486 



ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



Similar material, has been discovered in Georgia, and fragments 

 of beautifully made utensils have been found on sites in the upper 

 Savannah Valley. 



Soapstone or steatite does not occur in situ in Florida, and the 

 nearest deposits are northward in central Alabama. Consequently, 

 all soapstone vessels found in Florida had been carried from some 

 distant point. Two remarkable specimens from Florida are illus- 

 trated in plate 10. No similar pieces are known. 



CONCLUSION 



The occurrence of steatite or soapstone in the Eastern United 

 States, from New England southward to Alabama, furnished the 



Figure 7. — ^Alabama. Detail of vessel from Tallapoosa County. U. S. N. M. No. 32280. 



native tribes with a material which could be worked with their prim- 

 itive stone tools. The extent to which it was utilized is revealed by 

 the quarries and quantities of broken, unfinished vessels that have 

 been discovered and by the many fragments of finished utensils 

 encountered on ancient village sites. 



Soapstone was used in the far North, and the knowledge of its 

 adaptability for making utensils, and the comparative ease with which 

 it could be worked, may have been brought from the North by early 

 Algonquian tribes and later communicated from tribe to tribe until 

 it became known to all by whom it could be obtained. This is sug- 

 gested by discoveries in Tennessee, previously mentioned when re- 

 ferring to the age of the quarries, and if the hypothesis is correct, 



