AMERICAN ABORIGINAL PIPES AND SMOKING CUSTOMS. 479 



country, it must be admitted that the evidence relating to their age is 

 of so fragmentary a character as not to warrant the positive exjuession 

 of an opinion on the subject. 



De Soto as early as 1539 with a hxrge body of men crossed an exten- 

 sive section of the southern portion of what is now the United States. 

 His people were familiar with the working and fusing of metals, and sev- 

 eral of his soldiers wandered off and were never heard from again, and 

 he is supposed to have penetrated far toward the borders of Ken- 

 tucky.' Fifty years later the English landed in Virginia, and from that 

 period for one hundred and fifty years Spanish, French, English, Dutch, 

 and Swedes traded along the coast and far into the interior with the 

 natives for their peltries, and their intercourse was of a character to 

 familiarize them with the white man's implements and his use of metal. 



Mr. Clarence B. Moore found at Fairview, Camden County, Georgia, 

 a foot below the surface in a mound, a deposit of calcined human bones 

 beneath a local layer of oyster shells, and associated with the bones 

 was a sheet-copper ornament with repousse decorations.- He refers 

 also to four rings found on the finger of a skeleton at Madisonville, 

 Ohio, by Professor Putnam, which were made from bands of sheet 

 copper. Besides finding a copper finger ring in a mound near Wood- 

 bine, Georgia, and also a portion of a disk of copper in a mound in 

 Mcintosh County, Georgia, which was carbonated through, Mr. Moore 

 also found an 8-inch copper celt in a mound north of Creighton Island, 

 Georgia.' 



Such objects are said to be usually found near the surface, and poly- 

 chrome and other glass beads were found in the mounds at a depth of 

 2 feet with human remains or near the surface.^ 



Glass beads, pieces of china, copper coins, gold ornaments, and silver 

 crosses have been found on so many occasions in the graves and mounds 

 of the interior associated with human remains as to suggest that the 

 trade with the whites was considerable at a period when mounds were 

 still being constructed and while the Indian was yet living under 

 primitive conditions, 



MICMAC PIPES. 



As far south as the borders of Kentucky and extending as far as the 

 Blackfeet wander, in Labrador and across the continent almost if not 

 quite to the Pacific Ocean, there is found a type of pipe which appears 

 quite primitive in form, yet which is still in use in the northern part of 

 the continent. It has a bowl, in shape not unlike an inverted acorn, 

 wbich sits upon a keel-like base, broadest where it touches the bowl, 

 and extending beyond the bowl at times an inch or more on each side. 



I 



'Bennett H. Yonng, The News, Louisville, Kentucky, Ajiril 2, 1896. 

 2 Certain Aboriginal Mounds of the Georgia Coast, Journal of the Academy of 

 Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, XI, p. 10, 1897. 

 •^ Idem, pp. 13, 14, 2.5, 41, Philadelphia, 1897, 

 ■•Idem, pp. 14, 23, 66, Philadelphia, 1897. 



