30 PREHISTORIC TEXTILE ART. |etb.ann.13 



ing coffee exported from Havanna to the United States. The female had iu her hand 

 a fan formed of the tail feathers of a turkey. The points of these feathers were 

 curiously bound by a buckskin string, well dressed, and were thus closely bound for 

 about one inch from the points. About three inches from the point they were again 

 bound, by another deer skin string, in such a manner that the fan might be closed 

 and expanded at pleasure. • - • 



The cave in which they were found, abounded in nitre, copperas, alum, and salts. 

 The whole of this covering, with the baskets, was perfectly sound, without any 

 marks of decay.' 



There was also a scoop net made of bark thread; a mockasin made of the like 

 materials ; a mat of the same materials, enveloping human bones, were found in 

 saltpetre dirt, sis feet below the surface. The net and other things mouldered on 

 being exposed to the sun.- 



In the year 1815 a lemarkably iuterestiug set of mortuary fabrics was 

 recovered from a saltpeter cave near Glasgow, Kentucky. A letter from 

 Samuel L. Mitchell, published by the Araericau Autiquarian Society, 

 coutains the foUowiug description of the condition of the human remains 

 and of the nature of its coverings : 



The outer envelope of the body is a deer skin, probably dried in the usual way, 

 and perhaps softened before its application, by rubbing. The next covering is a 

 deer skin, whose hair had been cut away by a sharp instrument, resembling a hat- 

 ter's knife. The remnant of the hair, and the gashes iu the skin, nearly resemble the 

 sheared pelt of beaver. The next wrapper of cloth is made of twine doubled and 

 twisted. But the thread does not appear to have been formed by the wheel, nor the 

 web by the loom. The warp and filling seemed to have been crossed and knotted by 

 an operation like that of the fabricks of the northwest coast, and of the Sandwich 

 islands. - - * The iunerraost tegument is a mantle of cloth like the precediug; 

 but furnished with large brown feathers, arranged and fastened with great art, so 

 as to be capable of guarding the living wearer from wet and cold. The plumage is 

 distinct and entire, and the whole bears a near similitude to the feathery cloaks 

 now worn by the nations of the northwestern coast of America.' 



The Bureau of Ethnology had the good fortuue to secure recently a 

 number of representative pieces of burial fabrics of the classes men- 

 tioned in the preceding extracts, and somewhat detailed descriptions of 

 these will sufficiently illustrate the art as practiced by the early 

 inhabitants of the middle portions of the country. 



The relics which have come into the possession of the Bureau were 

 obtained iu 1885 by Mr. A. J. McGill from a rock shelter on "Clifty" 

 or Cliff Creek, Morgan county, Tennessee. Mr. J. W. Emmert, through 

 whom they were procured, reports that they were found in a grave 

 3J feet below the surface and in earth strongly charged with niter and 

 perhaps other preservative salts. The more pliable cloths, together 

 with skeins of vegetal fiber, a dog's skull, some bone tools, and por- 

 tions of human bones and hair, were rolled up in a large split-cane mat. 

 The grave was situated about as shown in the accompanying section 

 (figure 4). A shelf some 20 feet iu width, with depressed floor, occurs 



'Nat. and Abor. Hist, of Tean.. John Haywood. Nashville, 1823. pp. 163-165. 



' Ibid., p. 62. 



3 Trans, and Coll. Amer. Autiq. Sor. Worcester, 1820, vol. I. pp. 318, 319. 



