474 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



them fire-cracked stones and charcoal, evidence, it may be, of man 

 contemporaneous with the American elephant. There are sites 

 which yield the monitor pipe, others that yield the polished slates 

 called banner stones, gorgets and bird-shaped stones and the notched 

 flints far different from the flints shaped by later comers. That the 

 people who made these things were of the American race is evident, 

 but of what tribe or stock is a question yet to answer. Neither 

 is there yet any way of discovering who their descendants of today 

 are, if perchance their blood yet flows in human veins at all. At 

 a later period a new stock of people invaded the region but whether 

 they found it inhabited or whether there was a struggle in which 

 the old race was expelled is merely a matter of conjecture now. 

 Evidences of the wide distribution of these old people seem to 

 preclude the theory of their utter extermination and it seems more 

 probable that they became absorbed by their conquerors or became 

 expelled to regions where their environment changed their culture. 



The later invaders who displaced the builders of the mounds and 

 makers of polished slate implements seem to have been some early 

 branch of the Huron-Iroquois family. Their territory is character- 

 ized by the earth walls and inclosures which they left and by the 

 pottery and triangular arrow points which are never found on 

 earlier sites untouched by other occupations. The early Iroquoian 

 sites are still further differentiated by the ossuaries which are found 

 upon many of them. Later this territory came into the possession 

 of a people whom we recognize as the Eries, a branch of the Huron- 

 Iroquois, but a people whose culture differed from the earlier 

 Iroquoian peoples of whom they are without doubt the descendants. 

 After the expulsion of the Eries in 1654 the region remained un- 

 inhabited save by wanderers and hunters and not until after the 

 Revolutionary War did it become the hunting grounds of the Sen- 

 ecas who had trails through it, one of which passed close to the 

 Erie site at Ripley. Over this trail the Senecas for years traveled 

 on their way to the settlements on the Sandusky in Ohio. Another 

 great trail extended down what was once the Portage road to 

 Chautauqua lake. It began at Barcelona harbor. 



There have been noted numbers of sites of aboriginal occupation 

 east of a meridian line drawn through Chautauqua lake and touch- 

 ing Lake Erie on the north and the Pennsylvania line on the south. 

 West of this line, from the archeologist's standpoint, lies a prac- 

 tically untouched region, a strange fact since it presents an excep- 

 tionally inviting field for investigation, being as it is, the border- 

 land between the territory of the tribes of Iroquoian stock and the 



\ 



