1877. ] Anthropology. 495 
ANTHROPOLOGY. 
Tue CLASSIFICATION or STONE IMPLEMENTS. — The kindly criti- 
cism of my descriptions of the Indian relics found in New Jersey, in the 
Smithsonian Annual Report for 1875, by O. T. M., wherein he remarks 
that the writer has shown too great a fondness for classifying the various 
forms met with, suggests the propriety of offering a few remarks on the 
absolute necessity of field-work, in correctly pursuing archæological 
study, at the same time without intending to intimate that my lenient 
critic is not competent to pass judgment; for certainly it cannot be said 
of the Smithsonian collections which he has studied that they have been 
ignorantly gathered, but archæological specimens of themselves, pur- 
chased of dealers or picked up by others than students of the subject, are 
in a great measure valueless as helps to unravel any ethnological puzzle. 
I cannot conceive of a position in which one is more liable to fall into 
errors than in judging of the uses of stone implements from their shapes 
only. It cannot, in fact, be shown that the same pattern might not have 
had a far different use on the Atlantic coast from the present use of such 
a form in the far West. The “ leaf-shaped arrowheads” are stated to be 
used only as knives in Colorado and Utah, but were doubtless also ar- 
rowheads in New Jersey. It must be remembered, too, that the varieties 
of stone implements are by no means endless. Rather. their limited 
range of forms renders it obvious that the surroundings of a sea-coast 
tribe necessitate a different use for many of the simpler shapes than 
that of such tribes as occupied a mountainous region. The varieties of 
that would not be true of like forms found along the coast. This brings 
me to my subject proper, which is to insist that our safest guide in study- 
ing the relics of a locality long since deserted by its aboriginal occu- 
pants is the circumstances surrounding the discovery of every specimen 
found. To accomplish this an archxologist must be his own collector. 
Fully convinced of this, I have personally gathered several thousands of 
relics from a tract of about one thousand acres, and have by no means 
exhausted the supply; and this laborious field-work resulted in the con- 
Viction that such and such a form was for this or that purpose, as a rule. 
-As an illustration, let me instance those long, slender, tapering spears, 
which I have called “ fishing spears.” The conclusion that they were 
used solely (?) for such a purpose was based on the fact that they are es- 
sentially (that is, in this locality) a “ water find.” From the Delaware 
iver, and especially from the deep mud of Crosswick’s Creek, I have 
dredged numbers of this pattern; and when found on the surface I be- 
lieve they have always been very near the larger creeks and the river. 
This association, coupled with the shape of the specimens, which is 
' one admirably adapted to spearing fish, I submit, quite naturally suggests 
