36 
Knives. Suitably mounted points chipped from stone (Plate III, 
figures 9-15) may have been used as knives for cutting up meat and for 
similar purposes. Semilunar knives were not found, but, according to 
Cat. No. 276 in the Patterson collection, one made of veined, yellowish 
grey slate was found near cross roads, St. Mary, Guysborough county. 
Pestles and Mortars. No pestles or mortars were identified among 
the finds, although possibly some of the objects considered as hammer- 
stones, on page 51, may have been used as pestles, and some of the five 
large specimens considered as whetstones, on page 53, may have served 
as mortars. The specimen, Cat. No. 72 in the Patterson collection, 
called a pestle and referred to by Patterson (a, page 247) as grooved 
for use with a spring pole, is, according to W. J. Wintemberg, only a water- 
worn pebble and bears no signs of battering or wear. Pestles are found 
in southern New England. 
Cooking. Meat was, probably, roasted before open fires. Charcoal 
and ashes were frequently found in the shell-heaps. There must have 
been another method of preparing meat, as is indicated by the great 
number of potsherds found, most of which seem to be parts of broken 
cooking dishes rather than of water or ceremonial jars. A few of these 
fragments of pottery have carbonaceous matter, probably burned food, 
on the inner surface (Plate VIII, figure 4), and a few have it even on the 
edge of the rim and on the outside. This suggests that boiling was done 
in potter vessels. Stones, cracked and covered with soot, were found 
in excavating in the shell-heaps and are probably the stones used as pot 
props. These fire-cracked stones, however, appearing like stones that 
have been heated and dropped in water, remind us that boiling may have 
been done in pottery vessels or even in baskets, birch-bark dishes, or 
boxes, by adding hot stones. Lescarbot once saw an Indian boil meat 
in a trough formed of a tree-trunk into which he placed red-hot stones, 
and Piers states (a, page 103) that they also cooked thus in birch -bark 
receptacles. Some of the fire-cracked stones may be the result of baking 
roots or vegetables by covering with leaves and building a fire on top of 
them. 
Forks. Some of the objects considered as awls, on pages 63 and 64, 
may have served as forks. Mills (a, page 47) also considers that the 
so-called awls made of the tarsometatarsus of the wild turkey, so common 
in Ohio and Kentucky, and the large awl-like objects made of bone found 
in the Gartner village site of Ohio served for forks as well as awls. The 
modern Montagnais Indians make a fork, which they use for punching 
meat while it is being smoked, by binding together four sharpened splint 
bones of the moose exactly like the twenty-three similar bones classified 
as awls, one of which is seen on Plate XVII, figure 15. One of these 
modern Montagnais forks is illustrated on Plate XXI, figure 3. 
Pottery. Fragments of pottery were found in each of the shell-heaps 
in which excavations were made and apparently in proportion to the extent 
of the excavations. Five hundred and sixty-five were found in heap A, 
six hundred and three in heap D, twenty in the refuse of the prehistoric 
cemetery, four in heap K, sixteen in heap L, one hundred and two in heap 
M, and twenty-one in heap N. Fragments of pottery in the Patterson 
