87£) PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY. 



What I now propose is to give some of my experimental practice in 

 flaking and working flint (chert), and (from a purely mechanical stand- 

 point) some conclusions drawn from a pretty extensive examination of 

 the waste and refuse as well as finished and partly finished work left in 

 the aboriginal flint workshops. 



There are many places along the banks of the Ohio Eiver and its 

 tributaries that are not subject to the annual overflow, but are still 

 below the occasional great floods, where the flaking process has been 

 extensively carried on, and where cores aud waste chips are abundant. 

 At one of these places, on the Kentucky side of the river, I found a num- 

 ber of chert blocks, as when first brought from the quarry, from which 

 no regular flakes had been split; some had a single corner broken off as 

 a starting point. On the sharp, right-angled edge of several, I found the 

 indentations left by small flakes, having been knocked off tsvidently by 

 blows, as described by Catlin, as a preparation for seating the flaking 

 tool. Most of the localities referred to are now under cultivation, but 

 before being cleared of timber and subjected to the plow, no surface relics 

 were found ; but on the caving and wearing away of the river banks, 

 as the light earth washed away, many spear and arrow-heads and other 

 stone relics were left on shore. After the land had been cleared and 

 the plow had loosened the soil, one of the great floods that occur at 

 intervals of some fifteen or twenty years, would wash away the loose 

 soil, leaving the great flint workshops exposed. It is from the stores 

 of material left, the cores or nuclei thrown aside, caches of finished aud 

 unfinished implements and flakes, the tools and wastage, vast accu- 

 mulations of splints, «&c., that we can, on critical examination, di-aw 

 tolerably correct ideas of the mode of working pursued. 



One of these great flaking banks or workshops is exposed on the 

 northern bank of the Saline Eiver at its first rock '• ripple," about 3 miles 

 above its junction with the Ohio, the general course of the Saline being 

 from the northwest to the southeast. Above the "ripple" the stream is 

 only navigable during high water of the Ohio. On its southern side 

 are ranges of hills from its mouth to its source, ranging between 300 

 feet and 400 feet in height, and on the divide between the west fork of 

 the Saline and Eagle Creek they rise to a height of over 800 feet. The 

 ridge is broken through by the valleys of small tributaries ; the spurs 

 from the ridge at places terminating in rock bluffs close to the river, at 

 others leaving a narrow bottom. On the northern side of the stream 

 the hills proper commence about 4 miles above the mouth, leaving a 

 wider valley or bottom on that side; the low bottom lands of the Ohio 

 extend nearly to the ripple, where commences what is termed the second 

 bot^tom lands of the Ohio, which rise rather abruptly, extending with 

 the river by its windings at varying distance from it. It is on this 

 ridge where it is intersected by the Saline that the coal company made 

 the terminus of their railroad and shipping port of coal. 



On my first visit, in the fall of 1853, this was in dense forests with 



