1894,] Archeology and Ethnology. 357 
encountered them in scratching his wonted oven hole he might have 
mixed them with what was to grow by degrees into the present fire- 
blackened layer. 
The awe-inspiring entrance of the Nickajack Cave, (left bank of the 
Tennessee River, Marion County, Tennessee), though subject to partial 
invasion by river freshets that back the water of the cave creek sév- 
eral hundred yards into its channel, showed traces of aboriginal 
habitation as far as light penetrated. But the human refuse lay in a 
scattered talus on an uneven and craggy floor, about 250 feet wide, 
which, sloping steeply into the cave stream, was buried under masses 
of leached earth thrown upon it by nitre diggers in 1863-64. Where 
the remains of old fires were caught in hollows in the slanting ledge 
underlying this nitrous deposit, a trench (12 feet 10 inches long by 6 
feet wide, by 2 feet 10 to 3 feet 5 inches deep), revealed again a single 
homogeneous layer of human occupancy continued on an undisturbed 
shelf clear of the nitre heaps and containing the remains of Unio (5 
Species), Paludina, Trypanostoma, fresh water Drumfish and Deer, and 
with its bone awls, arrowheads, chips, hammerstones and pottery 
repeating the record of the Lookout Cave. Again all trace of more 
ancient human presence betokened by underplaced deposits was want- 
ing. Earlier peoples, if they existed, had avoided the Nickajack Cay- 
ern, and it is only pre-Columbian inhabitant had been the Neolithic 
Indian, who, strewing the alluvial meadows at its mouth with arrow- 
heads and hornstone chips, had left potsherds, pebble hammers and a 
perforated ceremonial stone, along with the remains of the cave mid- 
den Mollusca and the Deer, Tortoise and Rabbit, at the river-side shell 
heaps a mile away. 
Throughout the above investigation we have owed a grateful acknowl- 
edgement to the suggestion and kind encouragement and assistance 
of Professor Cope.—H. C. MERCER. 
The Trenton Gravel Discussion has thrown light upon Man's 
antiquity in North America, but has not settled it. 
» We know that geologically, modern Indians chipped the rude leaf 
shaped outlines which we may as well call “ Turtlebacks, ” but we do 
hot yet know who else made them. The “ Turtleback ” exists without 
the Indian in Europe, and the more we study it the less—unhelped by 
associated evidence—we care to call it “ Paleolith” or “ Implement 
on the one hand, or “ Reject ” “ Unfinished Implement ” or “ Failure’ 
on the other. 
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