Plate 33. 
This plate illustrates some of the woodworking stone tools used by the Indians who 
lived in the Mississippi Valley. All but the two pieces at each end of the bottom row 
are types used by Indians during the period A.D. 1000 to historic times. The other 
two were made by earlier people. Although objects of wood seldom survive in the 
humid climate of eastern United States, it is known from occasional finds and from 
the accounts of the earliest explorers that wood was worked extensively and well. 
In 1895 an excavator for the Smithsonian Institution uncovered artistic wooden 
objects which included masks of deer and wolf, which had been preserved by being 
buried in the swamp muck of Key Marco Island on the west coast of Florida. These 
were recently exhibited in a showing of Indian art at the Nelson Gallery of Art in 
Kansas City (Coe, Sacred Circles, 1977, p. 63). 
The Gentleman of Elvas, a participant in the DeSoto expedition in A.D. 1539-1542, 
mentions several times in his narrative things made of wood. When the expedition 
first landed in Florida he speaks of houses ‘‘built of timber” and “‘a temple, on the top 
of which perched a wooden fowl with gilded eyes” (Bourne, 1904, p. 23). Many of the 
towns were fortified with wooden palisades. Here is his description of one of these: 
“The place was enclosed, and near by ran a small stream. The fence which was like 
that seen afterwards to other towns, was of large timbers sunk deep and firmly into 
the earth, having many long poles the size of the arm, placed crosswise to nearly the 
heighth of a lance, with embrasures and coated with mud inside and out, having loop- 
holes for archery.” He also describes dugout canoes which were a part of the daily 
life of the Indians which the Spaniards encountered along the Mississippi. Some of 
these were quite large, capable of holding sixty to seventy persons (p. 196). 
Garsilaso, another chronicler of the expedition, describes canoes which held seventy- 
five or eighty. This is probably an exaggeration, but he does state that they were 
made from one piece of wood (Varner & Varner, 1951). 
A. Catalog No. 18X E. Catalog No. 18X 
484 from St. Clair 129 from Union 
Co. AL Co, 1b 
B. Catalog No, 18X F. Catalog No. 18X 
32, provenience is 64 from Mont- 
unknown, gomery Co., MO 
C. Catalog No, 18X G. Catalog No. 18X 
30 from Tazewell 11 from Pike Co., 
mo.4C IL 
D, Catalog No, 18X H, 
Catalog No, 18X 
19 from Union 24 from r 
co. IL Clair Co., IL 
