MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY. 577 



prising spades and hoes, are not uncommon in the rich loamy terraces 

 of our rivers, but are generally interior in size and workmanship to 

 those met with in that portion of Saint Clair and Madison counties 

 known as the American Bottom. The spades are smaller and ruder, 

 and the hoes are iilain and without notches for fastening them to hand- 

 les. The broad hornstono disks, discovered some years ago buried in the 

 sand a short distance above the large Beardstown mound, and which 

 I have described in a previous paper,* are supposed by some archffiol- 

 ogists to have been intended for agricultural tools, though never intro- 

 duced in general use. Of this however we have no positive evidence, 

 and until our knowledge of this class of relics is increased, we must 

 regard that strange deposit as an unsolved mystery. 



Celts and grooved axes of granite and Various augitic rocks, of all 

 sizes and many patterns, have been, and still are, abundant hero. The 

 largest grooved ax in our collection weighs twelve and a half pounds; 

 the smallest, one and a half ounces. Our largest celt, cut from a coarse- 

 grained diorite, weighs eleven pounds; and the smallest, obviously a 

 child's toy, weighs scarcely half an ounce. Flint arrow and spear points, 

 knives, scrapers, and hatchets of the usual forms have been collected in 

 Cass County in great profusion. Hammer-stones, nut-stones, discoidal 

 stones, perforated "talismans " or " arrow atraighteners" of ribbon-slate, 

 of basalt, and of fossil wood; stone-balls, plain and grooved; in short, 

 all of the ordinary types of rough and polished stone implements in use 

 by the pre-metal Indian tribes have been and still are often found about 

 our streams and bluffs. 



The archaeological remains of which I have so far briefly treated are not 

 peculiar to this county or to any circumscribed locality, but are common 

 in all those portions of Illinois and of almost all of the Western, Middle, 

 and Southern States contiguous to water-courses, where the aborigines, 

 with identical habits of life and by identical methods, obtained, with little 

 effort, their food-supplies. And the comprehensive generalization which 

 I have attempted of the antiquities observed here will, with trifling 

 variations and additions, apply equally well to those of other counties 

 and States. 



I have yet to mention, however, one object recently discovered in this 

 vicinity, of rare occurrence in the prehistoric remains of this State, be- 

 longing to a class so suggestive of savage, ethnic characteristics as to 

 incite interest and thoughtful study. On the crest of one of the highest 

 and most prominent points of the Sangamon blufts, jutting out irom 

 the range into the valley, a promontory, conspicuous for many miles in 

 all directions, was one of the common oval swellings of the surface, 

 usually known here as an "Indian grave," but so overgrown with 

 bushes and weeds and tall grass as to have required close inspection to 

 distinguish it from the natural contour of the hill. The owner of the 

 land, having occasion to build a pasture-fence over this point, set a 



Smithsonian Annual Report for 1876, p. 438 et acq. 

 S. Mis. 109 37 



