PREHISTORIC MAN IN LAFAYETTE COUNTY. 407 



nection with flint chips, arrow-heads, ancient pottery, etc., on the site of an 

 ancient Mound-builder village at Lexington, Missouri, was molded by the ancient 

 copper-workers referred to by Mr. Conant, as above quoted. It was too small 

 for any practical use as an axe or weapon, but the rich shiny quality of polished 

 copper would render it as precious a metal with a primitive and rude people as 

 gold is with our modern nations \ and hence it is presumed that this specimen was 

 probably an amulet or else the token of authority owned by some barbaric chief. 

 Another curious relic which I found there was a piece of brown hematite, 

 wrought or flaked off into the shape of a box turtle, one and one-half inches long, 

 one and three-sixteenth inches wide and one-half inch deep from top of the round- 

 ed back to the flat; bottom part. It is so manifestly flaked into its present shape 

 that there cannot be any mistake about it; and the bottom or flat side is worn 

 very smooth. My conclusion is that it was a game piece of some sort, to be 

 moved around on a marked robe, or on the ground, something after the fashion 

 of checke s, morris men, etc., either for pastime or gambling purposes. Theie 

 was found, a mile or more from this ancient village site, and sent to me by Ccl. 

 John Reid, of Lexington, a ball of flinty hornstone about as large as a mediun.- 

 sized Osage orange, and I think from its appearance of wornness on one side that 

 it was made by the stonefolk and used as a muller or pestle for triturating their 

 parched corn, roasted acorns, etc., and probably also for pulverizing red, yellow, 

 and other colors of ochre to mix their paints for war parties, dances, feast days 

 and grand occasions. Mr. Jackson Cox, of Sniabar township, plowed up in his 

 field a very fine specimen of ancient stone pipe and sent it to me. It is of ovoid 

 form, with a groove and creases worked very neatly around each way from the stem 

 hole; its material is a heavy, compact dirty-blue variety of pipestone; the bowl 

 cavity is relatively small, and that and the stem-hole are both of a uniform sharp 

 taper, as if the maker did not know how to make a hole as large at bottom as at 

 top, and the groove, therefore, may have been intended to hold in place a thong 

 by which the pipe stem was held into its socket. 

 " The teubner collection. — Mr. Charles Teubner, of Lexington, Missouri, 



has a collection of mound-builder relics numbering over 2,300 specimens in flint, 

 such as arrow-heads, spear-heads, javehns, daggers, bird-darts, drills, reamers, 

 fish-spears, shovels, hoes, scrapers, knives or lances, game pieces, etc., etc. The 

 materials represented in these specimens are flint, hornstone, agate, chert, chal- 

 cedony, hematite, slate, milky quartz, and vitreous or glassy quartz crystal. 

 Among these are over one hundred specimens known as bird-darts, being per 

 fectly wrought and finished arrow-heads, less than an inch long — some very tiny 

 ones, only half an inch or five-eighths in length. These are supposed to have 

 been designed especially for shooting small birds of brilHant plumage, the feathers 

 of which were used by some tribes in making a rich and gaudy kind of cloth, 

 which exceeded in princely gorgeousness and splendor the costliest silks and 

 velvets known to European courts. It ■ was made in about the same way that 

 some good housewives nowadays make most elegant rugs, by knitting common 

 store twine and looping a small shred of silk fabric into each stitch, and when fin- 



V— 26 



