XL REPOUT OF THE BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY. 



aud the question was necessarily preseuted to him, Did these 

 ancient people have the art of making glass! Subsequently 

 the copper ornament was more carefully examined, and it ap- 

 peared, to be made of rolled sheet copper, or if the sheet was 

 made by hammering this was so deftly accomplished that 

 every vestige of the process had disappeared, leaving only flat 

 surfaces on both sides, with a uniforna thickness of metal. If 

 these articles were the work of the mound-builders in jn-e- 

 Columbian times, then the people must have possessed arts 

 more advanced than those shown by the mound arts previously 

 studied. Thus a suspicion arose as to the correctness of the 

 prevailing opinion. 



National events interrupted the investigation, and carried 

 the investigator into other fields of activity; but while cam- 

 paigning in Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi, in 1861-64 

 he discovered and examined many other groups* of mounds. 

 In these new fields, also, most of the works of art unearthed 

 were of stone, bone, shell, and pottery, but in excavating a 

 mound with stone graves, near Nashville, Tennessee, more 

 glass beads were discovered and also an iron knife, very much 

 rusted, which was afterward lost. At the time of this find his 

 former suspicion became a hypothesis that the mounds from 

 which the glass, copper, and iron articles were taken were con- 

 structed subsequent to the advent of the white man on this 

 continent, and that the contents gave evidence of barter 

 between the civilized and savage races. 



Wlien the Bureau of Ethnology was first organized the 

 energies of its members were devoted exclusively to the study 

 of the North American Indians, and the general subject of 

 archeology was neglected, it being the dominant purpose and 

 preference of the Director to investigate the languages, arts, 

 institutions, and mythologies of extant tribes rather than pre- 

 historic antiquities; but certain archeologists, by petition, 

 asked Congress to so enlarge the scope of the Bureau as to 

 include a study of the archeology of the United States, and 

 thereupon, when the next appropriation was made, in Febru- 

 ary, 1881, the act of Congress was modified by including the 

 italicized words in the following extract: 



