preconceived ideas, if dominant, renders all field-work useless, except per- haps the dreary details of mechanical work and description of the specimens collected, and preconception, it appears to me, vitiates this brochure of Mr. Mercer's on Delaware val- ley archaeology. The author's antipathy towards the idea of a really ancient man in the region treated is pronounced. All that savors of a lapse of years is as a red rag to a bull. By the doctrine of resemblances, as I have called it, Mr. Mercer is inclined to accept the conclusion that because he has found vast quantities of rude argillite implements at the spot where the material was quarried, and that they have the same general appearance as those found on the surface of the elevated plateau of central South Jersey, and 45 also occur in the gravels of the immediate valley of the river, that the two are identical in age, origin and all archs- ological significance, or, as Mr. Mercer puts it, "historical" significance. His contention appears to be, for there are no distinctly positive assertions, that man carried these rude objects from Point Pleasant on the Delaware, in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, to Cape May, in New Jersey, and that that man was the Indian, or his great-grandfather, with whom William Penn bargained for the pick of his land. The doctrine of resemblances is called upon to prove this, and apparently does so to his satisfaction ; but is it a logical conclusion ? Here at Point Pleasant argillite "blades" were made; ergo, all blades wherever found come from Point Pleasant. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Whatever such line of reasoning may be, it is not archaeology. In the first place, the resemblance is fortuitous. In the second place, unfinished objects would obviously be the same wherever found, though they were made, the one cen- turies before the other and by people wholly unrelated, and lastly, when there was active exploitation of argillite quarrying and implement fabrication at Point Pleasant and that general neighborhood, if Mr. Mercer is correct in his inference that it was as recent as five centuries ago, the Indian of the tide-water region was using jasper in prefer- ence to argillite and had been using it for a long time. As already pointed out,^ the dwellers in the tidal region were not dependent on quarries of any sort for a supply of any material for making implements, and that, too, of the very first quality. Masses of argillite sufficient to meet all their needs were near at hand and altogether accessible. One such mass that I have recently seen uncovered — it was within three feet of the present surface of the field — would have made, if worked up, fully one hundred thousand flat ' Archseologia Nova Csesarea, p. 35. 1907. 46 "blades," such as are so common everywhere in South Jersey; blades two inches in width and from five to seven inches long. Again, who among archaeologists or more fortunate folk has demonstrated that these blades were made by the historic Indian. The word "argillite," or any term of same purport, does not occur in any publication concerning the Indians, printed in the seventeenth or eight- eenth century. No difference was detected between one arrow-point and another ; with the early explorers and mis- sionaries, every object not made by themselves, was made by an "Indian;" but this does not go to prove that prior to the Indian whom they knew there might not have been another people. No one is rash enough to declare in ^ex cathedra manner that there were such, but the author of these pages, for one, does dare to claim there is evidence of man's presence in South Jersey, which is more reason- ably explained on such an hypothesis than upon any in- ference, deduction or assumption offered by Mr. Mercer. I have seen one cache of argillite "blades" — ^not a truly de- scriptive name, if cutting is implied — numbering two hun- dred specimens, not one of which showed the slightest trace of having ever been used in any way.-^ To- what purpose they were put, if any, is purely conjectural. They might have been used as hoe-blades, for instance, but if so used there should be signs of attrition, especially when digging in the sharp, sandy soil of South Jersey. This I have never seen. Aftei- examining many hundreds of specimens, now in the Abbott collection of the Peabody Museum, Har- vard University, and in collections made by others, it is the same story, no nicking of the edges, no striae, no pol- ishing, but the object as it came from the hand of the maker, plus the ravages of time; simply chipped thin blades ' See article "Cache discs and blades." Handbook of American Indians, p. 178. Washington, D. C, 1907. 47 that had suffered only as all implements of argillite suffer from long exposure. Why they should be referred to the argillite in place and not to boulders of this mineral near at hand, does not appear. It is true discs of jasper are also found cached, and in one instance both it and argillite were associated in a cache of over two hundred objects, but the jasper was ninety-five per cent, of the whole and the argillite objects were not weathered but black, and the chipping as fresh as when done, which bore out that for which I have always contended, that argillite never ceased to be used, but its place was gradually taken by silicious material. It is by no means certain that the characteristic product of Gaddis Run, near Point Pleasant, was not a finished arti- fact and not intended for "crude material" for more special- ized fabrications. It must be remembered that they are not adapted to re-chipping until a thin, flat blade is produced, and not, too, of much smaller size. These roughly-chipped buit finished (?) objects are noticeable as being shaped by detachment of very large flakes, and the specimen has a wavy shape that could not be removed by any amount of "trihi- ming." A second consideration is, that the argillite at Gaddis Run, as microscopic and chemical examination shows, is not identical with more than fifty per cent, of the argillite relics found in the tidal area of the river valley; and un- trimmed implements, if such they were, unquestionably from Gaddis Run, are found scattered over the fields, miles away from that locality. They occur singly, and never yet as a cache, ready for the workman to convert them into more available shapes. As they bear not the slightest re- semblance to objects of same material found in the gravel, but have been found deeply buried in the soil and wholly unassociated with Indian handiwork, it is evident that while not old in a strictly geological sense, they are not as "new" 48 as the historic Indian. There is nothingf to indicate the precise or approximate age of the quarry at Gaddis Run, and the discovery of the product thereof in the tidal Hmits of the river valley under circumstances indicative of pre- jasper and pre-pottery age, makes it reasonable to conclude that the quarry is as old as the day of exclusively argillite products and synchronous with the sands that overlie the gravel and on which the "Indian" soil now rests. The exploration of the Point Pleasant neighborhood re- vealed the fact, known to everybody long years before, that blocks of argillite, wrought to their present shape and now known by the rather unfortunate name of "turtle backs," as it is not descriptive of all the specimens that are classed together as "rude" or "unfinished," and this was the sole source of supply of argillite. Here, again, we think Mr. Mercer's view is incorrect. If comparatively recent floods have carried these much — ^and unnecessarily — discussed objects down the river for a distance O'f some twenty miles, why should they not show signs of the rough and tumble treatment to which they would necessarily be sub- jected? Those found in the talus along the river shore do not show anything of the kind. Water-worn "palaeolithic" implements from the gravelly bed of the river are occa- sionally found. The former are from, the gravel bluff, of which they are a constituent part and have been exposed to little or no water-action, while the latter, from the bed of the river, have been so exposed. It is not clear ho'W the one set or evident that the other were chipped miles from where they are now found, by Indians of three or four centuries ago. The truth is, and it can never be too frequently or emphatically declared, that the two regions, tidal and non-tidal, are in no way comparable and should never be associated. They are as distinct as the palaeolithic and neolithic horizons in Europe. 49 Mr. Mercer recognizes in the "turtle back" the initial chipping that is to be succeeded by more skilful work and an implement to be the product of the labor involved. In other MTords, his "turtle backs" are either unfinished but finishable objects or they are failures. Now, what I sug- gested, thirty years ago, were finished implements of pre- Indian origin and gave, unwisely, a local name, are really as much finished implements as a grooved axe or polished celt, if availability as a weapon or a tool is to be our guide. I may have erred in confusing some unfinished objects with real implements of the palaeolithic type, but he renders con- fusion worse confounded. That all the conditions which obtain at Gaddis Run, Point Pleasant, and wherever else Mr. Mercer worked, would be found, outside of quarries, is inevi- table considering the huge masses of argillite, in the drift gravels, upon which the tide-water people worked. But it is scarcely necessary to continue pointing out the inappli- cability of his assumptions. How unwarranted they are is established by his single remark that the historic Indian "may have been living at the spot as late as 1737." Sup- pose he was, he was then no longer a user, to say nothing of a maker, of stone implements. He made nothing of a permanent character, unless possibly he carved a soap-stone pipe. Supplied with a gun, or, if using a bow, had arrows tipped with metal, had European manufacturers supplying all his needs, his day as a "child of Nature" was over. If a lingering band of despairing and degenerating Indians were lingering in the neighborhood or camping on the very site of Mr. Mercer's trenches, it surely has no bearing on the question of antiquity of man even in that region. He does not produce one jot or tittle of evidence to show when man first noticed the excellence of argillite at Gaddis Run. In attempting, too, to connect its exploitation with all that succeeded, he lamentably fails. Pitted hammer stones are 4 AB so not sufficient. So simple a form of implement was quite within the capabilities oif a man who could fabricate a "palaeolith," and pitted hammers are found in Europe, where palaeolithic man is as established a fact as that man there passed from this toi the neolithic stage, and are not un- known in the Trenton gravels. It is assumed, not demonstrated, that the argillite quar- ries, where the rock is in place, were discovered, opened and worked by the historic Indian, as were unquestionably the jasper quarries that are not so very far away. Were they synchronously operated or did one precede the other? We are not given this very important information. The utilization of jasper and quartz did not depend upon the discovery of this rock in place; why should argillite? In 1885 I discovered at Catawba where jasper arrow-points had been made. It was a long-abandoned village-site, in Atlantic county. New Jersey, on the Great Egg Harbor river, which an earlier visitor has thus described : "The Naples yellow sand-bank of Catawba covered with oaks is visible afar. The waves of the river break into lines of foam on its beach and over the river stretch acres of meadow back of which are the fastnesses of a swamp forest. "On the side and crest of this bank many bits of flint, broken arrow-heads and clam-shells, charred stones, frag- ments of crude pottery, queerly ornamented with dots and zig-zag lines, and Indian food-plants indicate that here there was once an Indian camp-ground. By the bits of flint the work-shop of the ancient arrow-head maker is easily located. Here, with rude implements, he deftly plied his trade. The charred stones, broken shells and pottery still mark the spot where the squaws once cooked their food. These are the vestiges of an age that is past — these are the relics of the mild-mannered Lenni L,enape." 51 Here are countless jasper pebbles, and these had been the source of supply for the Indian of that neighborhood. Hundreds of pebbles, partly chipped and discarded, were gathered, showing conclusively that arrow-points were made of small masses of the material but a little larger than the desired implement, while innumerable minute chips were scattered through the sand, and often so deeply buried as to suggest decided antiquity. This "find" com- pletely upsets the view so often and confidently expressed that large masses were first blocked out, reduced to "blades" and then, at "trimming sites," of which we hear much and see little, however diligent the search, were finally finished as spear-head, arrow-point, drill or stemmed scraper. Of probably greater import than any other consideration, or all of them together, is the fact that the argillite imple- ments found in the non-tidal regions of the Delaware valley from the neighborhood of Point Pleasant, westward through the country (in Pennsylvania), show no such evidence of age through decomposition, as do these same forms in New Jersey from the head of tide-water, southward. I have collected so many specimens, personally, and examined so many collections made by others, that here, too, I speak confidently. It is practically certain that no stone imple- ments were made here, i. e., Point Pleasant quarries, within the past two centuries. Firearms had been fairly well dis- tributed by 1700, and besides, the Indians had practically left the neighborhood, yet the argillite points, the chips, the long slab-like "blades" or what not from Gaddis Run are comparatively fresh or unaltered since the day of chipping. I have many specimens, found on the surface and gathered from trenches, that are as well defined as to the secondary chipping along the edges as any imperishable jasper arrow- point now shows. This is a condition that does not obtain among the argillite objects of like pattern found in the 52 sandy fields of New Jersey, and, as already stated, many that are found here are scarcely to be recognized so exten- sively has the process of disintegration progressed. If it could be shown that the soil in Bucks county, Pennsyl- vania, about Point Pleasant, is preservative and the sands of Burlington and Mercer counties, New Jersey, are destruc- tive, then an explanation would be at hand, but it is not true. Again, in comparing the two localities, the subject of encrusted argillite implements must be considered. In the sands of the tidal region of the river valley, and through- out the territory extending to the sea, incrustations of iron and sand or iron and clay are common on pebbles of every description. No mineral occurring in these sands, as peb- bles or boulders, escapes this addition to its bulk, but it is significant that, while the argillite arrow-points are seldom free from some traces of this accretion, I have never found it upon any jasper or quartz arrow-point, although pebbles of these minerals are often completely coated. This I have always maintained is irrefutable evidence of the greater age of the argillite. This is not true of the objects found up the river or in the non-tidal area. No argillite imple- ments found there have this condition of surface. Pebbles are found there so incrusted, but the operation, very slow in its work, has not had time to affect the surface of any artificially-chipped surface. The simple fact that argillite objects have been lying long enough in the sands of New Jersey to become covered with a coating of limonite is sufficient to show that these forms have nothing whatever to do with those of Point Pleasant. Throw all else out of court as irrelevant, and the single fact of the condition of these objects, "turtle backs," blades, fish-spears and arrow- points alike, point only to the one conclusion, the antiquity of man in the Delaware Valley. S3 From the author's point of view, Mr. Mercer hopelessly damages his whole case by the conclusion, on his part, "that the resemblance in make of a certain number of Trenton specimens to the quarry series suggests that the former had been made by modem Indians and intruded by them into the gravels." Just what he means by "in- truded by them into the gravels," is by no means clear. If modem Indians deliberately buried these objects, why this pattern and not other examples of their handiwork? Nothing else has ever been found, and thirty years' search renders it probable that nothing else ever will be. If, on the other hand, Mr. Mercer means that the Indian, living here when the gravels were being gradually lain down, and lost these objects, why there is a glimmer of reason in what he says. This being led away by resemblances is most unfortunate in this case, inasmuch as it robs other- wise earnestly conducted "up-river" exploration of a great deal of its value. The shape of a chipped stone is of less value than the condition of its surface, and this Mr. Merc6r has entirely overlooked. Had early writers indulged in no speculation, had they not been over-confident as to the correctness of their im- pressions and so left cautious rather than confident state- ments concerning the Indian's origin, would the archaeolo- gists of to-day be so readily inclined to explain all that con- fronts them, when in the field? I trow not. Because an Indian two or three hundred years ago made a statement on such a recondite subject as tribal history, must it neces- sarily have been true? It may have been given as received, and accepted by all his tribesmen as veritable history, but was the Delaware Indian ever in condition to preserve his- tory beyond the events of two or three generations at most? I think not. His involuntary records, so far as they re- main, are alone reliable. 54 Tradition is full of interest. It fascinates. It is always plausible, but, unfortunately, "like the average white man, it is full of uncertainty." Surely, never can we tell how much, and at what rate, that which was once authentic his- tory becomes vague and generalized when handed down from generation to generation, and merges at last into the true traditional conditions. Unfortunately for those who would know the truth, tradition takes upon itself so vigorous a life, one so able to withstand assaults, that it emulates immortality and has no feature whereby a clue to actual age can be estimated. "Long ago, in the days of our grand- fathers," the equivalent of the "Once upon a time" of our familiar fairy tales, is not a phrase with which time can be measured. It may mean twenty centuries quite as likely as ten or even one. The historian can make some use of tra- dition on the basis of the doctrine of probabilities. If it agrees with all other forms of evidence, heed may be paid to it, but not otherwise; but to the archaeologist, unless his every step is taken with the utmost care, it is a delusion and a snare. Certainly the "history" of man in America, as based upon tradition, is so-called through courtesy alone. It is a long, rambling, contradictory tale, that is pleasant to read, but conviction as to its truth does not follow peru- sal. Archaeological explorations tell a different story, and one wherein far fewer difficulties are met. In the essay already cited, Mr. Mercer calls to his aid, to substantiate the claim of the Delaware Indian's v6ry recent origin, a considerable array O'f "authorities," and the chief among them the Walum Olam that has been ex- haustively treated and discussed by the late Dr. D. G. Brin- ton. Grant that the translation thereof is absolutely cor- rect, that the original, itself, is all that has been claimed for it by its most zealous advocates, it nevertheless is safe to say that there is no evidence that the Delaware river 55 is referred to in any one of its declaratory paragraphs. It purports to be the legend of a protracted migratory move- ment from' point to point, but it is not so definite that we can accurately trace the route of the asserted migration. Its rivers may be any rivers, its ocean as likely one of the Great Lakes as the Atlantic. It doubtless is a record, though very vague, of actual occurrences, but of a time so very long ago that all the particulars were forgotten, and how could any event of real importance be rationally re- tained in the memory and as thus remembered, transmitted, when that bane of existence, fanatical superstition, was as much a misfortune of these untutored Indians as it is still of ourselves? With every facility for correct record of the passing moment, our own colonial history is far from satisfactory, and some of it a sorry hotch-potch of supposi- tion, half-remembered events and unreliable say-so. It is remarkable, indeed, considering all else that the Walum Olam should be an actuality and preserved as it was, but nothing connected with it places it in the category of re- liable history, beyond the mere fact that we have no evi- dence that the Delaware Indians reach the river valley of the same name from the east, or across the sea, makes it plausible that the Walum Olam tells the story of reaching the Delaware Valley from an inland point, but it does not prove it. But if there were other evidence, and we accept it as an authority, the element of measurable time is hope- lessly lacking. In archaeology it is all a question of time relative and not time absolute, and when we have to deal with time relative, the century is as just a unit as the year. Mr. Mercer, I believe, does not admit this, but it has ever been my claim, and nothing in archaeological research has been brought to light which weakens the justness of my position. Mr. Mercer says of the Walum Olam: 56 "The latter curious record, whose authenticity is toler- ably well established, places eleven chiefs between the ar- rival of the Lenape at the Delaware Valley and the coming of white men (say Hudson, in 1609) ; and if we give twenty years to a chief's reign, the date of their first com- ing would have been about 1387. This agrees with what a Lenape told the Rev. Charles Beatty, in 1767 (Journal of a Two Months' Tour West of the Alleghany Moun- tains, Charles Beatty, p. 27, London, 1868). When count- ing beads on a wampum belt as years, according to tribal custom, he said that his people had come to the Delaware 370 years before, or in 1397. "The Heckewelder version of the tradition, however, which gives no means of fixing dates, would infer that the newcomers found the country vacant. The exploring par- ties of the eastward migrating tribe, it says, arriving at the Susquehanna, followed it down to the Chesapeake Bay, then ascended the bay and outer seacoast and discovered the Delaware River, New Jersey, and the Hudson River, — a country abounding in game, fruits and fish, 'and with no enemy ta he dreaded.' "This seeming absence of prior occupants in the new country is again suggested by the Walum Olam, which refers to the newly discovered land as 'a land free from snakes (enemies), a rich land, a pleasant land.' "But without attempting to dwell too much on these tra- ditions and their claim that the Lenape only arrived in the Delaware Valley five hundred years ago, and that before that time it had lain uninhabited for an unknown period, suffice it to say that at Lower Black's Eddy we have found two stages of occupancy. "The layers prove a difference in time, short or long. The character of the objects found a difference in handi- work. Future work can alone prove whether this differ- 57 ence denotes a mere accident of varying tribal conditions, or a wide-spreading difference in cultural status. Let us only say now that at this one spot it exists." The tenor of the above-quoted paragraphs from Mr. Mer- cer's pamphlet shows clearly as buttercups in a green pas- ture that his personal inclination is towards the five-century view of the subject. Thus he is the Indian's historian, and archaeology is beyond his purpose. Persuaded that an- tiquity cannot be, he fails to see the possible significance of conditions that, it is true, may be of recent date, bulf the verdict of "not proven" rests over the scene of his labors. Certainly, nothing was discovered by him or by subsequent visitors to the spot to show that the Gaddis Run quarries are not themselves older than five hundred years. The debris that marks the spot had been lying there for quite two centuries when the ground was overturned and the result of much stone-flaking activity was brought to light. Why, then, must only three centuries be allowed for the period of occupancy and activity? The unquestionable identification, if correct, in the Walum 01am, of the Susquehanna and Chesapeake Bay, of the Delaware Bay and river, and of the Hudson, which is not admitted, really bears out my own contention that the tidal region of what is now New Jersey was first reached, and at its southern extremity at that, and was settled per- manently long before the argillite quarries could possibly have been discovered. The trend of settlement would neces- sarily be up the river, and those heavily forested highlands and the precipitous banks of the stream would be for a long time only the hunting grounds and regions for casual ex- ploration long before any man would venture to form per- manent settlements. Its acquisition for village sites and agriculture would not be like the flowing of a stream, ever moving forward. Southern New Jersey was capable of 58 sustaining a dense population, and in all human probability every creek, brook, and perhaps every considerable spring with a meadow about it, every open glade in the forest and the whole reach of the river shore on each side would be dotted with habitation sites before the less promising land beyond, a vast sunless forest, cold, forbidding and unat- tractive, was^sQ far subdued that safe and healthful habita- tions were established. Nature's hand was against man among the hills and where the river flowed unceasingly and rapidly in but one direction ; as much so as it was a helpful hand in the lower-lying, level plains, where there was prac- tically nothing to contend against and a food supply in the river and along the seacoast was ever available. Yet the Indian did do all this. He acquired a thorough knowledge of every square rod of it, and if we are to pay any attention to tradition, of which Mr. Mercer thinks so much, the Indian was a dweller in the river valley many miles above Black's Eddy, when the waters were dammed at the Water Gap and a great lake glittered in the sunlight where there is now a glorious, fertile valley; and this same Indian knew the country before catastrophic action occurred at Nockanixon and the whole surface of the country changed. This is tradition. It is given for what it is worth, and will any historian of the Lenape have the temerity to assert that such changes as we know have occurred in the immediate river valley date back only about five hundred years? That the river would be traced to its source, the adjacent country explored and every feature of it become known, finally, was inevitable. The Indian was never so incurious, such a stay-at-home, as to keep his wigwam ever within view. He learned in time all that the land contained. He ultimately had a name for every place and for every object it contained. He crossed and re-crossed it until the paths he wore were so far permanent at last that they are not yet 59 all obliterated. He tarried by the river shore or upon its islands and then sought other sites, perhaps safer ones, being driven by freshets from his home. He did all and much more than Mr. Mercer finds evidence of his doing, but who shall pretend to say when the Indian's activities among the Pennsylvania highlands began ? We know when they ceased, but that avails nothing. The element of time is lacking, save as suggested, time relative. That no long- continued village was at Lower Black's Eddy was made apparent before Mr. Mercer's exploration of the site. His "layers of occupation" was not a startling discovery, yet it disconcerts him. It indicates clearly occupation, abandon- ment and re-occupation. It fits but ill with the claim of but three centuries, for the place was permanently aban- doned two hundred years ago. Mr. Mercer is hoisted on his own petard. It is almost trifling with the subject to take into consider- ation what Mr. Mercer seriously considers, the tradition that the Delaware Indians first caught sight of the river in 1397; but if such a thing had happened, it by no means follows that the land they found was virgin soil, so far as the foot of man was concerned. Haeckwelder's narrative would lead to the inference "that the newcomers found the country vacant." Here again we have nothing but assump- tion. There may have been no opposing force already here that stayed the Indian's progress. Battles would probably have been dimly remembered and vaguely transmitted, but that a people were here, or had been here, is not impossible or improbable. The pre-Indian argillite folk, for whose identity I have so long contended, may have disappeared, even become extinct, through plague, pestilence or famine, the constant ravages of war or persistent cannibalism. This is only conjecture, one of many possible explanations; but why consider tradition when the relics of a foregone race 6o point to wholly different conditions ? If the Indian of his- toric time is not the direct descendant of a less cultured, savage, then, on reaching this locality, the task was before him of absorbing a weaker race, and it was accomplished.. We have not as yet, and may never have, positive knowl- edge. The dissertations of Mr. Mercer and of Mr. Holmes throw no light upon the subject. Their efforts to exces- sively modernize the argillite quarries signally fail. "Myself when young- did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about; but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went." What little we really do know may be summed up as follows : (a) That the presence of pitted hammers is not a neces- sary reason for associating the objects found with them with the latest phases of Stone Age Industry; such ham- mers being known elsewhere at the lowest horizon. (b) The mere presence of "turtle backs" means nothing, if by this term is implied unfinished objects or failures. They were necessarily a product also of large, rude imple- ments, differing in toto from "blades." (c) That the resemblance of one form of chipped stone to another is not necessarily an evidence of identity in age or origin. (d) That two regions as wholly separate and apart as the non-tidal and tidal reaches of the Delaware River must each be judged on its own merits. The physical conditions being radically different, no reasoning, however cogent, that may be expended upon one region has force in another. The conditions at Liower Black's Eddy are not favorable for accurate determination of ancient conditions. The river is even now equal to flooding a great portion, if not all of 6i it. It was submerged in the phenomenal flood of 1903. Such floods, where water only is the disturbing factor, do not render it impossible to discriminate between an older and a later horizon, but with an accompaniment of floating ice, it may be different. Then a gully may be formed, not by gradual displacement of the soil, but by undermining and wearing away a great mass of frozen and compact earth and filling in the hollow with material from near by. The whole original deposit may be washed away and supplied by transported material that gradually replaces it. Certain it is, that at Lower Black's Eddy there is very little that was there or like what it was in the heyday of Indian occupa- tion. It could never have been a permanent village site. The argillite attracted but at favorable times, and the quarry at Gaddis Run visited and abandoned year after year, as the Indian's needs were met. I have said, year after year, yet why not century after century? There is not one jot or tittle of evidence going to show that ever a jasper- using, pottery-making Indian ever split a blade from the Gaddis Run quarry. There is nothing to disprove that it was a scene of industry when the man of the Delaware Valley was an argillite man exclusively. Such a supposed early occupant of the region would soon discover in the boulders of the tidal area, that not all argillite is the same, and a search for the very Best of its kind in all things is not an attribute solely of advanced people, and certainly the quarry product, useless in itself, so far as known, was not so well adapted to implement-making of specialized types as the smaller pieces, nearer the dimension and shape of knife, arrow-point or spear-head. As to the evidences of Indian occupation at Lower Black's Eddy, it must be remembered that it was the stamp- ing ground of collectors long years before Mr. Mercer's explorations. The author has, himself, dug many a hole 62 in the grassy slope well above the river and near the water's edge, and was present, in June, 1890, when a considerable trench was dug through quite as suggestive ground as that opened by Mr. Mercer. Jasper arrow-points and potsherds were found near the surface, and at a lower depth, argillite points and flakes. It was an exciting moment, and we were all in hopes of discovering a "palaeolithic floor," as it is C2dled in England, but at the limit of the excavation, when near the water level, instead of any trace of earliest man, there was unearthed a suspender buckle. Evidently the land so near the river as at Ljower Black's Eddy is not a safe basis upon which to found conclusions. That Mr. Mercer has shown that an older and more recent occupation of the site occurred, and that there was a decided difference in the condition of the people in the one case and the other has this significance. It is corroborative evidence of what we find in New Jersey in many localities, but this has been over- looked by the author we have quoted. The quarries may have been exploited by the people O'f the "lower layer of occupation" and the men of the "upper" been ignorant of their existence. ANTIQUITY Ot THE HISTORIC INDIAN. There is a widespread tendency to be skeptical, among intellectual people, that works for good when it demonstrates how necessary it is to be cautious and not ever-ready to accept statement as such without other warrant of its value than the ipse dixit of the narrator. But skepticism may outreach too far and include in its grasp that to which it is not entitled. If nothing is accepted as true but what with our own eyes we can see and with our own ears hear, then crass ignorance must follow. Without faith we are reduced to the level of brutes, but it must be a discriminating and 63 not blind faith. So much for the one world in which we live, that of facts; but there is another sphere of activity, a world within a world, wherein greater freedom is allowed, the world of rational speculation. Herein we have a few facts and it is ours to make the most of them and as bes't we may. We can never know in the sense of the absolute knowledge of mechanics or chemistry, but guided by what • we discover, be it more or less, we can convince ourselves and by future discoveries, unconvince or re-convince, but never feel that we stand upon the bed-rock of irrefutable demonstration. This is true of archaeological research, particularly where we have to deal with a savage race, a people without written language, but with, almost unfor- tunately, a pictographic tendency, for such pictographs as remain are not often readily deciphered, at least to every- body's satisfaction. So far as the Indian population of the Delaware Valley is concerned, we have the single fact that such a people as the Lenni L,enape were at one time in sole and undisputed possession of the territory now known as New Jersty and Pennsylvania. Beyond this statement, caution is constantly called for. Credulity must be checked at every turn. However plain the case, when a single vil- lage site is carefully explored, our deductions are likely to be set aside by unearthing another site not far away. But all this is of little moment when compared to the experi- ence awaiting the student of the antiquity of these people. His best evidence to-day of a great lapse of time may be successfully set aside by the discoveries of to-morrow, and perhaps not yet has enough been done to warrant an ex- pression of probable length of time since man first sighted the river on our western and ocean on our eastern boundary. The term "historic Indian" is a misnomer. It really bears the relation to that people that a man's funeral notice does to his life's career. 64 Taking as rosy a view as is permissible from the writings of the early chroniclers, and seeing the best only of what eye-witnesses narrate, exaggerating every noble quality and minimizing all that which we wish had not been, it is never- theless evident to us, as it was not to the missionary or explorer of three centuries ago, that the Indian was then degenerating in a sense, that he was not what he had been, that his career as a "nation" had seen its rise and now was falling, and while the most intelligent among them, may have been endeavoring, at the time of the white man's ar- rival, to upbuild and reconstruct their race, it was really a hopeless case, and there was then and had been a steady lowering process in progress and savagery becoming more pronounced rather than less so. However might have been the outcome of the contest, if such there were, between the better and the worser element, the discovery of America by Columbus sounded the Indian's death-knell. No progress could afterwards be made. The Europeanized Indian is not a successful type of humanity. He must be one or the other. That the Lienni Lenape had been in more flourishing con- dition than when first interviewed by the evil-designing European, is evident from the fact that much had frequent place and so stood for much in their estimation which had wholly disappeared, or why had it not attracted the early travelers' attention and they in turn explained the signifi- cance thereof? The archaeologist of to-day is now reduced to the necessity of calling certain forms of stone imple- ments "ceremonial objects," but who knows aught of the ceremony and what it stood for in the minds of those who took part in it? The most difficult to fashion, that which, cost the most labor and exhibits the greatest skill and knowledge of symmetrical expression, is the object of which we know, not the least, but absolutely nothing. Banner- 65 stones, bird-shaped stones, boat-like stones, irregtilarly pit- ted slabs, gorgets with many notches, lines, dots, swastikas, and various arrangements thereof, must have meaning. These markings are not likely to be simply an attempt at ornamentation, they are so inconspicuous. What of the idols of the Delaware Indians? John Brainerd,^ while a missionary among the Indians of New Jersey, recorded of one of these people, that "she had an aunt * * * -^^ho kept an idol image, which, indeed partly belonged to her, and that she had a mind to go and fetch her aunt and the image, that it might be burnt; but when she went to the place she found nobody at home, and the image also was taken away." While this, indeed, is slender evidence of the occurrence of idol-worship among the Delaware Indians, it is of interest in showing that images were not unknown, and that they possessed other significance and value than as mere ornaments. Any carving in wood or stone, merely used for personal decoration, would not have become sinful in the mind of an Indian woman, through the preaching of the missionary; and a desire to destroy the object she re- ported as in her possession must necessarily have arisen from the fact that it was regarded with superstitious rev- erence and invested with supernatural powers, in their belief. Had Brainerd been less fanatical and realized what Na- ture's purposes are in dealing with mankind, he would have made an efifort to secure and preserve as many idols as possible and given us a dissertation upon their place in Indian economics. But those were days of intellectual darkness, when the effort at conversion was nothing more than the blind leading the blind, the unhappy, perverted Indian woman seeing far less clearly under Brainerdian ex- ^Atbott: American Naturalist. October, 1882, p. 709. 5 AB 66 poundings than when led by the teachings of her own people. It is to be noticed that this woman desired that the idol be destroyed by fire, thus suggesting that it was made ol some such perishable material as wood. If of stone, doubt- less she would have spoken of breaking it, and such idols are not unknown, if the human head carved in stone, such as that found by Rev. Samuel Lockwood, near Keyport, N. J., is an idol, or Mesink, and then what of the standing stones, suggestively incised with lines or plain, that stood in many places until finally overthrown by the farmer when they were in his way? Of all this matter, we know only that we know nothing, save that the Indian had developed a re- ligion that was a step or two^ in advance of utter innocence of this stage of intellectual status. If nothing of all this was developed in the territory now under consideration, it certainly required many years for expressions of it to be so universally scattered, as they were at the time of their leav- ing the lands not more of their fathers than of their remote ancestry. On many a long-occupied village site, "prob- lematical" objects are still found, and almost to a certainty unsolved problems will hover over these sites until every trace of them is beyond recognition. A flood of light would be thrown upon aboriginal history did we know what the problematical objects were to their makers; but no missionary or traveler seems ever to have seen them, or seeing, to have sought information, when he might have obtained it. At a meeting of the Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, some years ago, the late Frank H. Gushing, by means of a large series of these objects, scarcely two of which were alike except in general character, dem- onstrated the descent of the double-winged banner-stone from the double-bladed war-axe. The double-bladed war- axe, represented both in the hand and on the head-dress 67 of the figures impressed on copper from the Eutaw mounds in Georgia, served as an intermediary link, the banner- stone of beautifully banded slate being the warrior's badge, carried as an axe or worn upon the breast. Mr. Gushing- suggested the Southern source of these symbolic specimens, tracing them to the extreme South, where they exist as practical weapons. Fig. 6. Ceremonial objects, of various patterns, are common in New Jersey. The one represented by the drawing is of less frequent occur- rence than those with the "wings" narrower and longer It is possible that this object, Fig. 6, may have originated independently here in New Jersey, as modifications and am- plifications of naturally perforated pebbles, but the chances are against this and favor Mr. Gushing being right in his surmise. Dr. Brinton's objections have noi weight, for if double-bladed axes were ever in use here, some traces of them would be found, but as they have not been, it is fair to prestime that the "banner-stone" of this region, if a deriva- tive, was derived from the Sbuth, and so the New Jersey In- dian had a Southern origin, as the Walum Olam seems to suggest, but his coming was so gradual an approach that it could scarcely be called migratory. If not, then "banner- stones" might have first been made known to them by inter- 68 tribal commerce. The contention is, that an article of abso- lutely no use, but symbolic only, and so foreign to the pur- poses of migratory people and not long established at any one locality, would not have been made, as^ thousands of them were, by the Lenape, had they not been here in the valley of the Delaware for ages, and not merely sojourners here under the rule of eleven successive chiefs. It is rather disheartening tO' find opportunities for illumi- nating archaeological research lost because of an unconquer- able inclination tO' resurrect and rehabilitate the righteously buried whimsies of forgotten visionaries. Even "the lost tribes of Israel" have been looked to for comfort in endeav- oring to solve the problem of America's aboriginal man. Dr. Boudinot thought he had made out his case, a century agO', but this is all forgotten now. The origin of the Ameri- can Indian is a geological question primarily and archaeo- logical secondarily. It has nothing to do with history proper, or with tradition that sO' frequently masquerades successfully as a veritable record of the past. How far the use of wood was general for domestic, agri- cultural^ and warlike purposes is now undeterminable, but it may have been far greater than the accounts of early writers lead us to suppose, and if soi, considering the vast quantity of stone implements still found, and these but a fraction of the Indian's entire possessions, then but one of two conclusions can be reached. Either there was a vastly greater population than has been believed, or the people occupied the country for a much longer period than the traditionalists so confidently claim. The harder woods, if ^The stone spades and hoes, shoulder blades of elk or dear, dam shells ; all have been reported as used in cultivation of maize, but Lucien Carr asserts wooden hoes were most common. Mounds of Mississippi Valley, historically considered, pp. 9, 14, 20, 25. 69 at all protected, are not so very perishable, yet who now living has seen a bow, shaft of an arrow, a canoe, or even a war-club, that unquestionably was made and used by a Delaware Indian in the Delaware Valley? Buried in the mud, these objects should still be preserved — ^wooden boats a thousand years old have been found in Europe — ^but so far as my own observation extends, I know only of two mortars, not authenticated, a paddle that may have been whittled by a white man and a long wooden club that cannot be proved to be of Indian origin, although this is very prob- able. Canoes, for instance, were hollowed out from logs and were in constant use among the river Indians, and the number of them must necessarily have been very great, yet every one of thousands has disappeared. This fact is not an argument for the antiquity of the race, except so far as it shows that we have not so much to go by in our estimates of what has been as we may think, judging only by the objects of stone and fragments of pottery. Could we have a view of an Indian riverside village, such as once occupied the ground on both sides of the river a!t the head of tide-water, we would see the gently sloping shores lined with canoes and the river dotted with men in other boats passing from shore to shore, or going down the stream to their villages at the mouths of the many inflowing creeks, or laboriously working their way up-stream among the uplifted rocks that here block the further passage of the tide. Perhaps a canoe^ without a passenger has drifted ^In an unpublished MS. Hearing date of 21st of Sth ni(o. 1758, con- cerning the establishment of the settlement of Wyomink, I find as fol- lows : "they (Indians) went away about 10 o'clock, and soon, after showed us a mark of friendship, which was, as they went up the river about six miles above the town they found (as afterwards we had cause to believe) a number of canoes and paddles a lying on the shore, (which beyond doubt a large number of enemies had brought there and were gone to do hurt at the Minisink) they took twenty-eight of 6 AB by and all is excitement, for by such means many a warning of approaching danger has been sent. Back from the river on the fertile rising shores are orchards, both of nuts and fruits, even at last peaches, which, derived from the Span- iards in Florida and brought hither, now flourished so ad- mirably that in 1680, an English settler compared them to "ropes of onions." The smoke from many a cooking-site floated above the tree-trops, and while Nature was not dis- turbed and the world here still retained that pristine fresh- ness that makes life so well worth living, man was busy everywhere. The maize fields were models of careful cul- ture. There was work for every one, yet time for play. There were many games known to them, and there the dance, perhaps, about those monoliths that stood in open spaces and many a painted post. There was every indica- tion of a long-continued settlement, an aboriginal town or centre here, and the innumerable burials, in both upland and what is now a meadow, still show convincingly that the ancient man was no uncertain nomad, here to-day and gone to-morrow. The falls of the Delaware were early fixed upon as the natural centre of a race that, long-established here, flourished for centuries and then was overtaken by some swift disaster or slow-destroying intellectual cancer that gradually sapped their strength. We are fairly sure that this much we know, but the underlying cause mU|St remain a mystery. The invading European, tyrannical, fanatical and devoid of justice, saw but the last act of the the paddles and put them in a bark canoe and set her adrift to float down the stream, in order to give us notice there were enemies near us and might be in danger, as they supposed." * * * Titeusquand later explained the occurrence, saying, "I have been seven miles up the river where I have found more canoes and paddles, which were brought here by French Indians * * * as for the canoe coming down with paddles, these men that went up to-day put the paddles in the canoe and sent her here with the stream that we might see how matters stood." 71 drama, of this we may be sure, and nothing of the telHng- incidents of their career, and heroic struggles to reach that stage of culture that once was theirs. The English, as did the Dutch and Swedes before them, saw but the backs of departing Indians, and theirs it was to let fall the curtain that shut them from view forever. Henry W. Haynes, in an illuminating paper on the Agri- cultural Implements of the New England Indians,^ after commenting upon the accounts of early writers, adds, signifi- cantly, "But in this instance, as in so many others, the authorities have not told us the whole story by any means, and archaeology comes in with the most irrefragable proofs." How true this is becomes impressive indeed, unless the stu- dent is hopelessly adrift through preconceived erroneous ideas, as we have already seen is sometimes the case. It is as fatal to the truth to unwarrantably modernize traces of early man as to ascribe to them unreasonable antiqmty. There is ever the safe middle-ground, a coign of vantage, wherefrom the outlook is never obscured, where every con- dition and its value is recognized and the final decision can be made without fear of successful contradiction. The impression of antiquity is not a fatuous condition, and reason retires to the background whenever a stone im- plement is picked up. There is, besides the physical sight, mental vision that projects itself beyond the naked fact of a stone lying in the dirt. The "modernist" feels this as well as others, but dishonesty is his overpowering passion. He will not reason with himself. Even the single fact that stone-implement manufacture was discarded promptly on the appearance of the white man has been vehemently denied. It has been said that a decomposed argillite fish- spear might have been chipped on the very day that Penn ^Proceedings, Boston Society of Natural History, vol. xxii, No- vember, 1883. 72 treated with the Indians at Shackamaxon, notwithstand- ing that the most recent of these or other patterns chipped at Black's Eddy show practically no signs of disintegration when compared with argillite implements from central and southern New Jersey. Determination tO' attain an end sometimes leads tO' most unwise selection of means where- with to accomplish it. There are conditions familiar to every experienced col- lector of Indian relics that are explicable in more than one way, and not always is the apparently simplest solution of the problem necessarily the correct one. This is notably true of the occasional occurrence here of objects character- istic of a section of the country hundreds of miles distant. If we accept the recent migratory origin of the Delaware Indians, for instance, it is easy toi understand that objects procured in a district through which these people passed might have been retained until they found a final resting- place in the valley of the Delaware. This is very reasonable when we refer to forms rarely found here but common in the mound-building districts of Ohio, or in the nearest of the southern states, but is less and less likely an explanation of such objects as Catlinite tobacco-pipes and ornaments, which must have been brought from Minnesota, or flakes of obsidian, now knives and scrapers, from even more remote localities, and what of a bead made of a shell that belongs on the west coast of Panama? Even if the Delaware Indians moved in a body into New Jersey, by a circuitous route, or a straggling band of this people accidently wandered here from their original home, ho'W little probability there is that any but their most press- ing needs would be considered, and how likely what they required would be furnished by the available materials found in the sections through which they passed. A migratory movement is never a rapid one. This asserted one of the 73 Delaware Indians was not a grand exodus under compul- sion. It must have been, in those days, with that people, a slow pushing outward, first in this direction and then that, and, if met with opposition, the delay in traveling far in any one direction might be greatly prolonged. Little, likely, of personal possessions would remain after years of wander- ing, and over a wide extent of territory, of that with which they set out. Indeed, is it at all probable that any of the individuals of the original band would be alive by the time the migratorial journey, if we may call it such, was ended ? We know, too, how general was the custom to bury their cherished personal possessions with the dead. There is, on the other hand, another explanation that is, it seems to me, more reasonable, that of inter-tribal com- merce. How far such a custom ever existed, it is impossible to determine, but if it be true, and there is no valid reason to question it, that a pipe-maker^ wandered from the Missis- sippi tO' the mouth of the Columbia river, taking five years to perform the journey, then there is less improbability in some objects reaching New Jersey that came as far only as the copper mines of Lake Superior, the mica deposits of North Carolina, catlinite from Minnesota, and even obsidian from the far west. It is a tempting subject for speculation, with but little chance of complete demonstration, but if my contention of protracted occupation of the Delaware valley holds good, it is quite as plausible as any other explanation proposed. Only among tribes or "nations," long located in some one well-defined locality, is such commerce likely to be well-established. It is something more than mere barter. It is distinctly a feature of fixed conditions and that have been long-fixed and are generally known. That the Dela- ware Indians were an important people among the aborigines of North American, no one denies. They were recognized ^ DuPratz, History of Louisiana, vol. ii, p. 128. London, 1763. 74 as a nation that were to be honestly dealt with. Individuals on trading expeditions knew that their rights would be acknowledged at home, and if violated, in times of peace, would be avenged. That obsidian, that is not found east of the Mississippi, should find its way to the middle coomtry, and from there occasionally tO' the Atlantic coast, is not an unthinkable proposition, however improbable it may seem at first. The fact, however, remains that these foreign productions do occur here and that the Indian brought them. They have been found under circumstances that set aside all possibility of their presence being attributed to even the earliest Euro- pean travelers, and if a scanty trace of an established trade with distant tribes, then their little weight of evidence is wholly in favor of the view that the Indians of the valley of the Delaware were not recent-comers into this region, finding it an uninhabited country. What, it may be asked, is included in the generic or com- prehensive name, Delaware Indians, or what, rather, by their own designation of Lenni Lenape? They were not, when^ discovered by the Europeans, what we might call a homo'- geneous people. There were the grand divisions of Minsi, Unami and Unalachtgo,^ and known by their totems as wolves, turtles and turkeys. They not only occupied differ- ent portions of the river-valley and adjacent country, but ^ The Lenape were divided into three sub-tribes : Minsi, properly Minsiu and formerly Minassiniu, means "people of the stony country," or, briefly, "mountaineers." Unami, or W'namiu, means "people down the river," from naheu, down stream. Unalachtigo, properly, W'natachtko, means "people who live near the ocean," from wunulawat, to go towards, and t'kow or t'kou, wave. The Lenape and their Legends, by D. G. Brinton. Library of American Aboriginal Literature, No. v, p. 36. Philadelphia, Pa., 1885. 75 there were dialectic differences that are of marked signifi- cance. Did these divisions exist prior to migration ? If so, would they have been retained during it ? It is not probable. A wandering community is a disorganized one in many respects. After a permanent settlement has been made, and it is felt to be such, permanent organization and complicated social condition develops. Then these wandering Indians, widely separated and living now in regions as wholly unlike as the Delaware Water Gap and Cape May, with still a different country between the extremes, might well become organized as wolves, turtles and turkeys, and in time marked changes in language be brought about. Mankind in the mass cannot be hurried. The element of time is all essential and the conditions obtaining among the Delaware Indians, when first seen by the Europeans, the Swedes, Dutch and English, were all such as preclude the possibility of the earlier people, being themselves immigrants within meas- urable time. When, on the high interior plateaus of the southern coun- ties of New Jersey, we find traces of the Indian, and gather potsherds, implements and charred bones of animals that had been used as food, there is in the single evidence in- stance evidence only of the Indian tarrying here, but when after years of experience in examining such one-time sites of aboriginal life, we find that differences exist and that the site at one location was not like that of another, it is natural, indeed is imperative, if we would know the truth, that the reason for such differences should be made plain. They do exist and they are of two' unrelated characters. There is the difference of the historic Indian jasper, quartz and pottery condition, in that in one locality it is elaborate and in the other, the same materials occurring, it is extreme- ly rude. There is no discoverable difference in the horizon. So far as present conditions point, the two sites might have 76 been occupied on the same day. There is no apparent reason why one should not show as great skill in the fashioning of its object of daily use as the other, but the fact exists and why ? It is not a case analogous to what now obtains. The extremes of vast wealth and abject poverty were unknown to the Ivcnni Lenipe. There doubtless, as at present, were wise men and poor fools, but the weapons, household utensils and agricultural outfits did not greatly vary. We have no warrant for any such conclusion, and the alternative is, that the Indian advanced materially after he reached this part of the world. If so, the village or wigwam site, with the rudely chipped implements, coarse pottery and generally primitive outfit, is older than that where all the indications are of stone-age culture at its zenith. If this can be shown to be the case, then the assumption of the recent (i. e., 1397: vide Mercer) appearance of the Delaware Indian in this region falls to the ground, vmless it is admitted that on arrival they displaced or absorbed a people who' had long preceded them. There is little toi indicate any other view than that the Dela- ware Indian did come from some point of the compass other than east, but it was soi long agO' that the surface conditions of the country were very unlike what they now are. Fortunately for the cause of truth, there is a variation from this condition of differing village sites on apparently the same horizons, and that is sites distinctly one above the other. These have more than once been brought to light. We are apt to speak so glibly nowadays of shifting sands and of the sudden overwhelming of some green and grassy location by an irruption of wind-blown sand. All very well when treating of a seacoast or a desert, but when the Delaware Indian took possession of this part of the country, the plains between the river and the sea, there were no such desert-like areas, due to deforesting the land. Vege- tation covered and protected the sandy soil, and it needs 77 but very little of it to hold such sandy areas in check, how- ever the March winds may rage. The Indians' maize-fields were not without protection, too, from the surrounding forests. It was, therefore, not so easy a matter for Nature to cover up the earth-scars the Indians' needs caused. A village site if abandoned, would quickly become covered with grass and weeds, but little else would reach it. The rains would not wash it away nor carry enough sand to inhume it in a year or a decade. Decomposition of autumn leaves and annual weed-growths would yearly spread but a thin film over it, yet in time there was a change. The char- coal and ashes are lost tO' view, the potsherds are buried, the axe, the knife and the arrow are mingled with the dust and in time a giant oak or towering ash flourishes where once the ground was bare ; all this has again and again been traced, and when superficial examination has been followed by ex- haustive exploration, beneath the Indian site that disap- peared long ages ago, there is found yet another series of equally telling objects that were in turn, through the same agencies, lost and forgotten, faded. wholly from the mem- ory of the ancient men who dwelt upon the upper site. It is when these superimposed proofs of early occupation are brought to the arch^ologist's attention — not the objects themselves, arranged in museum cases — that he begins to realize what Mr. Haynes has well called "the irrefragable proofs" of his science. It is no longer a mere unearthing of curiosities to please an idle moment, but the opening up of a vista that leads the mind safely and surely back towards the beginning of humanity's career, and we see, not as through a glas.s darkly but with the clear vision of an un- biased mind, what has been and have more than intimation of when, if not, why, or how. And when this is the reward of the archaeologist's toil, as happily so often it has been, then the value of tradition that makes all a matter of yes- terday, is small indeed. 78 CONCLUSION. However dexterous the ancient man of America may- have been, however hopelessly wrapt in mystery his origin, however puzzling the many examples of his handicraft, and repugnant to us the greater number of his customs and be- liefs, now that they are but a feature of a distant past, did not age lend a charm to every tangible trace we find, the main incentive to study him or them would be lacking. Antiquity wanting, not a relic that we gather but would hold the place of a flower without color, a rose without odor, a man without a mind. It is not that we may coldly calcu- late the exact number of years since an axe was shaped or an arrow-point was chipped, for a few centuries, more or less, matters nothing. It is the feeling of being brought face to face with days so far long gone-by that mystery invests them ; a feeling too of seeing as we never saw before, what has been. This it is that captures the mind, kindles en- thusiasm, and more than this, broadens our knowledge, not alone of our own age, but of that which preceded and af- fected it. It was not so long ago that myth held the place now awarded to sober fact. The archaeologist is dealing with humanity, and though here in the valley of the Dela- ware with a phase of it that rises not very far above its lowest limits, still it is sufficient to make us sympathetic and desirous that the truth shall make us generous to their memory. An axe or an arrow-point cannot be picked up in a newly- ploughed field without a thought of its original owner. We wonder about him, for no element of doubt enters as to his one-time existence. We ask ourselves questions and, if wise, wait patiently for a reply that comes at last, when we have gathered hundreds of objects. We are too gross in our 79 make-up, these prosy days, to become in touch with any single example of the Indian's skill, but an array of his work in every phase of his manifold industries does ap- peal to all so strongly that the man behind the display is dimly discovered. A very shadowy figure, and at the best but vaguely comprehended, but still enough of a fact to be acknowledged as within the scope of brotherhood. Enthusi- asm may go too far, but I for one am free to confess that when I read of vast reservations of timber land, wherein a botanist can roam and be happy, and other areas set apart for the protection of game, wherein the sportsman can in- dulge his murderous appetite, I wish there was still some- where a few million acres of wild land, wherein untamed, unchanged and Nature-fashioned Indians were allowed to live in peace. Probably from them, if such there were, we might learn much and many a hopeless tangle be made straight and intelligible. Only, I think, through restoration of original conditions, will we be able to know the whole truth. This is impossible and much ignorance is our lot. The past can never return, nor is it well that it should, but our interest in it, so far as these people are concerned, can never die so long as relics continue to be found, whenever we wander where once they filled the scene, although the moccasin-print of the hunter-warrior and patient squaw have long been obliterated. Here and there are trifling bits of wild land still very much as the Indian knew them. Here the irrefragable proofs of their one-time presence still re- main and every object that we hold in our hands, once held in theirs, points backward, backward only, but how far? Here is the parting of the ways of many who have reached this point. They have the relics, they acknowledge their origin, they admit they ante-date the epoch of the invading white man, but this is all. It is all that need be known, all that can be. Is this true? I have never felt content to let 8o my own studies and reflections, when in the field, cease with the decision that all is referrible to the Indian and what an Indian is, we cannot know. It is a most unsatisfying out- come of long-continued labor. The Europeans succeeded the Indian, and may it not be, that the Indian succeeded a people distinct from and inferior to themselves? To turn one's back on such a question, to greet with a sneer any such suggestion, to call those whose impressions lead them to think otherwise, visionaries and sensationalists, is not science, but exhibitions of that weakness which still links mankind to the headstrong — I will not say, unreasoning — brute. When I stand on the higher ground of a vastly older geo- logical formation, extending across the State from the head of tide-water in the Delaware river to the sea, and look across the country that is spread before me far to the east and south, and looking over the smoky city to the fair fields, meadows and wooded land that continue until lost in the horizon, I think of those vexing, mysterious and disputed chipped pebbles which are lying in the gravel and on many an upland field, and the days of glacial activity come back vividly and with them the flooded valley with its wide reach of water, and I perceive that the now-continuous land was once divided by a stream that united what are now two dis- tinct water-sheds. The present canal is, as it were, history repeating itself, the waters of the Raritan and of the Dela- ware once mingling in a long-since obliterated cross-country channel. The walrus, the seal, the whale were then deni- zens of this forgotten deep, the seal alone remaining as a reminder of other and far-diiferent days ; while in the for- ests hardby, the musk-ox, the reindeer and, perhaps, the mastodon found there a congenial home, and man, was he here then? Did he then know that struggle for existence 8i that he now knows in and near the Arctic circle? The tell- tale bones of the animals make their former presence cer- tain, but no bones of man, though many have been found, have yet occurred which have escaped the carping criticism of the modernist. That such ancient and Arctic man was here, I cannot doubt. His bones and his handiwork are no less a part of the history of the underlying gravels than are those of the Indian in the overlying soil of our fields. Time passed and many the changes that were wrought as the slow centuries dragged on. The old waterway was dried, was choked with earth, was hidden from view, and forests flourished where once was a broad outstretched arm of the sea. Man, I fancy, felt the change and changed with it. The old conditions that figured so promiently in their past, were gradually discarded, as we discard the humbler utensils with which our ancestors worried through a happy existence. The innocent "palaeolithic" that now rouses to wordy rage the uninstructed, was tossed aside for better weapons, and necessarily so, for the new order brought with it more wary, if not new forms- of life, which human skill must now outwit. The evolution of implements was in- evitable. Long was this new phase of humanity sole pos- sessor of the land. His increased needs called for more than weapons, but the blessing of inventive faculty was never his save in a limited measure. What was this man's fate? Here I look in vain for any clue that promises success. It may be that he had the bow, it may be that he had boats, but there even conjecture must halt. The traces he has left behind him of his sojourn here are in the sands that over an extended area was then the surface of the plain, but since has been covered by the slowly accumulating mold, that con- continued growth of forest produces. An open and, in part, treeless country, it may be, was the home of this man of specialized argillite implements and not until the forests re- 82 placed the rank annual growths and dwarf shrubbery gave way to giant trees, did the scene again change and the In- dian appeared. This is the reading of Nature's pages since the great glaciers dwindled to our own brief winter's ice. The text is imperfect, many a sentence is blotted out, often but here and there a word where we would have a chapter, but what we have warrants, I maintain, such an interpreta- tion as I have given, and how very long in years it must have been for this to happen ! There is nowhere a trace left of any great catastrophe. No violent up-lifting here and sudden sinking there. The up-lift was gradual. No tidal wave washed over a million acres and swept a whole people out to sea. There was no difference, one year with another, but centuries varied with centuries, and what no individual suspected, a race realized. For long, before the encroaching ice-sheet chilled the region and drove man before it from- his forest home among the hills, the country was a veritable paradise for mammalian life. This we have as sure knowl- edge of as that the hand of man has within the historic period largely destroyed what the glaciers spared. Why not this savage man at such a time? A product of Nature, as other mammals, what reason can be adduced to warrant denying his existence also in pre-glacial time? Then, too, what boundless areas of inviting land were south of the ice- sheet's range. The teasing "palseolith" that is as nothing to so many, tells others of this ancient man. Is it probable that such men should have originated where we find traces of them, during the close of the ice-age? Where could he have come from? Not from the south, surely, for why leave pleasant lands and milder climate for one where conditions were far more exacting? But why not a dweller in the land before it was blighted by an Ice- Age winter ? As I look from the present highlands over the scenes of many years of archaeological research, I see, or seem to see. 83 these things. My mind is deeply, ineffaceably impressed. The many inherent difficulties that others claim are fatal to my view, are resolved toi idle words of protest, I am^ so much in earnest. How else could the disposition of the thousands of relics be explained? That it is accidental is for me unthinkable. Happily, however, a change that ad- mits no dispute did come about and at the last we have only the historic Indian with whom to deal. Had he been a chronicler using decipherable text, we would not now be groping in the dark as to the vastly remote past, and, too would his own story be that of his historians ? When as many a day has drawn tO' its close, while yet I lingered in the field and every sign of white man's industry faded from view, the scattered trees became again a forest, the cry of the cougar and bleat of the fawn were heard, the bark of the fox and howling of the wolf filled the air, a lurid light of a camp-fire lit the sky ; the days of the Indian had returned, nor did the illusion pass away until homeward bound, my hand was on the latch. Archaeologia Nova Caesarea No. Ill BY Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D. The great dim centuries of long ago Sweep past with rain and fire, with wind and snow, And where the Savage swung his axe of stone The blue clay silts on Titan trunks o'erthrown, O'er mammoth's tusks, in river-horse's lair; And, armed with deer horn, clad in girdled hair, A later Savage in his hollow tree Hunts the strange broods of a primeval sea." 1909 TRENTON, N. J. MacCrelUsh & Qulgley, Printers. 1908. PRKKACK. The discussion has been as animated as it has proved * unsatisfactory, that reckonable time, i£ I may so call it, enters into geological problems as unquestionably do'es sequence of events. When we pick up a pebble and find that it is made up of minute grains of sand so cemented by silica that it is again solid rock, we are carried back to a time when this sand was rock, then broken, crushed to fragments, almost to powder, each grain rounded by running water, then exposed to other influences and a new rock formed of the fragments of another, a piece detached, rolled until all angularity had disappeared and is now a pebble. Hold such a one in your hand, and under its influence, while gazing on it, travel back to those ancient days when first one and then another of the changes occurred, or still farther back, when the elements of that rock were yet intangible, and then apply your petty method of calculating time as it affects humanity. The absurdity is at once apparent. Time applies to human history only, and when it is to be applied to what we know as ancient human history, the greatest caution is called for, as many have found to' their sorrow, when the facts of the earth have calmly contradicted the vagaries of dreamers. Nature has never recognized what man knows as "time." Always existent, but ever changing, her career extends backward throughout the eternity of the past, as it will continue throughout the eternity of the future. Man's career, as yet, is but as a fleeting shadow on the surface of the sea, and only an approximate date need concern the archaeologist who' en- deavors to trace this career. To endeavor to date it as we do that which has happened within recorded human history, to speak of years, centuries, or even milleniums, is the bane of archseolO'gical research. Only the most indefinite phrases, as "old" and "very old," should be used. It is the business only of the archaeologist to trace the sequence of event, to arrange in proper order, if he can, the sadly mixed, dis- jointed and exasperatingly confused facts and fragmients thereof, and set them forth again in orderly array. This is his proper work. No' cherished theory, no' adherence to long-settled convictions of one's days of ignorance should deter him from demonstrating, when opportunity affords, that this is older than that, and the invention of a simple form preceded the elaboration of a complex one. Who, standing in the shadow of a patriarchal oak, will attempt to count its leaves, or trace the outlines of its tiniest twigs, or follow each sinuosity of its wrinkled bark? It is the tree as a whole that bids us pause, and there is ever enough to excite our wonder and call forth our admiration without asking the question, when was the first acorn evolved from some Quercian ancestor? Enough to know there are oaks, and for long have been; enough to know there are men, and for ages long have been, and, as a fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, at times, it also' makes some of us wondrous curious at other times ; so, to inquire into the career of those who' preceded us is not unnatural, nor, perhaps, without some use. There is always satisfac- tion in the possession of a truth, even if we can make no special use of it. Certainly we never know when a truth may come into play. Man is an incident in the progress of events, and, as such, is of some interest; but, if we associate him with time absolute or time relative, as we must an individual and his period of existence, we are led into a trackless wilderness, from which there is no escape. "Thus, it happened," is a happy phrase, but how much care should be exercised in using it, and then, it should be always understood that it is used tentatively. When Euripides suggested our ignorance of to-morrow, in his neat way of putting it, he may not have had in mind either historian or archaeologist, but they, above all people, should keep in mind that the earth turned up to-morrow may tell a different story from that which was brought to light to-day. The spade is something more, it seems, than an implement with which to dig. It proves to be a maul occasionally that knocks the bottom out of the tub into which the theorist has snugly ensconced himself. The worst of it is these petty Biogenetic archaeologists complain bitterly because the little- ness of their labors has not been sufficient, and their solution O'f a problem has not proved the genuine solution of the great problem. Applying experiences had in other directions, it is naturally unlikely that the career of man can ever be traced without here and there a yawning and unfathomable abyss, where may be everything that vexes and nothing that satis- fies ; obstacles too high to clamber over, too long and broad to travel around, and far too deep to tunnel beneath them. We can imagine only in such a case, and the sole difficulty is to satisfy ourselves that we are making a scientific use of the imagination. Then, when it comes to making a state- ment, let the fact upon which no obscurity casts a shadow be set forth as such, and our inference or fruit O'f imagina- tive exercise be set forth as such. Then, and then only, will knowledge be advanced. This has not always been done. Some problem, into which the element of time enters, is raised upon a pedestal and so revered that all else becomes of secondary importance, and facts must be bent, twisted and contorted generally until they give some resemblance to conformity with the all-important (?) problem. A thou- sand facts are often thus made valueless to gfive fictitious value to a worthless whim. Mention need scarcely be made of the fact that it can only prove disastrous to science to make use of time to bolster up some vague tradition which has loomed into prominence because reduced to writing long after the events occurred, if, in fact, they ever did. It is well enough in a way to approximately date the time when the moon, for instance, leaped from the Pacific and started on a still more pacific career of its own. Millions of years ago! So' be it; and so Lord Kelvin can compute the duration of life on this planet, but unfortunately an accurate definition of "life" is not yet forthcoming. Do crystals live? We hear much of the intelligence of plants. Is protoplasm^ conscious? All such speculative features of scientific research are proper enough and indeed are unavoidable, but nothing of it all pertains tO' the study of man's career. There are noi dates in the earlier milleniums of his straggle for existence, and why the Glacial Period, innocent, dreary days of ice and snow, should be brought down to so late a time that we can almost feel its wintry breath, to make more plausible an oriental legend and fragments of the Orient's history, surpasses compre- hension. Certainly, to: those now facing the serious problem of living their own lives it matters nothing when the first anthropoid strode over the plain or through the forest, not having dominion over all other beasts, himself but little in advance of them, but striving to outwit them all, and this effort has not yet ceased, for there are some creatures still that may be "lower" than mankind as a whole, but which have a wit that defies man's efforts to effect their annihila- tion. Nevertheless, when we see the foot-prints of a previous traveler, we, as we travel, wonder who he was that passed this way. So, too, when somie trifle that fell from human hands happens in our path, laudable curiosity is aroused, and the past is, or should be, in a measure revealed. Whether fantastically or not, depends upon ourselves. It is the business of the archaeologist to see that our re-creation of a time gone by is not grotesque, but rational ; that step by step we are guided by fact, not fancy, and, above all, no vain imaginings of the uninstructed of centuries ago shall poison us with their fallacious views of the world and of themselves. The philosophy oif other continents is philo'- sophical in America if it is philosophy, but oriental con- cepts of the origins of things have no place here. The American archaeologist has to do with American man. His studies in the museum and library, and his labors in the field may never solve the problem, o^f the ^American's origin. The secret may be so' deeply buried no spade will ever reach it; but it may be confidently claimed, the secret, if ever brought to light, will be discovered here. Discovered or not, man here in America, on these broad plains and in these boundless forests, had a career. None will question this, and this alone concerns us, for, as we tread it, the ground is firm beneath our feet. To the quaking bogs, in which the theorist loves to flounder, he is welcome. Again I would call attention toi the importance of right interpretation when an object of archaeological significance is discovered. The spirit of the collector is too' likely to dontrol, and the desire of acquisition overrules prudence, and the specimen is removed without thought oif its sur- roundings and considered only per se. Too often this means nothing. As well cut a word from the page of a book and study it, and so lose all that the page might have revealed. Even an object lying on the surface has or may have more significance than the simple fact that it is a veritable relic of an earlier century, but it is when brought to light by the spade or exposed by the crumbling of the face of a clifif 8 that the really important study of the object should com- mence. It is imperative that we first determine the nature, or trace the history of the containing bed. It is equally demanded that we eliminate all possibility of the "find" being an intrusive object, and then remove it and hear what it has to say for itself. There should be a responsive chord betwixt the finder and the found. Let nothing that is gathered become merely a specimen. One arrowhead is as good as ten thousand if that it is an arrowhead is all one cares to know. If the trunk of a patriarchal oak is split and an arrowhead is found near the heart of the log, then it can be accepted as a fact that the object struck and was held fast by the tree when the latter was a sapling, and the annual rings of growth gradually shut it from the light O'f day. There can be no blundering here, no unwarranted inference, no rash conclusions drawn. Error here has no ground upon which to stand and make a seductive showing. It is very much the same with traces Oif man found in the earth. Whether intentionally inhumed or hidden by natural forces, cataclysmic or orderly, can be determined in almost every case. If naturally shut from, view, then the character of the changes of the surface which resulted ultimately in burying the relic are to be considered. Such study calls for the consideration of the element of time. No' startling antiquity can be attached, it may be, to ninety and nine of every hundred objects that are found, but that one hundredth will rise to puzzle, if not vex, its discoverer, and the care given to the consideration of the others, extended to it, will result in its not fitting with any theory of modern origin. It cannot be carried forward and found a place in recent centuries, but, on the contrary, carries its finder irresistably back to so remote a time that he gropes in darkness instead of walking in the light. The knot that we seek to untie can be cut by asserting it to be an intrusive object, but here in the valley of the Delaware these "intrusive" objects are all, as yet found, of soi primitive a type that it is more difficult to understand how an historic Indian could use them, than that they were the handiwork of a less cultured folk. The moral of all which is that a mere collector has no place in the field. He simply renders more difficult the labor of the archaeologist. One stone chip, one potsherd, one fragment of bone, artificially shaped, intelligently removed from where it has rested for centuries is worth a dozen cases in any amateur's museum, however elaborately labelled and ostentatiously displayed. Of course, all difficulty can be avoided and archaeology reduced to a mere preface to history by ignoring objects possessing transcendant importance. This is the plan fol- lowed by certain institutions, and the inevitable result of a wrong impression has gone abroad. It is the prevailing view that the Americas were unknown to any race of man, until discovered by some one of them a few centuries a-go. This simplifies archaeology to such an extent that it becomes the plaything of the unthinking masses, and the public is permitted tO' reach its own conclusions — never a safe thing to do' — ^providing always it closes its eyes when any object suggestive of a lapse of cen- turies is held up before them. If palaeontoloigy were treated in such a manner, what would we know now of the succes- sion of forms in the various geological horizons, from the earliest to the latest? As it is, American palaeontology ranks high in the court of science, and deservedly so; while those whose advantages in archaeological research have been greatest, have very nearly dragged it down toi the level of a farce. If what has been called heretofore archaeology, is not such but ancient history of a modern type, as the Bureau of lO Ethnology declares, then by all means change the nomen- clature and call a spade a spade. At least make a show of honesty, even if none exists. It has been superciliously claimed recently that North American archseology was not a subject of scientific research forty odd years ago, when an institution for such research was founded. If not then, it is no more so now. The truth is that the subject was not scientifically treated, and now, to make a g'reat show of activity, the ends of the earth are swept up into a heap and the dust that is raised obscures the original purpose of those who would have the origin and career of early man in America determined. The handi- work in stone, bone and clay of the North American Indian is asserted to be a matter "of narrow and well-defined limit." Narrow, because of the narrow view taken of it, or spitefully called "narrow" because too great tO' be grasped; and "well-defined," if by this term is meant what North American archseolo'gy really comprehends, but not defined in detail by any means, if we may judge from the endless array of specimens duly labelled as an implement of war, agriculture or hunting'. Beyond that, a pitiful blank, that becomes the more soi as the quantity of material in- creases. "Narrow and well-defined," the archaeology of the Atlantic seaboard may be, but nowhere is the whole matter set forth in detail. The purpose of first importance of archaeological research is to determine the beginning of an industry, toi date relatively the beginning of occupation of a given territory. This may all be within the "well-defined" limits referred to, but the line of separation twixt archae- ology and geology, or the place of American archaeology in world-wide anthropology has not yet been brought into the realm of the readily discernible. The relationship of North America to other portions of the globe is eminently desirable to ascertain ; without it, all II the facts, if ascertainable, of one region, would be of little value, but the facts of all other regions will not help us to bring to light the past of our own country. When a relic of stone, bone or clay can be picked up in the fields and its whole story told, its entire significance expounded without hesitation or reservation, it will be found that the subject of North American archaeology, as a whole, is not so very "narrow," and the definition of its limits be found such that we can only wonder that a subject so full of interest should have been so long neglected and even treated with contempt and ill-treated through crass ignorance as it has been. Seeing a great crowd, we get but a poor impression of humanity; so too, seeing a vast accumulation of relics does not throw light on their origin. One grooved stone axe will tell the story of them all, if we can but get it to speak for itself. Why a groove about it, instead of a hole through it, as we find them in Europe ? Have those who look with ill-disguised impatience at the pre-historic objects of their own surroundings, told us this simple fact? The spirit of accumulation is fatal to that of investigation. Mounds have been levelled, when robbed of their treasures, but the builder of the mound has not yet figured in history or been awarded a paragraph in any annual report. The subject may be too "narrow and well-defined" to need this, but here there is difference of opinion. There are those who want to know of the man who made the arrowhead and shaped the axe and left the endless potsherds in our fields. What other countries have to say and show may not appeal to us. Nothing distinctly beyond their boundaries can solve the problem of the Atlantic seaboard States, and these are by no means one in their ancient history. There is room to wander without danger of collision in these "narrow and well-defined limits," and enough to be discovered to keep the honest student busy all his life ; nor is it likely that the 12 tale when told will prove without interest, without stirring incident, without those features of mankinds' later history which are ever as prominent as they are proof of a lowly origin. That forty odd years of familiarity with stone imple- ments could lead only to the conclusion that they are not objects of scientific research, and rouse but an idle interest that is "narrow" and a significance that is "well-defined," is a trifle discouraging perhaps, but we must consider that it is a museum-born conclusion and had the significance of the fields gone with the object, another story might now be told. A check to the progress that might have been made years ago in reaching to a reasonably comprehensive conclusion is the constantly occurring contradictions that face the explorer. Nothing disturbs the theorists in his study, still less is the curator perturbed when arranging his specimens; all, in either case, is what he wishes it tO' be ; but the spade has no consideration for the man who uses it. It brings to light whatever is in the ground, and not simply what, according to theorists ought to be there. No one is so severely and so frequently jolted as the archaologist when in the field. He cannot withstand the temptation to formu- late his facts as he acquires them. They must be set in orderly array that they may not disturb the mind while the hands are busy ; but how often, when the sky is clearest and the outlook fair, suddenly the cloud of a contradiction sweeps over sky and plain and the mists of doubt envelops them. This is not so unhappy an occurrence as the reader might think. It only demonstrates the danger of theorizing on insufficient data. Sum up the day's work only at the close of the day; sum up the year's work only at the close of the year, and finally, sum up the life's work at the end of 13 a life. There will be fewer mistakes made and the little that is left behind, when the archagoloigist passes away, will be worth the having. There is another view to be taken of contradictions, as we meet with them in the field. They are a constant caution against too limited a view. Your own field and your neigh- bor's may tell different stories. No one house in a city tells how all the citizens live. So no two limited localities will prove the same, on exploration. The counterpart of some one day's experience may never happen. Unique conditions are the rule, thousands of acres considered, and so there are many unique objects, outcomes each of a passing thought that was never repeated. But through them all there is a common significance; however varying, there is a common origin. Just as two individuals, to-day, would surely, if they could trace the matter far enough back, find a common ancestor, so it is in the study of a people once occupying any clearly defined territory. The thing in common is the proper quest of the archaeologist. The special is always for subsequent consideration. The former, when once upon the right track, can be traced with some degree of certainty. The contradictions should not deter us in proceeding or be allowed to chill that enthusiasm, without which, effort is vain. Often these same contradictions, as we hold them, are only facts out of place, and will fill again their proper niches when we have reached far enough back to realize what the past has been. We know better what the depth of a well means when we stand at the bottom of it and look upward. No one has as yet reached the beginnings of human activity on this continent, nor will it ever be reached except by digging for it, and not idly speculating as to the ultimate result of the effort. As yet, only a small area has been passed through a sieve and the treasure it contained sep- arated, and until this has been done a hundred fold more 14 than at present, will it be warranted to speak, even if then, in absolute confidence and defy criticism. While the questions involved are still in a tentative shape, this is no reason why the convictions of the individual, at the close of his life's work, should not be set forth and defended until further exploration sets his conclusions permanently aside. The morning is still fresh; no one has borne the heat and burden of the day. Work, not words, is the order of the hour, and this is preeminetly true here in the valley of the Delaware, where every chip of stone is an ancient's autograph and eveiy finished implement his autobiography. Whether or not a wiser procedure to have rerhained silent after thirty-six years of labor in the field, is not now to be considered. Thirty-six years ago I invited criticism by unqualified statements oi views which have as yet stood, although they may not always stand, the test of time. As years rolled by, I was not inclined tO' alter any material view, and made but few changes in subsequent statements as to minor matters. Palaeolithic man may never have existed, the later argil- lite man may be a figment of a too active imagination, and all traces of early man reduced to a recent date, when, as Mr. Mercer presumes, the Delaware valley broke out suddenly with humanity, like a child with the measles, but still I do not believe it. In conclusion, it is proper here to^ express my many obli- gations to M. Taylor Pyne, Esq., of Princeton, N. J., whose unfiagging interest in my work and substantial encourage- ment at all times, made it possible tO' carry on my investi- gations until now, when I cheerfully pass on the problem of man's origin in the Delaware Valley to^ younger and more competent hands. Three Beeches, Trenton, N. J., October 13th, 1908. C. C. A. ARCH^^OLOGIA NOVA C^ESAREA II. the:; peopling OP NORTH AMERICA. The peopling of North America is as yet an unsolved ' problem. There is a theory for every day in the year and every change of the wind, but there has been noi dem- onstration. The most plausible is the possibility of drifting from Japan or that general locality eastward to the Aleutian Islands. A word here as to this. If it did ever happen, then it was so very long ago, that the few slight resem- blances of a physical character were the principle character- istics of both peoples, and since then the two races have been built up on very divergent lines. All this calls for an antiquity which refers the whole subject to the scope of geological rather than ethnological research. What relation the circumpolar people have toi the North American Indian is still a puzzle. The results of explo- ration and thoroughly scientific investigation lead rather to inference than conviction, and it is the history, as we know it, of the so-called Eskimo that calls for a lapse of time that is not readily computed. The earliest people left no unmistakable track behind them in their march. How do we know, to-day, that bears, wolves and wild-cats were once abundant in our back yards, and that where we have plotted a garden path may have been in other days an Indian trail ? It is a matter oif hearsay, of vague tradition, of fragmentary history originally written by incompetent historians. The evidences, substantial, indisputable and overwhelming have, long before this, effectually disap- peared. Still, we do have what we call positive knowledge, in the records of the days when European and American came in contact, but no such conditions obtain in the pre- 2 17 i8 ceding chapter of the Earth record. The native American did not chronicle his career nor place beyond irrecoverable loss, his origin. All traces of early man are accidental, and it follows, consequently, that all efforts to make plain the significance of such traces are equally uncertain. We may be right, the truth may be set forth, but the element of un- certainty hangs over it all as the mists of dawn obscure the rising sun. While it is painfully like groping in the dark, the condi- tions among the Indians in 1620- 1680, earlier and later, were undoubtedly such that a long time must have elapsed to have brought them about. Progress is very slow among ^savage peoples. There is almost no incentive to change. The influences that effect a people are due to physical con- ditions altering. In such case, the required amount of adap- tation takes place. Such changes of the earth's surface, of the climate, of fauna and flora are never sudden, but when they do' occur they exert an influence no people can with- stand. All this has happened, but not a measurable part oi it is a matter of yesterday. It is reasonable to infer that far less seldom than now did a prophet arise among them and lead the way towards better conditions, if not a better land. Such unwelcome disturbances belong, as of old, to the semi-civilized of a barren country, where day-dreaming is the most strenuous occupation, or among ourselves, so over-burdened with civilization, the working of the ma- chinery is irregular and the inevitable happens. The prophet has degenerated to a freak, yet it has no less a following. The North American Continent has always called for sane methods of living. Effort has been the price of suc- cess. The Indian found it so at the outset, and was finding it so when in 1492 a change came o'er the spirit of his dream. Canassatego was doubtless right when he claimed the Indians were better off before the arrival of the Euro- 19 peans than ever afterwards. They had fitted themselves into a niche and were living as they wished, and under such circumstances all change was necessarily, must necessarily have been, slow. A century has less an effect upon them than does a decade upon our unfortunate selves. The most interesting phase of this question, the peopling of America, is that which associates man with the masto- don and elephant. This subject comes well within the scope of the archaeology of New Jersey, because these huge proboscideans were once abundant here, as gravel beds, swamps and peat-bogs attest. Cleverly as the geological history of the North Ameri- can Continent has been worked out, and accurate as is our knowledge of its secondary and tertiary faunas, it is still evi- dent that our knowledge, while accurate as far as it extends, is not complete. Curiously enough, the nearer we get to our own time, the less assured are we of our facts. No mystery surrounds the oyster in the cretaceous marls, but nothing but mystery envelops the scattered bones in even recent gravels. When an extensive earth-work is well nigh obliterated by a flood, what remains enables us tO' trace the outlines of the original structure. We can dO' as much by means of the vexatiously scanty traces of certain forms of life of a geologi- cal epoch. One tooth of an elephzmt is as substantial evidence of the beast's one time existence as the skeletons of a thou- sand of these ponderous creatures, and with such a starting point, the life of the individual and the habits of a herd thereof, can so far be depicted to the mind's eye that the student has every reason to be satisfied. To go to Africa and deliberately murder one would not teach him more. But it should be remembered that he has started from the time of the established career of the animal in this country, 20 and is not walking on as firm ground when he ventures backward and hopes to determine when that career com- menced. If every mammal whose remains have been found in North America could be shown to have been evolved on American soil, the difficulties would all vanish. The Ameri- can man could, if he would, look kindly upon the American monkey, which still holds its own in our tropical jungles. Palseontological research, however, certainly warrants noth- ing of the kind. We must look elsewhere for American man's origin, and elsewhere, too, for the mastodon and ele- phant. Both beasts wandered up and down the Delaware valley. A tooth, a tusk, or some fragment of a bone tells the whole story. Where the traces of these beasts occur is oi great signifi- cance. They doi not belong to the surface as do- skeletons oi Indians and Colonial coins. We do not pick them up in ploughed fields, as we do the bones of bears, deer, beaver, and even the wapiti; but, when the present surface soil is removed, and when the underlying stratum of compact sand is penetrated, we find in the coarser gravels that were deposited here by glacial floods these proboscidean remains. They are a constituent part of the gravel. They have much the same surface as the associated pebbles. They have been subjected to the same conditions, yet many oi them are not as old. The ordeal that reduced fragments of rock to rounded pebbles would have reduced them to powder, or, at least, have destroyed all resemblance tO' their original outline. They date from a time when the associated pebbles, as such, were transported to their present position by the ancient floods. Huge carcasses floated in the relentless cur- rent of the streams were stranded at last, and finally the bones were scattered, and now, at this distant day, a frag- ment occasionally comes to light. We are never so- much impressed with this fact as when we recall how very scanty 21 are the traces of these animals. Great herds were once here, and their teeth and bones are not so readily decayed that time sufficient has elapsed to destroy them. The majority of such elephants and mastodons as were trapped by the floods were in all probability carried out to sea. The land that was once within our coastline, and now far beyond it, may be the resting place of these animals, just as now the Siberian marshes are a proboscidean cemetery. All this is conjectural, but the fact remains, unaffected by any theory, there were elephants and mastodons in pre-glacial, inter- glacial, and at least in the earliest of what we may call post- glacial days. We have nothing to positively demonstrate that the Indian or his quite remote ancestors had any knowledge of such a creature. Here, in the valley of the Delaware, with which I am alone concerned, the occurrence of a trace of these animals is, I think I may say, always in the gravel, and just as the rude chipped implement that we call palaeolithic sometimes occurs there. Nowhere have been found any traces of the later Indian in the gravel as a constituent part thereof, nor any trace of the mastodon or elephant with remains of the native race that last occupied the region. The two' are wholly separate and apart. Confusion has arisen by speak- ing of the association of man and the mastodon, and the inference being drawn that to the historic Indian reference was made. If these people, such as we know they were when Columbus discovered America, had been familiar with the animal in question, the remains of the latter should be still as much in evidence as are those of the men whoi sup^- posedly hunted them. This is true of the elk, bear and deer and smaller mammals, the Indians' mainstay for food, so why not the more resisting bones of the larger creatures? We know that the mastodon and mammoth preceded man; we do not know that they survived until the "Indian" was 22 this country's established type of man. The over-wrought and unquestionably fraudulent "Lenape" stone would seem to tell another story, but this encyclopedic slab of slate, etched by a left-handed scamp, refutes its own claim. There might be no other etched gorget like it, but this is improbable, and more so', if these animals could be depicted so vividly in that manner, in other ways it would have been at least hinted at, when we find that stone carving and pebble shaping were so commonly practiced. The Lenape stone really does not deserve reference made to it, nor would it receive attention had not misguided and jejune enthusiasm been so persistent in keeping in evidence a palpable fraud that should have been purchased and destroyed, instead of preserved and published. As stated, the association of man and elephantine remains is another problem; that is, it is another problem' if cer- tain rudely chipped stones found also in the gravel are not of Indian, but of human origin. This still mooted point draws nearer tO' a definite settlement as investigation pro- ceeds. The constantly accumulating evidence, as I view the matter, tends toi separate, and not associate the two. I have already (Archaeologia Nova Csesarea, No. I, p. 4,) called attention to Mr. Holmes' statement to effect that chipped stones were abundant at the foot of the bluff facing the river — ^he wrote this in 1893 — and claimed they were practically where the Indians left them, having tossed them aside as refractory, and gives them the name "rejects." The question arises, would Mr. Holmes have made quite the same report had he visited the spot a century earlier, when the shore line was at least fifty feet river-ward or westward of the present bluff. As the outline sketch shows, where now is nothing but the open air, there were storehouses and wharves back of them. Necessarily, no wild Indian i. e. 23 NW. N Dotted line, bluff in 1800. Continuous line, bluff in 1908. Dotted squares, store houses prior to 1850. Pig- I. 24 pre-colonial, ever saw the present bluff or Jersey shore of the river as it now is. What then of Mr. Holmes' abundant "rejects" on the present bluff or at the foot of it? These must either have fallen from the top, or from the crumbling face of the bluff, or been carried down stream by freshets. All the evidence favors their coming from the gravel that constitutes the bank of the streami at this point. These specimens may have been discarded by ancient man, but the only "reject" in the whole question is Mr. Holmes' visionary account of the conditions here and their archaeological significance. It was not SO' long ago, that while looking for palaeolithic implements or other traces of ancient man, a friend picked from the compact gravel of the face of the bluff, that there constituted the river's bank, and at a significant depth, a tooth of a mastodon,^ and back from the bluff, from the bottom of a grave then being dug, an argillite implement was thrown tO' the surface. The horizon was essentially the same. The gravel was the one deposit. Shall we say that the chipped argillite was an intrusive object and the tooth in place, and so stifle all inquiry, or shall we look the simple fact in the face, accept its purport, and admit the con- temporaneity of the man and the mastodon. I propose toi do so. It is a logical conclusion. It violates noi canon^ of geological law. It may run counter tO' pre-conceived opinion. Facts are apt tO' doi soi in proportion to' their importance, but this unhappy condition should not act as a deterrent. ^It may be claimed that proboscidean teeth were already fossils when they became a constituent part of the mass we call a gravel deposit, that they are ivory pebbles, as we have others of quartz, sandstone, slate and hornblende — gneiss. This is not true, however, as the speci- mens have not undergone any degree of petrifaction, but only suffered a greater or less degree of disintegration. On the other hand, they can be looked upon in no sense as intrusive objects. The condition of the containing bed forbids this supposition. 25 The mastodon and elephant are not indigenous. They wandered into America from another continent, and the land communication between the one land and the other must have been a substantial area of firm earth and vigor- ous vegetation. Just when did all this happen? The re- searches of Prof. Osborne seem' to indicate that Africa was the original home of the elephant, and that it found its way to America — and necessarily to North America first — thus showing it to be "the greatest pre-historic traveler among all the animals of the earth." Prof. Osborne's own view of the association of man and elephant is, or was in 1906, as follows: "It is difficult to give anything like an adequate estimate of the period during which man has been on the American continent. Personally, I am inclined to the view that man has been in America much longer than is generally esti- mated, and that we may at any moment discover proofs. ********* "Unfortunately, our pleistocene deposits in this country are not so definitely laid down nor so> easy tO' determine from fossils as those of Europe. Just before the ice age we have the well-defined sands of the so-called equus, or horse beds, in which the remains O'f camels, hoirses and elephants occur. This is roughly estimated at from two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand years back, and some maintain that traces of man have been found even in this remote period, but the evidence is conflicting and by no means generally accepted. 3|e3tc******:1c "The beginning of the pleistocene period was the close of what may be termed the African stage in the history O'f North American fauna — that is, elephants undoubtedly African in origin, were present in abundance; also horses, 26 either of African or of Asiatic origin; camels and llamas mingled with a few distinctively North American forms, such as the large kinds of peccaries, but with practically very little of the North European fauna. "It would seem not impossible nor improbable that man, well known in Europe as a hunter oi the mamimoth, may have found his way toi North America in pursuit of these animals. At least, there was nothing to prevent the advent of man at a very early period. There were nO' physical barriers, such as extremely cold temperature, nor were there the present wide Behring Straits to be traversed. It must be remembered, however, that the existence O'f man in Europe has not been proved at this early pleistocene period, and Europe was still more intensely African in the character of its fauna, owing to its greater proximity to Africa. For example, the peculiarly African hippo- potami were present in the rivers of Europe." Did man, at a later date, cross these "former land bridges," yet at a date so early that the American pro- boscideans still roamed the country? To> derive American man from' an African source may be rather startling, but when we recall the fact of there being an element in com- mon between Eskimo and Bushman art that goes far to indicate a common origin,^ we realize how wide is the prospect over which the imagination is required scientifically to roam, if all the facts bearing upon early man in Amer- ica are desired, and without all of them, but little can be done. A sturdy structure requires stout material. The temple of American archaeology has not yet been built, but its outlines are fairly well defined, and the solid base upon which it rises is the rude implement of the rude man which had wandered over all the northern hemisphere 'Comparative Art. E. S. Balch, Philad. 1906, p. 84. 27 when a different climate and a different fauna were its most prominent features. Let us follow this a little farther. There is evidence sufficient for all reasonable demands that the circum-polar people have been longer on the North American continent than has the historic Indian, unless it can be shown that the latter are a modification of the fo'rmer, having undergone such changes as a milder climate would produce. That the arctic man or Kskimo dates back to pre-glacial time is a logical inference. There is also evidence, as I have per- sistently claimed, although it is vigorously disputed, that the man of the Delaware valley who depended wholly upon argillite for implement-making was more akin in mode of life, at least, if not genetically, toi the Eskimo^ oi the pres- ent than to his successor, the pottery-making, flint-chipping Indian. May not, then, the traces of man, so separable from the surface-found Indian relics, be as old as the older strata of sand and gravel and contemporaneous with the elephant and mastodon? This line of reasoning may not satisfy the cautious reader ; mine may be, he holds, specious arguments that will be shown in their true light sooner or later, but it is with unbounded co-nfidence that I claim these .suggestions to be better fitted to our few unquestioned facts than to refer everything we find, deep' in the ground or on the surface, to the Indian. To do this, leaves us still in the dark. It has not yet been demonstrated what the term "Indian" really implies. It is inconceivable that the Eskimo went from what we consider a much more desirable country and deliberately chose the polar regions, with its walrus, musk ox and polar bear, for the bison, elk, black bear and deer, which were ever more abundant and more easily obtained. On the other hand, if these people were at one time far south of their present range, and driven northward, then this happened a very long 28 time ago-. They must necessarily have preceded the en- croaching and attacking people, and whence came the latter? A roving band would never have successfully contended with a settled people. It was a question of numbers against numbers, and the conditions of population must have come gradually about. This calls for centuries. It is a matter of "time relative" and not "time absolute." It means a condition very slowly effected over a continent. The dis- position to minimize the age of every trace discovered is not due to scientific acumen but limitation of archaeological insight. When Mr. Holmes of the Bureau of Ethmology asserts : "I find noi satisfactory proof of the existence of man in America beyond a few thousand years. He may have occupied some parts of the continent at the close of the glacial period, which, in our Northern States, was probably some ten or fifteen thousand years agO', but the proofs are not yet conclusive." He should have added, no^ proofs that will ever satisfy him, because of pre-conceived notions of modernity. He is consistent only in his attitude towards reasonable demonstration and logical inference. When he adds : "The manifest age of the kitchen middens along our coasts, and the magnitude of certain ruined cities in Mexico, Central America and Peru suggest a considerable antiq- uity — a thousand years or more — the highest estimate sup- ported by scientific observations being three thousand years," he simply offeres a gratuitous assumption without a scintilla of warrant, at least so far as our coast-wise shell heaps are concerned. Since their foundations were laid, their has been up^lifting and sinking of the clay upon which they rest and to limit this to one thousand years is as idle as the prattle of a child at play. It is such "official" announcements to an ignorant public that so seriously obstructs the progress of scientific research and of truth. As if toi mitigate the mischief of previous assertions, it is grudgingly admitted "one of the most satisfactory proofs of 29 considerable ag^e is the highly specialized character of the race as such and of its languages and arts." Here we have the whole matter in a nutshell, but it is not an original assertion. The question of soi many years or so^ many cen- turies is as foreign to the subject as is Sheol from Paradise. What the archaeologist wishes to know, has there or has there not been an unfolding of the faculties on this contin- tinent? Was ancient man as wise when he reached it ass when he left it, or did he sojourn here long enough to ba;ome familiar with all its forests and prairies, its oceans on either side and the great gulf in the south? Had he learned the habits of the beasts of the forest and the birds of the air ; had he coined a name for each of them ? Had ideas become directive and ceased tO' be confusing as to Nature and her workings? And beyond all were the men who signed the treaty under the outreaching arms oi the elm at Shackamaxon descendants of America's first human occu- pants or of a later people, which supplanted them ? My own convictions, based upon my own researches, here, in this modest valley of an unpretentious river, is that all this did occur, and that it indicates, not what Mr. Holmes most un- willingly admits as "proofs of considerable age,'' but estabi- lishes the occurrence of epochs in the occupancy of North America by man. Nature may send a tidal wave over some level expanse and sweep away all that she bad done for years to beautify and, as man might think, establish it ; she may rouse the sleeping energies at the base of a volcano^ and devastate all the region about it. Islands of the sea may appear and dis- appear while man stands a witness of her mighty efforts, but nevertheless. Nature is never, the world over, in haste and her grand totals are the summing up of activities of such modest character that like the hour hand of a clock, we cannot see them move. Man, who is nothing save a product 30 of Nature, an animal among animals, moves en masse, and is moved by the same laws that govern, other animals and hold good throughout the world. The individual counts for little. The race as a whole, changes slowly. To attempt to estimate the lapse of time in tracing the career of m'an on the earth or in any of its continents, is puerile. As well attempt to determine when the first green blade of grass relieved the monotony of the dull brown earth ; when first the blithesome carol of the lark greeted the coming of the welcome dawn. Conceding this, the probability — and this is all, as yet, that has been acquired by any investigator — is that the last elephant and mastadon had not disappeared before the pioneers of the human race in America came upon the scene. We cannot conceive of any discovery that will demonstrate that the two, man and mastadon, never met in America. We need not be surprised, at any day, to- have all doubt forever set aside. THE DEI.AWARE VALLEY. In Dana's Manual of Geology,^ the author thereof, speak- ing of the coast line of our eastern seaboard during the cre- taceous period, refers to the Delaware river as then in exist- ence, and states that it "emptied into the Atlantic at Tren- ton." That portion of the river's valley from Trenton, north- ward, presents no features that are not readily understood by the geologist as he passes, mile by mile, up-stream, and finds the hills that once were rugged in outline and bare, and now are shorn of all unshapeliness and covered with dense vegetation. Perhaps shorn, too, of their height, for ^Second Edition, 187s, p. 478. 31 the term "mountain" is no longer applicable. Tracing their history the geologist finds no startling revelation of stu- penduous activities or devastating cataclysms. It is true the "ringing rocks" are suggestive of a one-time volcano's crater, but the region as a whole is not one that puzzles by apparent contradictions. These hills are old, even geo- logically speaking, yet they tell a straightforward story, and the river repeats it as it ripples at their base. Far otherwise, from Trenton southward. There we find no fixed features. From those far ofif days when the At- lantic beat its waves hopelessly on the rocks that shut out the sea, until to-day, when the tide reaches these same rocks, but cannot ascend them, there has been a long series of changes of more or less marked degree, but no cessation of them. Nothing is fixed as in the sense of solid rock. Here to-day and gone to-morrow has been the fate of every fea- ture that while it lasted bore the outward resemblance of a permanent condition. But the to-day and to-morrow of which I speak were no such periods as these words now imply. Geological reckoning of time is free of the swad- dling clothes of numbers. It is sequence of event without regard of time duration. Rocky strata are not paged like the leaves of a book and the same is equally true of the strata O'f sand and gravel, and the vast deposits of clay and the thin veins of it that streak both the sand and the gravel. Here, at Trenton, at the head of tide-water, we can find a deposit that tallies admirably with any cherished theory, but no theory has yet been framed that rationally includes all the deposits. It would seem as if geologists waited for gravel to become solidified, and then they crystallized their erudi- tion in the word "conglomerate" and looked wise. At this no one need wonder. To' trace the history of a gravel bed is much like the proverbial search in a haystack for a needle. The associated pebbles and sand conspire to confuse us. 32 They are not always the same. The face of a bluff made up of such material as pebbles, boulders and sand, with clay enough to slightly cement the whole mass, does not retain any uniformity as to its composition, as day by day the old face crumbles and a new one appears. A year's exploration may lead to the conclusion that no large "erratics" are found in the deposit, and then a dozen or more may be brought to light of a size that at once determine the gravel was not a quiet river-bed deposit. Ten years may elapse and not a trace of bone is found, and we begin to belieA'e that no mam- malian life occurred in the region from which the deposit was derived, and then patient search at last reveals a tooth or fragment of a bone.^ A revision of the conclusions as to the gravel's history becomes necessary. This was notably so of the Trenton gravel, that was originally set down as a deposit of water-worn pebbles that have lost all angularity, and SO' were readily dissociated from those which go to make up the terminal moraine, miles to the northward, and from which unquestionably the Trenton gravel was derived. But, at last, ice-scratched pebbles began to be found, and many a considerable portion of the deposit itself suggests that, as a frozen mass, it moved southward without disin- tegration and settled quietly in this less tumultuous neigh- borhood. It is very significant that where the gravel least suggests the probability of animal or human remains they appear never to have occurred, but where this supposedly same gravel has all the appearance of a later origin and re- sembles more closely the present river bed, there we look for traces of former life, and are not always disappointed. To recognize such differences as have been here mentioned in a formation geologically the same, and logically compre- hended under one descriptive term, it is necessary that we ^Mr. Volk's finds include one bone of a musk ox and a fragment of antler. 33 see it under endless different conditions, and continually, year after year. The visiting geologist, seeing a cellar hole or passing an hour along the river's bank, or looking idly along a railroad cutting, acquires only that general impres- sion v^rhich goes far to fill pages of a geological report and gives us no' information. It is safe to say, if there is any element of safety in such trains of thought, that the Trenton gravel is derived from the terminal moraine which extends across the State some miles northward of them, and through which the river found its way, and still finds it, in the valley that now confines the stream, but it is not safe to conclude that no gravel was already spread above the clay that underlies these deposits as a whole. There were pebbles, as we know, seons before glacial activity, and it does not require the swift current of melting ice and snow to produce them. An exhaustive examination, in 1907, of the material dredged from the bed of the river at Periwig bar,^ within the tide-water area but near its termination, revealed the fact that many hard substances of known origin, as brick, glass and earthen ware, had been rolled and rounded in the sand until very pebble-like in shape and given a surface that made their true character problematical until closely examined. It was somewhat disconcerting to find that objects that were fashioned well within the century were so altered by water-wearing. How, then, could we expect a chipped argillite implement to escape obliteration of all evidence of its artificialty? If these objects, which, if of Indian origin, could not be less than two hundred and ^Periwig bar was originally an island of some extent and covered •with a dense growth of trees and shrubbery. The one-time site of an Indian village. The channel of the river was between it and the Pennsylvania shore. The material removed by the dredgers was largely the base of the island which was washed away to the water's edge in the great ice-jam and freshet of February, l8S7- 3 34 twenty-five years old, had rolled down the river from the argillite quarries and been subsequently subjected to. water and sand erosion, would they not have lost all trace of their chipping ; would not the outline of every spall detached be wlorn away? This, it is submitted, argues more against the modern or Mercerian-Holmesian view than against that which I uphold. As well defined artifacts do occur in the gravel and such gravel was all transported by water, it is apparent that when they were dropped tO' near or in quite the position where they now: occur they w'ere protected by prompt inhumation, as where there was yielding sand and a generally loose texture of the mass, and inasmuch as angular pebbles with sharp edges and others still bearing ice^scratches occur sparingly in the deposit, there is nO' reason why an artifact should not retain its artifactuality. They were never subjected tO' like conditions as the pebbles that were dredged from the present river bed, or never to the same extent. The men who chipped them,, it must ever be kept in mind, were not amphibious animals. They need not have been as much at home on the water as the Eskimo. There was ever a wide range of land near by, over which no ice-sheet found its way, and no floods covered the forest-clad sands of the river's eastern shore. The terminal moraine was fifty miles away. That this sup- posed ancient man of glacial time frequented the water and hunted the seal, walrus and musk ox, is scarcely question- able, and the objects that he lost, his "palaeolithic" artifact may have long lain on the gravel before floods brought, down additional material and covering it, it rested at last in the gravel. The great heterogeneous mass or deposit known now as the Trenton gravel was not poured down the valley like tea from the spout of a pot, or came tumbling down from the hill-sides spasmodically, spreading over the low 35 lands and filling' the depressions as lava from a volcano, in a brief space, changes the landscape. Just as now we have floods at intervals that are irresistable and over- spread great areas of the lowlands, so in glacial times there were evidently even mightier ones that brought down mud. gravel and sand as they now bring down wood, and brought also boulders weighing tons, as to-day they bring down great trees from the sad remnants of the mountain forests. What at that time happened here at Trenton? The flow was checked. The tide held back tot .some extent the on- ward rush of water. It became almost quiet as it spread over the shallows and the material carried along by the water settled to the bottom of the stream proper and wherever it found its way. Even some fragile articles, as mussel shells, escaped destruction. Here, at such a time, at such a place, an artifact might readily become embedded. Never an artisan who has not lost a tool, so never a hunter that has not lost a weapon. That under such conditions as then obtained, the same form of artifact should occur upon the surfaces of the ground older than the gravel deposits is nothing strange. The claim so frequently made that to be truly palaeolithic they should be confined to the gravel and at a significant dtepth therein is simply an absurdity. As well ascribe modernity to all pebbles, because single they crop out every- where. The occurrence on the surface of formations older than the gravel — in this case, the Columbia sands and ^gravel — of rudely fashioned argillite artifacts does not modernize or "Indianize" them, because their true character is indicated by the few which are in the gravel. That such inhumation is accidental is set aside by the irresistible fact that nothing else attributable to man is likewise buried in such manner. Whatever is found is of the one character, and if objects thus fashioned are artificial, and no com- 36 petent judge longer disputes it, and point tOi a one-time and very ancient phase of culture in other continents, why not point in the same direction on our own? After long years of search, as opportunity afforded, and where there was every sort of obstacle to overcome, I have failed to find in the material brought from the present river bed any Indian relic that has suffered erosion tO' such extent as toi render its original outline indistinct. I have axes, celts and arrowheads from the beds of streams, but they show but little difference from those found upland. They are smoother and have a polish that only water could give them. Occasionally, however, it happens that a polished pebble is found, the outline of which is very suggestive. Such as I have seen are all of a size and shape tO' bring the palaeolithic artifact to mind. The outlines of the various surfaces where flakes had been detached could be traced by the sense O'f touch and sometimes plainly seen. They are water-worn pebbles now, but if these same outlines were distinct and sharp and the surface of the object rough in- stead of polished, then there would be no' doubt as to their artificial origin. The one important question is, are they palaeolithic artifacts that have been so> long rolled about in sharp sand and water as to lose all their characteristic features since they dropped from the hand of man ? If we could but see this material that now constitutes the bed of the river as it was centuries agO', probably our decision would be prompt and explicit rather than as now when the bravest dare but timidly hint at a bare possibility. If glass, brick and vitreous china can be converted into smooth water-worn pebbles in less than one hundred years, why should not in as short a time, under like conditions, the distinctive features of a chipped implement be oblit- erated? I do not presume to offer any explanation beyond what I have already suggested, that some objects are ex- 37 posed to the eroding action of sand and water while others are so lodged between protecting stones that they escape. The material, too, has something to do with it. Glass, brick and china are not as hard as quartz, jasper and some of the argillite, and as these modern objects have fallen into a now comparatively quiet river and lie exposed to shifting sands for an indefinite period, while years ago the palaeo- lithic artifacts were all too likely to be wedged in among large pebbles that effectually protected them: The bed of the Delaware river, from twelve to fifteen hundred feet wide, at the head of tide water, is a contra- diction in one way. An acre or more of pebbles, another of sand and scattered areas of tenacious mud and then wide reaches of coarse or fine gravel. Just why not a fairly uni- form mixture of all these materials is not readily explained. The numerous attempts to make the problem very clear only succeed in muddying the situation. Any one given condition of the river bottom is always well marked tO' its bo'undaries and there it abruptly ceases. There is no marked overlapping. All the while the water is steadily flowing up or down stream, but the bed of the stream is undisturbed. An occasional freshet, by reason of the greater volume of water and greatly increased rapidity of flow, equal to overcoming the opposing tide, may radically change the surface of the bed, but when the waters recede toi normal conditions the varied condition of the bed is again found. The arrangement may be different, but it has been simply the shifting of the conditions; where pebbly, now sandy; where muddy, now an area of pebbles. It can, I think, readily be seen that the effect upon an artifact of lying for a very protracted period in the bed of the river, would depend a great deal, if not wholly, upon the character oi the immediate surroundings. If buried in 38 mud, it would remain intact; if tossed tO' and fro, rolling hither and yon over sand, and sand forever passing over it, every angle would ultimately be worn away. Thus, it would be possible for two argillite artifacts, dropped in the river at one time, toi become wholly different in appearance in the course of time; one escaping erosion and the other losing every trace of its original faceted surface. Perhaps it is the wiser plan to' rule all such out of court, but happily the preserved artifact occurs under such circumstances as to keep^ alive a doubt as to the justice of such ruling. Ancient man in North America may never be "ofhcially" recognized, but he will never be relegated' tO' the limbo of the visionary or mythical. In 1892 I discovered the site of a fur trader's post, built in 1640-50, on the lower or southwestern end of Burling- ton Island. It appears to have been destroyed by fire about a century later. The glass, earthenware, lead, brass, cop- per and iron and the innumerable odds and ends once in use by the occupants of the place, were found, not only in the cellar hole, but in the sands that for years had here been shifting to and fro with the tides, and occasionally more violently agitated by storms. They had not suffered alike. Many were worn and polished until recognized with diffi- culty, while others retained their freshness of surface and gave no hint of having been for more than a century ex- posed to the tender mercies of shifting sands and troubled waters. This was particularly noticeable among the glass and polychrome paste beads, large numbers of which were found. Shifting our view, thai, from the river of to-day to the far greater river of glacial times, it is not difficult to under- stand that many a smooth pebble, with its lines suggestive of a chipped surface, might have been, in truth, an artifact, and that others, as found in the gravel to-day, should retain 39 all the outlines of that chipping which converted a pebble into an artifact. If this present bed oif the river, for a mile or more from the head of tide-water, up and down stream, were lifted and shifted to dry land, and then cross sections made of it, as we make them of the great upland deposit to-day, we would find as many and as great differences every few rods in the one case as we do in the other. It is all "gravel" in either case, of the same age and origin, and no distinction should be made, but we are constantly told that in the present great deposit of Trenton gravel that in one locality we have the original laying down of the material, and in another we have it reassorted by a very local cataclysmic disturbance, and so one horizon of sand and gravel is much, or signifi- cantly newer than another, and so toi the end O'f a tedious chapter. The single conclusion that the archaeologist can reach is that this Trenton gravel, as a whole, with whatever it con- tains of traces of man, belongs to a time when the general outlook from the high lands about the valley was materially different from that of to-day, and the lapse of time from that day to this has been sufficient to give the artifacts and bones of Arctic mammals and of man an archaeological as distinguished from an historical or pre-historical signifi- cance, and it violates rational procedure to relegate all of human origin that we find in the gravel tO' a later date than . the gravel's accumulation and escape the necessity of ade- quate explanation by calling every stone implement that happens to be vexatiously out of place an "intrusive" ob- ject, and staring as fixedly into space as the Sphynx looks over the Egyptian plain, when the character of that in- trusion is demanded. When viewing an exposure of a vast deposit of gravel and wondering what were the conditions that brought these 40 pebbles, sand, clay and boulders here, the picture we fancy- is not a photograph of an actuality. Conception is crude, at best, when we attempt to re-buiild the past. M'arvel, as well we may, at what has been done, we must admit the lacking of a vast array of details. We have a few brief sketches of ancient shores and seas, of one-time forests and faunas, but it is all as is a cemetery tO' a city. Siand does not suggest a flood nor small pebbles a dis- astrous freshet. The quiet methods of the present languid river only seem equal to^ sO' insignificant a task, but when a huge boulder is exposed to view, we are no longer mentally inert. We have been contemplating Nature at play ; now we see evidence of a real exertion. Not all the ponderous tomes ever printed about the Great Ice Age can make us see a rock, weighing thousands of pounds, floating down the river. As a theory in the class room, "erratics" are within our grasp, but when we find them in the field, they appear SO' different. They stare at you as fixedly as you hopelessly look at them. That there is a great gulf, between the present and the past, we now fully recognize. The disappearance of a period and appearance of another proves something more than the passing of to-day and the coming of to-mor- row. The outlook before the gravel was laid down ; what the landscape before it was covered with this pebbly mass ; what the fauna and flora; where then the river's channel, we can conjecture, but how unsatisfactory it all is, if our interest is really aroused. A great argillite boulder, measuring ten feet in length, seven in width and five in thickness, was recently exposed in an extensive series of excavations, near Bristol, Pennsyl- vania, where the Trenton gravel reaches tO' the present sur- face, and often has no distinctly traceable soil above it. It fills now a one-time river bed, the limits oi which, in pre- glacial time, were defined by vast deposits of clay. The 41 coarse gravel and sand were not only over and about the boulder but extended many feet below it. It rested on the gravel as well as in it. It could only have reached its present resting place through the agency of a vast ice field floating toward the sea. No other explanation has ever been offered. That such an occurrence ever happened here may be hard to realize, yet here is an irrefragable proof. As a geological phenomenon, it is but one of many and one of minor im- portance save for this, which enhances its importance a thousand fold, the association of this boulder with the Pig. 2. Boulder in Trenton gravel, near which implement was found. history of early man. At such suggestion, this huge rock, which excited wonder, now startles us. There is something illogical in this attempting to trace back the career of our own kind. We seem never in the same frame of mind as when studying some fossil shell or bone of an extinct mammal. These are here, of course. Why not? But remains of man; O'! that is different. It may be argued until doom's day that it is inherently improbable that man should have been associated with a pliocene fauna, but could 42 it have been any more difficult than to Hve, as a low species O'f Homo does to-day, with the fauna of an African jungle or with the marsupials of Australia, survivors of a still more ancient time? Seldom so favorable an opportunity for searching in the gravel occurs as this has been at Bristol, and the result of frequent visits is one chipped sandstone pebble. Not a splinter of bone or fragment of shell, in thousands oi cubic yards of the deposit that I closely inspected. But, is it really not enough ? One coin always means the minting of many, but many do not tell the history of the coinage better J %Ji 4 Pig. 3. Palaeolithic implement found in situ at Bristol, Pennsylvania. than one. Show me a single shaving that I know has been peeled from wood by a modern plane, and I will prove to you there was a carpenter, and yet, if this broken stone, broken as Nature never did or could break a pebble, is held up as evidence that a man was here to break it, when or before this boulder came floating across the country and that where the land now is dry was once a bay-like ex- pansion of the ancient stream — if this single stone is held up and we say, here is proof that an implement maker was then in the land, with what derision is the assertion met ! 43 Is science still in its swaddlingf clothes ? Were the geological history of the Delaware valley the opening chapter oi a long series of revelations as to man's career on earth then it might wrell be held as visionary in the extreme that man, almost primitive in condition, once sojourned here and led a by no means ideal existence, but when we consider that such men, under such conditions, are known to have flourished in many another portion of the globe, the difficulties as tO' his one-time long ago pres- ence here largely disappear. The Delaware valley is not a prominent part of the record of man on earth, but an humble supplement to an elaborate volume or trifling foot note to a pregnant page. THE ESKIMO AND ARGILI^ITE MAN. It is useless to deny that to a large extent that which comes within the scope of North American archseology is purely speculative. Conclusions are sometimes formed in accordance with the doctrine of probabilities. Our seem- ingly very natural inference is often rudely jostled by evi- dence. What we know as history does not always rest upon a rock foundation, and pre-history has at best but a doubtful footing on the shifting sands. As to the relationship of the Eskimo to the Indian, conclusions as to the past are based upon the solitary fact that at present the two people are liv- ing in regions that are contiguous. This, of itself, concerns only the ethnologist. The archaeologist wishes to know if the present geographical status of these people ever ma- terially differed from what now obtains. The following from Brinton,^ bearing on the subject, is given entire. Nothing later is more definite : "The name 'Myths of the New World, by D. G. Brinton, 2nd Ed. 1876, p. 24. Foot note. 44 Eskimo is from the Algonkin word BskimanHck, eaters of raw fish. There is reason to believe that at one time they possessed the Atlantic coast considerably to the south. The Northmen, in the year looo, found the natives of Vinland, probably near Rhode Island, of the same race as they were familiar with in Labrador. They contemptuously call them S'kralingar, chips, and describe them as numerous and short of stature. (Eric Rothens Saga, in Mueller, Sagsenbib- liothek, p. 214). It is curious that the traditions of the Tuscaroras, who placed their arrival on the Virginian coast about 1300, spoke of the race they found there (called Tacci or Dogi) as eaters of raw flesh and ignorant of maize. (Loderer, Account of North America, in Harris, Voyages). If these now circumpolar people once were inhabitants of what is now New Jersey, practicing the same mode of life and possessing the same artistic taste and capabilities, then it is incredible that no traces of this handiwork should occur. So far as my own observation goes and experience covers the result of collecting, whatever of bone, slate or steatite that has been discovered, occurred under such circumstances as to warrant its being attributed to the Indians of com- paratively recent date. While negative evidence is to be treated with caution and the Indian, with whom we are sup- posed to be acquainted, is still very much of a stranger, it is obviously rash to- speak positively. That is the practice, if not privilege, oi the theorist. But the negative evidence to date is so impressive by reason of its prominence that we are led to give it respectful consideration and accept it, tentatively, as demonstrating that the man of the Argillite period, as I have defined it, was nearer an art-less Eskimo than the artistic Algonquin. The conditions, if specialized argillite implements really date back to so remote a time as the dying efforts of glacial activity — when land now dry for undeterminable centuries was subject to overflow by 45 'jiirn'tr sense esthetic ; a man in whom art had not yet blossomed as it has with the Eskimo and had with the Eskimo's ancestor, Pleistokene man. This pre-Indian of the Delaware valley was a savage, indeed, but probably a powerful one, yet leading the lazy life of a well-fed beast. That his personal possessions were utilitarian and to but slight degree, if at all, decorative or symbolic, is inferred from the fact that no objects of the latter character have been found that could reasonably be referred to the Indian's predecessor rather than to the In- dian. The art instinct may, however, have shown itself in 72 etching rather than sculpture, for large blade-like flakes of argillite of no very definite design, but clearly artifically shaped, have been collected that were unmistakably incised in a suggestive way, but too vaguely to determine the de- sign. These incised lines, broken and often weather-worn Fig. II. Sandstone Hoe, perforated, of Delaware Indians. A rare form. until scarcely traceable, have all the appearance of an at- tempt at ornamentation of the stone or to depict some special object. But all is as yet too indefinite to warrant any con- clusion being drawn. It is not likely this argillite man was devoid of all art, but then we are dealing with the almost 73 primitive humanity of thousands of years a.go, and have scarcely a foothold in any direction save that of the single fact of his one-time existence. Furthermore, as has been pointed out by many authors, time and time again, all the stone implements that are now found are not necessarily referrible to the historic Indian. As well assert that all Fig. 12. Argillite Hoe of Delaware Indian. Simplest form of this implement. Colonial furniture and utensils still in New Jersey are of English origin, and none Dutch or Swedish, when we do know that these people antedate by more than half a cen- tury the Engli^ in the Delaware valley. It is, I claim, something more than reasonable conjecture, more than specious argumentation, that the argillite objects, 74 considered under all the conditions of their occurrence, are older as a class than those of jasper and quartz, which we know were fashioned by the Indians. It is not necessary, as has been done, to declare them, if older, to be simply the earlier workmanship of the Indian after his reaching the region. On the contrary, I claim this difference in age means a difference in origin, and that enough has been de- termined of the river valley as a whole, and of the eastward extension of the land to the sea, to assert with confidence that the argillite man was not a potter, or, if the invading Lenape shared the country with the conquered Allegewi, then he might have made crude attempts at shaping and baking clay during the period between the date of the sub- jection until their disappearance as a separate people. Herein we have a sequence of event. We refer to a time prior to the lyenni Lenape in the Delaware valley, and sub- sequently tO' a time when Arctic conditions prevailed and man, indistinguishable from Homo palseolithicus, of Europe, was here ; to a time when the man of the argillite period was in undisturbed possession of the land, and then tO' the passing, at last, of America's native races from the Atlantic seaboard and the fateful coming of the European. But how futile to estimate all this in years ! The Lenni Lenape halted many a year before resuming their eastward journey, but who shall say how long entrenched in their threshholds were the Allegewi? To deal in numbers, to speculate on the lapse of years, is to vitiate archaeological research. Of itself, whether one thousand years or five thousand, means nothing. It is an unfortunate tendency that should be checked. The same is true of what we know collectively of natural phenomena, especially the dawn and passing of geological epochs. We are not contented with what we do know and are equal to ascertaining, but waste our strength in endeav- 75 oring to acquire knowledge of the unknowable. That the last ice epoch was a well defined condition there can be no doubt, but it is hopeless to attempt to determine its duration, and so, too, I maintain, of the period of its decline and final disappearance. Dr. Winchell believes otherwise in re- gard to the latter. He states : "i. During the prevalence of the last ice-epoch the state of Minnesota was covered with ice, and all previous inhabit- ants, whether fauna or flora, were driven southward to more congenial climes. "2. This condition ended between seven and eight thou- sand years ago. It is not necessary here to rehearse the in- vestigations on which that result is based." Why between seven and eight instead of eight or nine or nine or ten ? Is it not guesswork at the best, and hazardous guessing at that? Whatever may be true of the interior of the country, it -took a great deal longer than seven or eight thousand years to accomplish all that has taken place in the valley of the Delaware since man first stood upon the banks of this ancient river. Much, it is true, can happen in a thousand years ; much did happen even among savage people in that length of time, but a thousand years in geology is about equal to a day in human affairs. Radical changes even among the most advanced people of to-day are not sudden. The spectacular outbreaks of freaks and fools do not sweep whole communities off their feet, and surely change was much more deliberate in the condition of primi- tive and nearly primitive man. The ice that drove the people of Minnesota, and of New Jersey as well, southward, was a long time in accumulating, and when, as a continental ice-sheet, it was a thing of the past, for how long were the glaciers that filled the immediate river valley ? I know noth- ing of the conditions in Minnesota, but there was such a glacier here, filling the Delaware gorge from the Blue 76 Mountains to lower hills, many miles below. What con- stitutes the ending of such a condition as the glacial epoch ? Have we not traces of it still, when every winter the river is filled with ice, and it has happened that so much gathers that spring is well advanced towards summer before the last of it has disappeared. Evidently all this change of a geologi- cal character was very gradual. We have not a vestige of evidence that warrants estimation of lapse of time in years. When it is admitted that certain events occurred between seven and eight thousand year ago, we use numbers rashly and convey no warranted impression. Time was, time is and time forever will be. This we have reason for believing. Time is not something instituted, and so it can be said there was a time when there was no time. It is but a convenient term for our own everyday affairs and to mark an epoch in our own career. Nature knows nothing of it. It is wholly out of place when dealing with geology. It cribs, cabins and confines the work both of geologist and archae- ologist. It belittles the grandeur of research. That which the student desires to know is the actual sequence of event. This informs. This makes plain the record of the past. Given this and the world and its inhabitants become intelli- gible. Bring in the arbitrary element of time, and the array of facts becomes little more than a heap of rubbish. CONCLUSION. Dr. Ales HrdHcka in a recent bulletin (No. 33) of the Bureau of Ethnology, clears the way for that institution to discover, determine and set at rest for all time the question of the antiquity of Man in North America. The doctor is particularly savage when he growls at the valley of the Delaware, but the river still continues its upruffled flow, and at least one dweller on its banks pursues the even tenor of his way. 77 If we accept the conclusions as set forth in this bulletin, notwithstanding all the efforts that have been made since the establishment of the American Antiquarian Society at Wor- cester, Mass., early in the last century; the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, D. C, and the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, more than forty years ago, no advance has been made in throwing light on man's origin and early career on this continent. Always an army of workers in the field, and an army of observers quick to preserve the chance discoveries that may have an archaeological signifi- cance; a whole library of supposed archaeological literature, and yet nothing accompHshed, and to-day we stand, accord- ing to Dr. Hrdlicka, as ignorant of early American man as did our forefathers of Jamestown, Plymouth Rock and the landing of William Penn. Not encouraging, surely, but really not discouraging. If the problem has been solved, there is that much less for the bureau to do. That it and other institutions have not done what they should in the all-important line of tracing man's origin on this continent is evident. The results, however abundant and convincing, would not satisfactorily fill a museum case and excite the wonderment of the gaping crowd. It is not a question of research, but search for prettiness. Pipes and pottery from the mounds, but the simpler handiwork of the mound- builders forebears is ignored. Much archaeological research appears to have been on the principle that the aboriginies of this country had no ancestors, and yet no Indian ever talked long without referring toi his "grandfather," using that term not literally but in a derivative or ancestral sense. It is well enough to be conservative, but conservatism can go too far and make that appear false which is really true. This is strictly so with reference to Dr. Hrdlicka's work as set forth in Bulletin 33 of the Bureau of Ethnology. Noth- ing that he adversely criticises may be as old as was at first 78 claimed, but, on the other hand, nothing is so recent as he would make it. The eagle may not be above the clouds but still far above the mountain's top. This means something in the matter of altitude. The "finds" of recent date may not carry us back to pre-glacial time. America's early man may never have witnessed a pliocene sunrise, but this does not bring all stone implements and fragmentary crania to so recent a date as to make them mere objects of ethnological interest. Dr. Hrdlicka takes the grO'Und firmly that wherever in North America sufficient portions of the human skeleton have been unearthed under conditions suggestive of an- tiquity tO' warrant comparison with like parts of a modern Indian, the result has been toi bear witness against what may properly be called "geological" antiquity. Without discussing the merits of the value of such comparisons, what of such osseus fragments as are not sufficient for comparison and 3'et are unmistakably human It certainly is more than probable that no' complete skeleton could escape destruction when exposed to the vicissitudes of even the closing activities of a glacial period. Tossed about by floods; buried in gravel and unburied only to be re-buried, even a single bone could scarcely escape the destruction of its characteristics, and yet even so fragile an object as a unio' shell — a single valve — ^has been found in coarse gravel so far from the surface that it surely was no intrusive object. Would Dr. Hrdlicka presume tO' declare it was specifically identical with the living mussels found in the nearest creek ? If a unio is found and in the same horizon a fragment of a human cranium, which was the case, then why not the latter as old as the former? Surely an argument or inference applicable to the one should be equally applicable tO' the other. The conclusion reached by the author quoted is that thus far on this continent no human bones of undisputed' 79 "geological" antiquity are known ; which simply means that he does not accept the fragments that have been found under what we may call geological conditions, or that the glacial activities of milleniums ago were too recent to be considered geological. It follows, therefore, that the proofs offered are not sufficiently weighty to convince him and there it rests, but until he or others explain away these fragments of bones and explain, too, far more logically than has been done, at least one cranium^ from the Trenton gravels, the antiquity of man in North America is still an open question. Dr. Hrdlicka accepts the antiquity of man in the world. He is not opposed to the view that this early man dates as far back as the tertiary period, which is going back two' or three hundred thousand years ago, so it is estimated. This is like going out into the fresh air after confinement in a stuffy room. We have space in which to think. Vision is clearer. Earth takes on a new aspect. All that we know leads to the conclusion that the New World was peopled from the old, but to what extent "great multiplication and wide dis- tribution of the human species and the development of cul- ture," was necessary before this could take place, we do not know. When the world was sparsely settled and man was free to wander, meeting nO' other foes than wild beasts, it was more a matter of physical endurance than all else, how far he ultimately found himself from the home of his fathers. If the North American continent was unoccupied, can we not imagine the Eskimo wandering far south of the St. Lawrence? "A wide dispersion of the race over the earth cooild hardly have taken place before the later stages of the Cenoizoic era (the glacial period)." Why not earlier? The geological conditions just anterior to the ice age appear to have been in every way desirable, so far as average man ^Archseologia Nova Caesarea, II., p. 12. 8o looks upon life's fundamental requirements, and as he now lives under the conditions of extreme cold and ex- treme heat, whatever the climatic conditions of pre-glacial time, if he is equal to them now, he was equal to them then. Notwithstanding such a bad showing as it appears to be to Dr. Hrdlicka, he does not look upon the case as hope- less. He considers there is still abimdant incentive to' con- tinued, careful and, of course, scientifically conducted ex- ploration ; all of which means that the explorations, to date, have not been careful or scientifically conducted. Not at all complimentary, nor is the intimation of slip-shod pro- cedure in the past deserved. So far as the Delaware valley is concerned, certainly Mr. Volk's labors have been ex- haustive, painstaking, intelligent and strictly conscientious. From what I know of it — he is my informant — I am dis- posed to believe that he was sometimes too careful, and in several instances rejected as evidence what I would un- hesitatingly have accepted, especially in the case of chipped stones, which I believe were artificially shaped, but of which he was doubtful and so discarded as of natural origin.^ Nor can I accept the conclusion of others, that no statement 'An amusing and yet irritating instance of mis-placed credit occurred at the meeting of the Internation Congress of "Americanistes," in New York, in October, 1902. Following an exhibition of crania and chipped stones from the Trenton gravel, which Prof. Putnam desired should "speak for themselves," Prof. W J McGee remarked : "There is a strong theory in favor of the existence of the glacial man. Now, looking at those skulls which, by Prof. Putnam's persistent efforts have been recovered from the Trenton sands, we all are convinced of the proposition. The burden of proof now lies on the other side." So far, so good, but Prof. McGee erred in attributing to Prof. Putnam the credit of the "finds" exhibited. The work was that of Mr. Volk, who was not directed, influenced or instructed by any one. Whatever credit is due is due to Mr. Volk. For Prof. Putnam, who was present, to silently accept the laudation from Prof. McGee is about in line with the suppression of Mr. Volk's report on his, to that time, thirteen years of labor in the field. 8i except that of an "expert" is to be accepted as to the actual conditions under which objects have been asserted to have been found. The practical knowledge of a contractor whose business it is to excavate for cellars, sewers and other work necessitating removal of large quantities of sand, gravel and clay, is of real value and should be given the consid- eration which it deserves. Hypercriticism of testimony not "expert" only retards progress and is not inexorably de- manded by science. It must be remembered, too, that there is never unanimity among geologists when glacial and pre- glacial deposits of gravel are examined. Such, at least, has been my experience. That evidence of early man in America would be wel- comed by the scientific world is unquestioned, and Dr. Hrd- licka inclines to the view that the interior of the continent is more likely to produce it than anywhere along the eastern or western seaboard, but why the Missouri or Mississippi drainage areas are the more likely to reward the explorer than are the coastal plains is not apparent. While great migratory movements have followed the courses of a continent's principal rivers, and this naturally, in that an open country is more easily travelled than a forest or a waterless desert, it is to be borne in mind that all the attractions of a river valley are manifold greater along the ocean. The ever uppermost question of food supply must not be lost sight of, and surely the ocean offers greater fa- cilities for obtaining it than does any river. We do not associate navigation even in its rudest form with primitive man, but if the ancient river-side dweller had his boats, we must consider that the Eskimo had his, and we do not know when he invented his kayak. The probabilities all seem to point in the direction of early man, in his initial migra- tions, keeping within sight of the coast and gradually ven- turing into the interior, then a trackless forest teeming with 6 82 danger really, and to his impressionable mind would be a fearsome thing tO' face, except when many by a concerted movement, sought little by little to explore the streams that flowed to the sea. Again, we do not, save in the most general way, know the condition of our Atlantic seaboard in pre-glacial time. We do not know how much land has been lost since man first stood upon the shore, with all America at his back, and noth- ing but the ocean and an unsuspected continent before him. The main difficulty that now confronts the American archaeologist is that he is several thousand years too late in making his investigations. Could he have seen the dry land of pre-glacial days, or even when this modest Delaware river, that has now lost every vestige of its former grandeur, was again ice-free in summer, after a glacial siege, the out- look would be suggestive beyond anything at present. The traces of early man would doubtless have proved as abund- ant as they now are rare. Dr. Hrdlicka may be right. There may still be reason for continuing our labors in the field, but so insignificant is the reward of years spent with pick and shovel that often we are moved to throw down our tools and cry, too late ! And what a reception does anything savoring of a discov- ery receive! My own conclusions, based wholly upon the results of my own explorations, are: 1. That man reached the North American continent in pre-glacial time. How far anterior to the ice age is imma- terial and probably undeterminable. 2. That the epoch of ice and continued cold drove him southward, where he became established, flourished and be- came racially differentiated from his European or Asiatic ancestry. 83 3- That synchronous with the retirement towards the Arctic circle of arctic or glacial conditions the northern por- tion of the continent was re-peopled. 4. That the valley of the Delaware has yielded sufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that it was occupied by man representing three distinct stages of culture: a. Palaeolithic man. b. Argillite man. c. The historic Indian. ESTDEX. A. PAGE. Activity, human, beginnings of, III., 13 Africa, II., 3, 7; III, 19, 42 Aleutian Islands, III., 17 Algonkin crania. III., 47 Algonquin, II., 5, 33, 35 Allegewi, possible identity of. III., 70 " unknown origin of. III., 70 Alleghany Mountains, III., 70 AUeghanies, II., 7 America, ancient man of, II., 78 ; III., 38 " Central, its relation to continental, II., 3 " " ruined cities of, III., 28 " man's origin in, II., 4, 8 " native race of, II., 19 peopling of, 11; II., 3; III., 19 North, II., 3, 8,32; III., 10,18,27 " " antiquity of man in. III., 76 " South, its relation to continental, peopling of, 11; II., 3; III., 17 American Antiquarian Society, III., ^^ " continent, man's first appearance on, IS " man, Asiatic origin of, 19 Museum of Nat. Hist., bulletin of, quoted, II., 14 " Naturalist, periodical, quoted, 9 ; II., 11 " savage, III., 65 Anglesea, N. J., III., So Antilles, II., 3 Arctic regions, stone implements of, 40 Argillite arrowpoints (in N. J.), 42 ; 11-, 29 " " decomposition of, 36 " " when used exclusively, 46 artifacts, 29; III 54 boulder. III, 4o " man, 59; HI., 43, 47. 6S, 83 " outcrop, 35 (85) 86 PAGE Arrow-points, 29, 36 ; II. 19. 2S " " incrustations on, 37 Artifact, argillite, 29 " palaeolithic, 20, 24, 30 Artifacts, 15 stone, 15 Asia, II., 3, 7 Assunpink Creek, N. J., II 14 Atlantic Coast, II., 74 " County, N. J., paleolithic implements found in, 24; II.,. . 5° " seaboard of U. S. early man along, 39; III n, 48 Atotarho, II., 33 Australia, marsupials of, III., 42 B. Balch, Edwin Swift, quoted. III., 26 Bear, black, III., 27 Bear, polar. III., 27 Beatty, Charles, Rev., quoted, II., S6 Beauchamp, W. M., Rev., quoted, II., 32 Beesley, Maurice, Dr., quoted. III., 51 Behring's Straits, early migration at, II Blades, argillite, cache of, II., 46 Boudinot, Elias, quoted, II., 68 Brainerd, John, Rev., quoted, II., 65 Brinton, D. G., quoted, 20, II., 54, 67 ; III., 43 Bristol, Pennsylvania, argillite at, II., 28 ; III., 40 Brooks, obliterated, 62 Brugas, II., 33 Burlington County, N. J., ancient cranium from, II., 15, 52 Island, III., 38 Bushman (African) art, III., 26, 46 C. California, Southern, archaeology of, II., 20 Camel, III., 26 Canassatego, III., 18 Cape May County, N. J., argillite implements at, II., 45 " " " palaeolithic implements at, 24, 37 Carr, Lucien, quoted, II., 68 Catawba, N. J., arrow-heads at, II., 50 Catlinite, occurence as Indian relics, of, in N. J., 57 ; II., 73 " " of, as evidence of commerce, 57 87 PAGE Cedar, red, III., 50 Ceremonial obj ects, II 67 Chesapeake Bay, II 56 Chukches, spear-points of, 41 " stone implements of, 40 Coins, Colonial, III 20 Colonial furniture, III 73 Columbia gravel, 66 ; II., 12 ; III., 63 river, II., 73 sands. III., 3S Columbus, Christopher, II., 3, 64 ; III., 21 Contradictions, occurrence of. III., 12 Cook, Geo. H., quoted. III., 49 Cooper's Creek, N. J., III., 66 Copper spears, II., 34 Crania, human, value of comparison of, 50, III., 47 Crosswicks Creek, Mercer County, N. J., 61 Cushing, Prank H., quoted, II., 66 Cusick, David, II., 33 D. Dall, W. H., Dr., quoted, 42 Dana, James D., quoted. III., p 3" DeCosta, B. F., quoted, 43 Deer, III, 27 Delaware bay, II., 57 Falls of the, 67 Indians, II., 5, 24, 72 ; III., 47 II., canoes of, 69 " idols of, 65 " relics of, 35 " " " spear-heads of, 33 river, 6, 10, 26, 39; II., 43. 5i, 63, 69, 72; III., 22,30,37 valley of the 3, 7, 19, 21, 24, 29; II., 4, 7, 9. I5. 20, 24, 29, 35, 43, 51, 63, 69, 72; III., 9, 14, 21, 30, 43, 47, 52, 66, 70, 75- Water Gap, II., 75 Drills, jasper, II., 38 Dutch settlers, early, in N. J., II., 75 ; HI-, 66 E. Earth-works, Indian, III., '9 Easter Island, III. 54 88 PAGE Elephant, III., 19 Erratics, III., 40, 46 Eskimantic, III., 44 Eskimo, III, 27, 43, 71, 79 Art, III, 26 crania of, 33 Greenland, life led by, 23 in Massachusetts, 43 unlike "Arctic" man in N. J., 44 Esquimaux, once in N. J., 40 ; III., 44 " stone implements of, 40 Ethnology, Bureau of, III., 10, 28 Europe, II., 3> S, 7; HI- n Pish spears, argillite, II, 37 Fishing Creek shoal. III., 52 Five Mile beach, N. J., III., 50 Freshets, effects of, 26 Fur Trader's house on Burlington Island, III., 38 Gaddis Run, Bucks Co., Pennsylvania^ II., 47 Geologist, State, Reports of, 30 Geologists, ludicrous caution of, 6, 18 Germany, II., 15 Glacial epoch, 31 man, 31, 43 " period, II., 30; III., 6 Gravel, ice-transportation of, 26 Gravels, Trenton, 4, 17, 30, 35, 37 ; II., 26 ; III., 39 " " remains of man in, 4 ; II., 40 " " " " mastodon in, 31 Great Egg Harbor river, N. J., II., 50 " Ice Age, III., 40 H. Hatapi, II., 3^ Haynes, H. W., quoted, II., 71, 77 Haeckwelder, II., 37 Heckewelder, II., 5, 6 ; III., 66 Holland, II., 15 89 PAGS Holly, III " Beach, III., 50 Holmes, W. H., quoted, 18, 27, 30, 50, 57; II., 10, 29; III., 22, 25 Homo palaeolithicus. III., 74 Hrdlicka Ales, quoted, 33; II., 14; III., 64, 76 Hudson river, II., gg I. Ilex opaca. III., 50 Implements, agricultural, II., 71 " caches of, II., 40, 46 " chipped, 25 " condition of, 25 " gravel bed, 28 " stone, IS " wooden, II., 68 Indian, American, agricultural implements of, IL, 71; III., 72 antiquity of, 52; II., 2S origin of, II., 68 " " relation to Eskimo, III., 17 " " wooden implements of, II., 68 " Delaware, culture status of, 68 " historic, 7, 10, 33, 37, 39, 44, SI ; II., 38, so, 63 ; III., 83 antiquity of, II., 62 " burials, variation in, III., S6, 59 " horizon, 11 " legends, 50 " ornaments. III., 61 " pipes, III., 57 pottery. III., 56 " Shawnee, 57 " shell-heaps, 59 " tools, II., 22 ; III., 60 " village, S3 " village sites, 46 Indians, American, Handbook of, quoted, II., 10, 25 " American, food of. III., 21 " skeletons of, III., 20 Indies, West, 11 Inter-tribal commerce, 57 Iroquois, IL, 5, 32. 35 90 J. PAGB Japan, III., 17 Jasper implements, 36 ; II., 19 " pebbles, II., SO " quarries, II., 5° Jesuit relations, II., 5. 33 Juniperus Virginianus, III., 50 K. Kalm, Peter, quoted, 44 ; II., 22 Kelvin, Lord, III., 6 Keyport, N. J., shell-heaps at, 59 ; III., 49 Knife, semi-lunar. III., 47 L. Lake Superior, copper mines at, II., 73 Lenape stone, fraudulent, 51 ; II., 24 ; III 22 Lenni Lenape, 39 ; II., 11, 42, 58, 63, 74, 76 ; III 68, 74 Llama, III., 26 Lockwood, Samuel, Rev., quoted, 31, 59 ; II., 66 ; III., 49 Loderer, Account of North America, III., 44 Long Branch, N. J., mastodon remains at, 31 Loskiel, II., 37 Lower Black's Eddy, II., S6, 60 Lubbock, Sir John (Lord Avebury), quoted, 41 Ludlam, Charles, quoted. III., 31 M. Maine, 41 Man, argillite, 40 " origin of, in America, II., 4 " palaeolithic, 23, 41 ; III., .' 48 Maryland, 41 Massachusetts, coast of, Eskimo on, 43 Mastodon, 7, 30 ; II., 24 ; III 19 McGee, Prof. W J, quoted. III. 54, 80 Mercer county, N. J., II., 52 H. C, quoted, 34; H-. 10, 43, 76 Mexico, III., 28 Mey, Cornelius Jacobse, III., 66 91 PA08 Minnesota, catlinite from, 57 ; II., 72 " Aborigines of, III., 67, 75 Minsi, II 74 Mississippi river 73, 74 Monmouth County, N. J., 31 Moose, 7, 32 Moravian missionaries, II., 6 Morgan, Junius S., 12 " Lewis H., quoted 33 Mortuary Customs, III., 54 Mountains, Blue, III., 7S Musk ox, 7 ; III 27, 32, 34 Mussels, used for food, 60 N. Nebraska, ancient man of, 49 New Jersey, 23; II. 63, 72, 75 coastal plain of, III., 47 " " mastodon remains in, 31 moose " " 32 muskox " " 32 " " occurrence of seal in, 33 Pines of Southern, 35 " " reindeer remains in, 32 sea coast of. III., 48 " " tide-water regions of, 38 " " walrus remains in, 32 New York, State of, II., 32 Nockamixon, II., S8 Nordenskiold, A. E., quoted, 40 Norsemen, 3° North America, east coast of 7° " Carolina, II., 7^ O. Oak, aged, III., ^ Obelisk, III., 53 Ohio, mound-building in, II., 72 Oregon, obsidian from, 57 Orient, history of. III., Osborne, H. F., quoted, 49; HI., ^S 92 p. Palaeolithic horizon, II in Europe, II., 48 " implements, 25, 29, 34 ; II., 82 ; III., 34 man, 23, 39, 40; II., 30; III., 83 Panama, II., 72 Peabody Museum, palaeolithic implements at, 30, II., 46 Pebbles, formation of. III., 3 Peccary, III., 26 Penn, William, II., 71 Pennsylvania, II 63 Pepachkhamatunk, II., 35 Periwig bar, III., 33 Pleistokene Art, III., 46 Man, III., 71 Point Pleasant, Bucks Co., Penna., 35 " argillite quarry at, II., 45 " pitted hammers at, II., 48 Pottery, archaeological significance of, II., 41 " horizon of, 29 " manufacture of, 54 Pre-Indian, 11, 36, 39, 40 Princeton University, Museum of, 12 Proboscidea, fate of, III., 20 Putnam, F. W., II., 10 ; III., 80 Pyne, M. Taylor, 12; II., 16; III., 14 Q. Quarryman, ancient, II., 43 Quartz implements, 36 ; II., 19 Quercian ancestor of oaks. III., 4 R. Raccoon, N. J., II 22 Rancocas Creek, N. J., III., 61 "Rejects,"' Indian, 22 Russell, Frank, Dr., quoted, II., n 8. Saga, Eric Rothens, III., ^ Sagaenbibliothek, III., ^ Sagas, quoted, 42 93 PAGE Sandy Hook, N. J., Ill 48 Seal, III 34 Schoolcraft, H. R., II., 33 Seals, occurrence of in N. J., 32 Shackamaxon, II., 72 ; III., 29 Shawnee Indians, 57 pottery of, 57 Shell-heaps, Indian, antiquity of, 61, III., ." 28 " " " general character of, 60; III., 49 "Sipitit," 6s Skill, advance of, 65 " bearing on antiquity, 66 Skralingar, III., 44 Skraellings, 43 Smith, Samuel, quoted, III., 54 Smithsonian Institution, III yy South Jersey, II., 38, 46 sands of, 38 Spear, Indian, II 31 Sphynx, HI., 39 Stacy, Mahlon, quoted, II., 24 Stone Age Industry, II., 60 Susquehanna River, III., 70 Swedes, early, in N. J., II., 75 Swedesboro, N. J., II., 22 Susquehanna River, II., 57 T, "Tachquahakan" (corn mill), S3 "Tangamican," II., 35 "Tandanikan," II., 35 Thoreau, H. D., quoted, II., 19 Time, glacial, 11 " Miocene, 31 " post, II ; II., 29 " pre-glacial, II " pre-Indian, II., 28 Titeusquand, II., 7o Toronto, Ontario, II., 30 Tradition, Indian, value of, II. 54 Trenton, N. J., 3, 29, 37, 67; II., 13, 25 ; III., 30 gravel, origin of. III., 32, 4° " gravels, literature of, 8 " " traces of man in, 4, 17, 30 ; III., 63 " " mastodon in, 13, 35. 37 94 PAGE "Turtle backs," II., 60 Tuscaroras, traditions of, III., 44 U. Unami, II., 74 Unalachtigo, II., 74 Unionidae (mussels), 60 United States, Atlantic seaboard of, 39 " " coast line of, 31 " " mid-continental regions of, 39 " " Pacific coast of, 39 Utah, obsidian from, 57 V. Village, Indian, 53 ; II., 69 burials at, 58 " sites, Indian, 46 " " " absence of argillite at some, 46 Volk, Ernst, explorations of, 9, 32, 33, 49, 56, 57, 58, 61, 64, 66 ; II., II, 12; III., 32,80 W. Walrus, 7, 32, 42 ; III., 27, 34, 47 Walum Olam, 50, 51 ; II., 54, 67 Wildwood, N. J., III., SO Winchell, N. H., quoted. III 67, 75 Wyomink, II., 69 Z. Zeisberger, II., 33, 37