IROQUOIS USES OF MAIZE 



25 



Fig, 



Antler hoe blade (Cut 

 is ^ actual size.) 



The writer has found in various old sites pieces of flattened antler^ 

 [see fig. i] with one worn edge and the lower surfaces well polished 



which seem to have been hoe blades. In 

 the Mississippi valley and often in New 

 York hoe heads of picked and chipped 

 stone were used. 



Where wooden hoes were used it is 

 probable that the digging ends were hard- 

 ened in the fire by a semicharring of the 

 surface. Hardening in this manner was 

 usual where a resisting surface was 

 needed. 



Thomas Hariot, a keen and reliable 

 observer though not always a good specu- 

 lator, has left us in his Brief and True 

 Report an excellent description of the 

 cultivation of maize by the coastal In- 

 dians of Virginia. In 1587 he writes: 



All the aforesaid commodities for victuals are set or sowed some- 

 times in grounds apart and severally by themselves, but for the most 

 part together in one ground mixtly : the manner thereof with the 

 dressing and preparing of the ground, because I will note unto you 

 the fertility of the soil, I think good briefly to describe. 



The ground they never fatten with muck, dung, or anything, 

 neither plow or dig it as we in England but only prepare it in a sort 

 as followeth: A few days before they sow or set the men with 

 wooden instruments made almost in the form of mattocks or hoes 

 with long handles, the women with short peckers or parers, because 

 they use them sitting, of a foot long and five inches in breadth, do 

 only break the upper part of the ground, to raise up the weeds grass 

 and old stubs of cornstalks with their roots. The which after a day 

 or two days drying in the sun, being scraped up into many small 

 heaps, to save them the labor of carry hig them away, they burn to 

 ashes. And whereas some may think that they use the ashes for to 

 better the ground, I say that then they would either disperse the 

 ashes abroad, which we observe they do not, except the heaps be 

 too great, or else would take special care to set their corn where the 

 ashes lie, which also we find they are careless of. And this is all 

 the husbanding of their ground that they use. 



Then their setting or sowing is after this manner. First, for their 

 corn, beginning in one corner of the plot with a pecker they make a 



1 Cf. Parker, A. C. Excavations in an Erie Indian Village. N. Y. State 

 Mus. Bui. 117. p. 535. , 



