THE ARCHEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK 247 



the monitor pipe, others that yield the pohshed slates called ban- 

 ner stones, gorgets, and bird stones and the notched flints far 

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

 who made these things were of the Indian race is evident, but of 

 what tribe or stock is a question we must yet determine. 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 older 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 ne\er 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 Erie, a branch of the Huron-Iro- 

 quois, but a people whose culture diff'ered from the earlier Iro- 

 quoian peoples of whom they are without doubt the descendants. 

 After the expulsion of the Erie in 1654 the region remained unin- 

 habited save by wanderers and hunters and not until after the 

 Revolutionary War did it become the hunting grounds of the 

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

 Erie site at Ripley. Over this trail the Seneca 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 Chau- 

 tauqua 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 touching 

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

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

 untouched region, a strange fact since it presents an exceptionally 

 inviting field for investigation, being as it is the borderland between 

 the territory of the tribes of Iroquoian stock and culture region of 

 that mysterious people for the sake of convenience termed " mound 

 builders." 



