AN ANCIENT QUARRY IN INDIAN TERRITORY 



By W. H. Holmes 



INTRODUCTORY. 



The Mississippi valley, within a radius of 150 miles of St. Louis, has 

 yielded a large number of flaked stone imj)leraents of exceptional 

 beauty of form and material, and, in many cases, of unusual or even 

 extraordinary size. Many of these objects are of whitish or light gray 

 flinty stone classed usually as chert. This material, having various 

 degrees of adaptability to the flaking processes, is found throughout 

 a wide district, including portions of Illinois, Missouri, and neighboring 

 states. 



In many places evidences of manufacture have been observed, but 

 usually the sites are nothing more than small shops where individual 

 implements have been shaped or small masses have been worked up. 

 It is apparent to the student of flaked stone tools that these limited 

 shops could not have furnished the multitudes of fine specimens dis- 

 tributed over every i^art of the valley, and that the existence of great 

 quarries must in time be discovered. These quarry sites, if such there 

 are, may be so hidden away in wild and rugged regions and so obscured 

 by forests that the attention of white settlers has never been called 

 to them. 



An important quarry site, considerably beyond the limits of the 

 province referred to, being nearly 300 miles southwest of St. Louis, has 

 recently come into notice. It is hardly to be supposed that the flint 

 supply of the Missouri and Mississippi valleys could in any large 

 part have been derived from this source, for the task of transporta- 

 tion M'Ould have taxed even the marvelous patience and endurance of 

 our aboriginal workers in stone. The material produced on this site, 

 however, corresponds very closely with that used in the St. Louis region, 

 and a study of the refuse of the quarry shops demonstrates the fact that 

 the classes of tools made are identical in many instances with those found 

 so plentifully in that region. 



DISCOVERY x\ND L(K'ATION OF THE QUARRY. 



Early in October, 1891, my attention was called to a letter forwarded 

 to Mr. G. K. Gilbert, then geologist in charge of the United States 

 Geological Survey, from Joplin, Missouri, by Mr. Walter P. Jenney, the 



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