1895.) Archeology and Ethnology. 393 
ARCHEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY! 
The Antiquity of Man at Petit Anse (Avery’s Island), 
Louisiana.—In digging fifteen and twenty feet through superficial 
soil into a very pure deposit of rock-salt, on a low hill at Avery’s Is- 
land, west of New Orleans, some miners found, on the- authority of 
Mr. T. F. Cleu (quoted by Professor Henry of the Smithsonian Insitu- 
tion, Trans. Chic. Acad. of Sciences, Vol. I, part 2), a fragment of 
ancient cane matting near the top of the salt, and fourteen feet below 
the surface of the soil. 
What made the discovery noteworthy was Mr. Cleu’s statement (see 
Foster’s Prehist. Races of the U. S., p. 56, and Nadaillacs Prehist. 
America, p. 36) that remains of the tusks and bones of a fossil elephant 
were found in the same soil two feet above the matting. Professor E. 
W. Hilgard and Dr. E. Fontaine afterwards (1867) said they found 
incredible quantities of pottery mixed with elephant and other large 
fossil bones at a depth of 12 feet below the surface. 
By that time a good deal of digging for salt had been done in the 
mines by white men, and the investigators of the locality seem to have 
drawn their deductions from what they saw and what they heard from 
workmen in these pits. Some of the observers thought that the layer 
of loam covering the salt had been washed down from the surround- 
ing hills. But its age would have been best settled by geological 
data of the bones it contained if the bones were in situ. 
Whether the fossil bones were part and parcel of the loam or not, 
the important question is—were the human remains (basket work, pot- 
tery, etc.) contempory with the fossils, or were they not contemporary ? 
And this has not been settled, for we do not know whether the com- 
paratively modern Indians dug pits through the loam down to the salt 
just as the white men dig them now, and whether, in such case, their 
pottery and basket work finding a way naturally to the bottom of 
their pits, had not thus become mingled with an underplaced bed of 
animal remains already resting on the salt. 
Comparatively recent peoples in Europe have dug graves and bur- 
ied skeletons on cave floors so as sometimes to let down their relics 
into more ancient company when the graves happened to penetrate in- 
1 This department is edited by H. C. Mercer, University of Pennsylvania. ` 
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