206 EARLY AMERICANS 



disclosing four or five layers of ancient graves. These 

 people buried all their household gods with the dead. In 

 the upper graves I found the usual stone implements and 

 bell clappers, Florentine glass beads, quaint mattocks of 

 iron, files, spikes all carefully wrapped in cloth made of 

 seaweed, showing that the graves did not date back 

 earlier than 1542, when Cabrillo, the first white man, ar- 

 rived and gave them objects in metal; but in the graves 

 lower down no metal was found, suggesting that they 

 dated prior to the whites and represented what we might 

 term the stone age in Southern California, though it must 

 be remembered they were not a low and savage people ; 

 but were skilled artisans in stone, shell, and wood. 



I visited a native manufactory here, a ledge of steatite 

 or soapstone, and found that the natives had made all the 

 interesting and attractive bowls and other articles found in 

 the graves. Their plan was to cut out a ball of steatite 

 with their stone implements until it stood in relief the size 

 required, then to break it off and to hollow it out at leisure. 

 At Empire Landing, Santa Catalina, can be seen the scars 

 of many of these mortars, and in the adjoining canyon I 

 found mortars in various stages as though started and 

 deserted. 



Near here were broken stone implements of various 

 kinds, and in the immediate vicinity many interesting 

 objects were dug up. Not far away I found a ledge of 

 rock where a native arrow maker had worked ; scattered 

 about were broken arrowheads and stone chips, telling the 

 story as well as though it had been written in a book. All 

 over this island I found similar places, shell deposits, camp 

 sites, and burnt patches of sand ; at Avalon stood a great 



