96 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



Mr Reed, who made the collection through many years of digging 

 at his leisure hours, has been careful to collect and catalog with 

 method. He found no objects of European manufacture and no 

 signs that the occupants of what he terms " the old fort " had eyer 

 seen the white man. The collection embraces good series of shell, 

 bone, antler, stone and clay objects. It is especially rich in fine 

 bone implements and early shell ornaments. The pottery unfor- 

 tunately is mostly fragmentary. The special value of this collection 

 lies in the fact that it may with reasonable certainty be called pre- 

 colonial Senecan. It is therefore a good type-collection of this 

 period and is valuable as a base for comparison. 



A mixed collection from Livingston county is that made by Mr 

 Fred H. Crofoot of Sonyea. It is the result of a surface examina- 

 tion of some forty sites up and down the Genesee valley from 

 the Honeoye Junction to Mount Morris, and of all the tributaries 

 within this region. Many stages of occupation are represented and 

 occupations beginning with the Esquimaux-like through the early 

 Algonkian, the mound culture, the later Algonkian, the early and 

 later Iroquoian into the colonial period. 



One of the thickly populated centers of the early Iroquoian 

 peoples is the area bounded on the west by the east shore of Lake 

 Ontario and on the north and northeast by the St Lawrence. This 

 geographical area is embraced in the present county of Jefferson. 

 Here have been a succession of occupations with the precolonial 

 Iroquois leaving the greater portion of cultural artifacts. Several 

 large collections have been made there, with those made by R. D. 

 Loveland and Charles Oatman leading in objects of interest. 

 Earlier small collections are those made by Dr R. W. Amidon, 

 Doctor Getman and Captain Oldham. The Museum acquired these 

 smaller collections between 1906 and 1909. This year the Museum 

 has been enabled to obtain both the Loveland and Oatman collec- 

 tions. Each collection is rich in fine examples of clay pipes, more 

 than 250 being embraced in both. Some have been carefully re- 

 stored from the broken fragments, thus showing almost exactly the 

 original forms. The range of ornamentation and relief decoration 

 is wide and on the whole is consistently Iroquoian. No entire clay 

 vessels were found in this locality, but the collections contain thou- 

 sands of valuable fragments. Bone and antler objects are numerous 

 and of good quality. 



From the region drained by the Susquehanna and its tributaries 

 we have acquired three small but not unimportant collections — 



