OBSERVATIONS ON STONE-CHIPPING 889 



early clearing and cultivation that has been most destructive to the 

 long wall earthworks, and was the place of all others where I ex- 

 pected to find the cup-stones. The single-pit nut-stones and indented 

 hammer-stones wore plenty, and also the rude mortars, but the cup- 

 stones were comparatively few. 



An aged farmer, whose father with his family emigrated from Virginia 

 into this section when it was Indian territory, and who as a boy worked 

 at the early salt works, tells me that the Indians then here used the sin- 

 gle-pit nut-stones, but they did not know anything about the cup-stones. 

 He asked me if I could divine any use for them. On my suggesting 

 grinding he said I was wrong and that he could tell me their use. I 

 will now give his explanation as near as I can in his own language. 

 He said : " If you want to see them in daily use, go to Patagonia, and you 

 can any day see a lot of women squatting around one of these stones 

 spinning yarn and talking scandal. You see, they strip and singe the 

 hair off of a piece of raw hide, lay it on the stone with the flesh side up; 

 they then squeeze it into the cup holes and put something on to hold it 

 while it dries. Then you see every cup makes a step for the foot of a 

 spindle to rest in, and holds just enough grease in it to make the spindle 

 run slick; and, depend on it, that is the way the thread was spun here 

 to weave the cloth that has left its impressions on the pieces of the old 

 clay salt-pans. You know that our Indians did not know anything about 

 them, or of salt either, for that matter; so how could they know what 

 these stones were used for"?" I understood him to say that when a boy 

 he learned this from a Pacific whaler, who drifted to the salt works, 

 and who related that on one occasion the vessel he was on laid up for 

 some time in the Straits of Magellan, and that he then saw the Patago- 

 nian women using just such stones as steps for their spindles. 



If that could have been the use of those that are so abundant here, 

 we should expect to find them where the women dwell rather than at 

 the flint workshops, the same reasoning applying to their use as paint 

 pallets. If used for either of these purposes, why do we find the cup 

 depressions on both sides, and many of the cups of various size, some 

 j ust started and others worn one into another ? 



From the fact of the upper stone of the piles as they were left on the 

 flaking ground being covered with such a depth of vegetable mold as 

 not to have been discovered until after cultivation and exposure by the 

 denuding floods, the finding one in the mound with the decayed skele- 

 ton of a stone-worker, the one I have before referred to as having been 

 found near the center of a large mound in Kentucky, leaves little room 

 to doubt of their having been, as well as the primeval workshops, coe- 

 val with the eartli-works and their associated mounds. 



There are other evidences of great antiquity in the condition of many 

 of the granite and porphyry implements being honeycombed by the 

 disintegration of their feldspar, leaving the silicious portions rough 



