34 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



quartz, finely polished, is from Indian Hill (1654), and is so neat and 

 symmetrical that it may have been intended for some game. The 

 diameter is two and one eighth inches, and the thickness one and 

 one eighth. It is a beautiful article. One fifty years older comes 

 from a stockade some miles south of this. It is a red sandstone 

 pebble, with both surfaces convexly ground, and with a small in- 

 dentation. The edges are picked, and it is four inches wide by one 

 and five eighths deep. A combined hammer stone and muller is 

 from Indian Hill, but it has the pit in the center of the fiat side. 

 The convex side is depressed, and the edge hammered. A fine nut 

 stone from Rome, nearly six inches across, has three cavities on one 

 side, one of them of a lozenge form. 



A curious elliptic pebble of brown sandstone is from Onondaga 

 Lake. It is ground and pitted as usual, and from this a sloping 

 surface has been ground toward each end. One from Cayuga 

 County has terminal grooves instead. On Mohawk sites mullers 

 are also found with European relics. 



Fig. 76 is an extremely small muller, but three quarters of an 

 inch across. It is a circular sandstone pebble distinctly ground on 

 one side, and was found on the Seneca River. 



PESTLES 



Pestles are everywhere found, as might be expected, but were 

 very sparingly used by the Iroquois, who preferred their wooden 

 pestle and mortar, as they do still. The Jesuit missionaries among 

 the Hurons expressed the same preference, although they had a 

 hand mill which the Indians delighted to turn. The primitive im- 

 plements gave the best results. Mr. Fowke thinks the cylindrical 

 pestle was used as a rolling pin, but has taken no notice of the long 

 flattened pebbles, so frequent in parts of New York. It may be 

 they were sparingly used elsewhere. Stone mortars are more com- 

 mon toward the coast, and the ordinary pestle or pounder must 

 often have been used without them. Prof. G. H. Perkins described 

 a pestle with a carved head in Vermont, and there is one of these 

 in the State Museum at Albany. Mr. Wagman had a fine one of 

 this kind from Lake George, with an animal head at one end. It 

 was 24 inches long and two thick. Several have been seen in the 



