200 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 182 



lines branch into what appear to be scales of some sort, roughly re- 

 sembling the scales of a carp fish. All lines are shallow and very 

 narrow as though etched into the steatite with some hard, sharply 

 pointed tool. The apex of the belly surface is highly polished. 



The back is marked with a number of shallow grooves, 5 mm. wide, 

 running parallel to the long axis. These grooves appear to indicate 

 that the gorget had long since been broken during aboriginal times 

 and that this fragment was utilized as a polisher for bone awls. 

 Other longitudinal striations occur which seem to be the result of 

 rubbing a coarse, gritty object over the surface. 



Grooved Imimiier stones^ inauls, and club heads are rare. Only 

 a single grooved specimen was found. This came from the upper 

 portion of a midden pit. It shows considerable battering on one face 

 while the rest show no alteration from the original surface. This 

 granitic artifact, a hard tough stone, has been hammered and pecked 

 into the general outline with a slight encircling groove near one end. 

 It measures 9.3 cm. in length and weighs 17 ounces. It is too badly 

 battered to be considered a club head and was probably used as a 

 hammerstone or a crude ax. 



Metates^ or milling or ruhhing stones, occur as flat slabs of some 

 kind of hard gritty stone. These display slightly worn saucer-shaped 

 central depressions which were the grinding surfaces. Usually, no 

 attempt was made to alter the natural outline of the stone. The only 

 modification is the slight central depression which may occur on 

 one or both sides of the stone. From the shape of the depression, one 

 would surmise that a rotary motion had been used in grinding. The 

 depth and size of the depression indicate that no great amount of 

 grinding was done by these people. 



In use with these shallow metates were either disk-shaped or 

 rectangular manos. Flat, natural-shape stones sometimes served as 

 manos. "Wliichever stone was used, it had to fit the depresion of the 

 metate closely so that contact between both surfaces could be made. 



Scattered throughout the midden area were bits of ground hematite. 

 Occasionally, larger chunks of this material were found, indicating 

 that crude hematite was ground and the resulting powder shaped 

 into "blocks" or "cakes" for future use. This powdered hematite 

 probably served the same purpose as milady's rogue packets, i.e., for 

 personal adornment. Faceted nodules of hematite and pyrolusite 

 (MnOi) ai'e also present. 



Along this same line there are a number of steatite nodules which 

 have shalloAv saucer-shaped holes in their surfaces (pi. 75, /). These 

 have been worn down either by gouging or scraping to produce a 

 powdered talc. Whether this talc was used as a polishing agent on 

 the various bone and stone tools or as an article of personal adornment 

 could not be determined from the evidence at hand. Some of the 



