54 UNIVERSITY MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS VOL. VI 



a chief's reign, the date of their first coming would have been 

 about 1387. This agrees with what a Lenape told the Reverend 

 Charles Beatty in 1767 (Journal of a Two Months' Tour West 

 of the Alleghany Mountains, Charles Beatty, p. 27, London, 

 1868). When counting beads on a wampum belt as years, 

 according to a tribal custom, he said that his people had come 

 to the Delaware 370 years before, or in 1397. 



"The Heckwelder version of the tradition, however, which 

 gives no means of fixing dates, would infer that the new comers 

 found the country vacant. The exploring parties of the east- 

 ward migrating tribe, it says, arriving at the Susquehanna, 

 followed it down to the Chesapeake Bay, then ascended the 

 bay and outer seacoast and discovered the Delaware River, 

 New Jersey, and the Hudson River a country abounding in 

 game, fruits, and fish, "and with no enemy to be dreaded." 



"This seeming absence of prior occupants in the new 

 country is again suggested by the Walum Olum, which refers 

 to the newly discovered land as "a land free from snakes 

 (enemies), a rich land, a pleasant land." 1 



"But without attempting to dwell too much on these tradi- 

 tions and their claim that the Lenape only arrived in the 

 Delaware Valley five hundred years ago, and that before that 

 time it had lain uninhabited for an unknown period, suffice 

 it to say that at Lower Black's Eddy we have found two stages 

 of occupancy. 



"The layers prove a difference in time, short or long. The 

 character of the objects found a difference in handiwork. Future 

 work can alone prove whether this difference denotes a mere 

 accident of varying tribal conditions, or a wide-spreading differ- 

 ence in cultural status. Let us only say now that at this one 

 spot it exists." 



Since the work of Mercer, several finds of exclusively 

 argillite material have been made in other sections of the 

 Delaware Valley. Skinner in his admirable Archaeological 

 Survey of New Jersey sums up the situation as follows. 



1 The Antiquity of Man in the Delaware Valley and the Eastern United States, Henry 

 C. Mercer. Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Vol. VI, 1897, pp. 81-82. 



