382 COLUMBIAN HISTORICAL EXPOSITION AT MADRID. 



percussion, for I saw the knappers at Brandon knocking them from 

 similar cores with steel hammers. 1 



Catliii (Smithsonian Report, 1885, p. 870) told George Ercol Sellers 

 that he had seen Indians flaking jasper and agate with long wooden 

 punches set with bone points, weighted with hanging stones, and held 

 against their breasts. When the pressure was applied a cooperator 

 struck a fork in the punch a blow with a club. 



Dr. Knapp (Smithsonian Report, part 1) saw Indians on Twelve 

 Mile Island in the Mississippi River, near G-uttenburg, Iowa, making 

 arrowheads by pressing down on the stone with the side of the leg 

 bone of a deer used as a lever and set in a notched tree. The notch 

 was large enough to hold the blade worked upon and a basal stone on 

 which it rested. 



George Ercol Sellers (Smithsonian Report, 1885, p. 870) heard from 

 a trapper who had seen Indians sending off large flakes by leverage of 

 the same sort. A long wooden lever was set in the notched tree, a bone 

 point fixed in its side pressed down upon the blade, which rested on a 

 flat root. When the pressure was applied the lever was struck above 

 the bone with a mallet. 



So much for the accounts, which I believe comprise all of importance 

 thus far published in America, by eyewitnesses. We learn from them, 

 and the arrowhead narratives above mentioned, of flaking (a) by 

 direct percussion, (b) by indirect percussion, or hammering on punches, 

 (c) by direct pressure, (d) by impulsive pressure, or pressure aided by 

 a blow, and (e] pressure aided by Jjueiit. 



Moreover, we have hints as to digging some stones out of the ground 

 and gathering others from the surface, wetting some, and drying or 

 baking others, and we fully realize that we are grappling with a very 

 intricate question. 



Almost dismayed at the complex features of this greatest craft of 

 the Stone Age, and dissatisfied with our own inadequate attempts to 

 master it, we can well appreciate the remark of Catlin that &quot; great 

 skill was required and a thorough knowledge of the nature of each 

 stone, a slight difference in quality necessitating a totally different 

 manner of treatment.&quot; 



But our experiments soon show us that not any chance fragment of 

 jasper or workable stone can be flaked into one of the larger shapes. 

 The jasper and chert pebbles so often used by riverside tribes for their 

 smaller blades will no longer serve, and we are brought to the question 

 of the whereabouts of the material. 



Here the exhibit of Mr. W. H. Holmes (Plate III) in the Smithsonian 

 cases shows us a valuable analysis of the chipped refuse found at certain 

 localities in the United States (Piny Branch, in the District of Columbia, 

 Garland County, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory), where the fol 

 lowing facts have been explained: 



1 Three of these sets of flint flakes with their cores I have placed in the Archaeolog 

 ical Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. 



