548 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHN^OLOGY [Bull. 137 



This game is simply a variety of the hoop and pole game which 

 was played over a vast extent of territory in North America. The 

 use of a stone roller, however, seems to have been confined to two 

 areas, one a small territory on the upper Missouri occupied by the 

 Mandan, Hidatsa, and probably the Arikara; the other the entire 

 Gulf region east of the Mississippi and including the tribes on both 

 banks of the latter, except that it is not reported from Florida 

 (Culin, 1907, pp. 420-527). There are specific notices of it among 

 the small tribes of the Mississippi, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creeks, 

 Cherokee, the smaller Muskhogean bands of eastern Georgia and 

 southern South Carolina, and the eastern Siouan tribes as far as the 

 Eno of central North Carolina. Hariot, Smith, and Strachey are 

 all silent regarding the existence of any such game among the Algon- 

 quian tribes of North Carolina and Virginia, and while we may feel 

 assured that similar games were played, it seems evident that they 

 were not striking features of the native aboriginal life. Evidence 

 at hand points to the probability that the chunkey game extended 

 over the southern or Catawba group of Siouans, but not to the 

 northern or Tutelo group or to the Algonquians. In the west evi- 

 dence is wanting as to such a game among the Atakapa, or Chiti- 

 macha, though this by no means proves that some type of hoop and 

 pole game was not played by them. They would, however, have had 

 some difficulty in obtaining suitable stone for rollers. The Caddo 

 apparently knew the hoop and pole game, but it is not certain that 

 they played it with stone rollers. (See Games, pp. 674-686.) 



MISCELLANEOUS USES OF STONES 



Other stone objects known to have been used in the Southeast 

 were mortars for cracking nuts and grinding paint, and, in prehistoric 

 times in the mountain country, mortars for grinding corn. These 

 were sometimes made of separate blocks of stone and sometimes 

 worked in the living rock. In the Tennessee country and neighboring 

 sections stone images have been found. We know that wooden 

 images were in use among the Virginia and Carolina Indians and 

 even the Creeks, but there is no certain mention of stone images in 

 the literature. The only possible exception is the sacred stone pre- 

 served by the Natchez in their temple, though it is not positively 

 known that this was worked. Finally, we may add two wholly dif- 

 ferent ways in which stones or rocks were utilized. One was in the 

 formation of fishweirs. These were either inland, like the one at 

 the falls of James River, into which fish were carried by the descend- 

 ing current, or coastal, like that reported by Garcilaso at Tampa 

 Bay, which caught fish as they swam shoreward (Garcilaso, 1723, 

 p. 94). Along most of the lower Atlantic and Gulf coasts, how- 



