IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS OF THE STONE AGE. 125 



the valley of the St. Lawrence, were agriculturists,, 

 and their culture of maize, beans, pumpkins, and 

 tobacco, was all carried on by manual labour, with 

 hoes made of wood, or headed with bone, shell, or 

 stone, which were used in great numbers in the 

 spring, and then cast away or laid by in heaps, or 

 buried in the ground until again required. Hunting 

 tribes had no need of such tools. Even the more 

 highly civilized nations of the Mississippi valley, who 

 possessed copper implements, and were skilful artists 

 in many ways, have left behind them vast numbers 

 of rudely-chipped discs and flat flints, probably used 

 in their agriculture.* They are found in caches, or 

 deposits of many together, as if quantities were used 

 at one time. This would agree with the idea of 

 their agricultural use. They would be prepared in 

 large quantities for the planting time, when the whole 

 tribe mustered, like the South Africans described by 

 Livingstone, to till their fields ; and when the work 

 was over they would be gathered and hidden in some 

 safe place till the next season, or perhaps buried as 

 an offering to the god of the harvest. Abbott, in his 

 " Stone Age in New Jersey/' figures one example 

 found with 149 others in a ploughed field. They 

 were buried in the ground with the points up, and 

 he remarks that such implements are not met with 



* Bau, " Smithsonian Beport for 1868," describes several 

 forms of stone hoes ; some having notches for attachment to 

 a handle, others oval in form. Thin, flat, sharp-edged stones 

 of various forms, found on old Indian sites, may often have 

 been agricultural implements. 



