500 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1896. 



objects, and has furnished the principal basis for the argument of the 

 existence there of a Copper a.i;e. No argument upon this or any simi- 

 lar question is attempted. The only proposition here presented is that 

 copper was used in the neighborhood of Lake Superior to malie cutting 

 implements of similar form to those of stone, and that, despite the num- 

 bers of such implements found, copper did not change the culture of 

 the peoples; it did not establish a Copper age as bronze established a 

 Bronze age in Europe; it was not an epoch-making discovery or inven- 

 tion, and the mode of making and using stone implements by chipping 

 and polishing, as in the purely Neolithic age, was not superseded by 

 the discovery of copper. 



Among the many mysteries of prehistoric archaeology growing out 

 of mound excavation in the United States, wherein things strange and 

 wonderful but of undoubted genuineness and antiquity are found, 

 none are more unexplained than the thin sheets of copper wrought by 

 repousse work into curious and unknown devices found in mounds and 

 earthworks in widely separated regions of the country. 



Etowah plates. — The principal specimens come from the Tumlin 

 mounds on the Etowah River, near Cartersville, Georgia (Plates 59, 00). 

 They have been figured in the reports of the Bureau of Ethnology^ and 

 in the author's paper on "The Swastika."- Of these specimens the 

 X)rincipal comment made by Professor Thomas is in approval of that 

 of Professor Holmes,' that "in all their leading features the designs 

 themselves are suggestive of Mexican or Central American work." Yet 

 he adds that- 



Theie are one or two features which are anomalous in Mexican or Central Ameri- 

 can designs, as, for example, where the wings are represented as rising from the back 

 of the shoulders. The two plates are a comhinntion of Mexican and Central American 

 designs, the graceful limbs and the ornaments of the arms, legs, waist, and top of the 

 head are ^Central American, and the rest, with the exception, possibly, of what is 

 carried in the right hand, are Mexican. 



Professor Thomas continues : 



That these plates are not wholly the work of the Indians inhabiting the southern 

 section of the United States, is admitted; that they were not made by an aboriginal 

 artisan of Central America or Mexico of ante-Columbian times, I think is probable, 

 if not from the designs themselves, from the apparent evidence that the work was 

 done in part with hard metallic tools. 



To the latter conclusion the author does not agree. The proposition 

 may be true, but there is no evidence of it. 



Fig. 150 represents a figured copper plate from mound c, Etowah 

 gnmp showing a human figure. 



Later excavations in the Tumlin mounds, made by Dr. Eoland 

 Steiner, of Grovetown, Georgia, have brought to light other copper 



' Fifth Annual (1883-84, figs. 42, 43, 44, and 45, pp. 96-106), Twelfth Annual (1890-91, 

 plates XVII, xviii, and figs. 186-192). 

 ^ Figs. 240 and 241, pp. 886, 887. 

 ■'Science, April 11, 1884. 



