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from twenty to forty feet wide, and for a distance of two and a half miles has been completely worked over by the ancient miner. I have been mining for the last twenty-five years on Lake Superior, but I have never seen anything to compare with this locality for ancient work.

I am confident that, when this district is thoroughly mined, discoveries will be made throwing more light than we now have on the character of the people who did this work.

In the depression in the outlying trap was found clean lake sand, and the rock thrown out of the pit first was thrown on the sand. There was no sign of vegetable mold between the rock and sand, but over all there was three and a half feet of made soil or decomposed vegetable matter.

In the pit there are tons of stone and stone-hammers, and a large quantity of ashes and charcoal.

In one I opened on a transverse vein on the same property, I found the scales of white-fish. At this pit the ancient miner had used large granite bowlders to hold up the hanging ground. These bowlders would weigh from 300 to 400 pounds, and were put in where the modern miner would place timber, to secure the ground. Nearly all the brands and timber we found in the pits were roots and stumps. This, with the fact of their using these large stones for timber, leads me to think that the ancient miners had used up all the timber in their reach, and consequently could not prosecute mining further.

There is another peculiarity in the hammers found in these mines-I only found one that was grooved, while on the south shore of the lake I never saw a stone-hammer that was not grooved.

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ANTIQUITIES OF YAZOO COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI.

BY J. W. C. SMITH, OF BENTON, MISS.

There is a mound on the Yazoo River, twenty miles below Satartia, worthy of note. It is situated at the foot of a tall bluff, and near the river. At the base it is, perhaps, one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet in diameter, fifty feet high, and flat on top; some fifty or sixty feet It evidently is the burial-place of some noted chief, and must have required months to build it, and the nearness to a high bluff precludes the idea of its having been built to escape from water. There are several smaller mounds in the neighborhood. Perhaps some scientist at Vicksburgh will explore it for you on application.

across.

Near Carthage, in Leake County, Mississippi, there is a small branch in which are many articles resembling petrified terrapin or tortoise heads; and where at one time was found here the genital organs of a man, also in stone.

ANTIQUITIES OF TENNESSEE.

BY DR. DANIEL F. Wright, of Clarksville, Tenn.

The locality in which the relics sent to the Smithsonian Institution have been collected, has been known as the "Indian grave-yard" as far back as any of the present inhabitants can remember, and has been more or less noticed according to the condition of the superincumbent soil as affected by successive inundations of the Cumberland. Thus, for many years prior to the present date, the graves from which these relics have been taken have been buried some eight or ten feet deep by the fluvial deposit, and have been forgotten by the present generation; but since the inundation of last spring, through some change in the current,, the receding waters have produced a contrary effect, and washed the graves completely bare, leaving the skeletons only covered with the stone slabs placed over them at the time of burial. The location is about fifty yards from the left bank of the river, and about three miles above Clarks-ville.

The following considerations will, I think, be deemed conclusive as. evidences of its having been a permanent and rather populous settle-ment of some tribe:

1st. The nature of the graves.-These are elaborately constructed. It is impossible to say how deep they were at the time of excavation, on: account of the shifting character of the soil above described; but every grave has a slab of shale-stone at the bottom; upon this the body lies,. and additional slabs are placed at the head and feet, and on each side,. all rising to the same level, which is rather more than high enough to cover the body. Finally, on the top of the inclosure so formed a large horizontal slab is placed, completely covering the whole; the earth is then thrown in, and the body thus left inclosed not only in a well-pro-tected grave, but in a complete stone coffin. In one place (and only one) a peculiar arrangement of the graves is noticed. Five or six graves. are so placed together that all the heads are nearly in contact, while the feet radiate outward so as to mark out the circumference of a cir cle something over twelve feet in diameter. On the whole, I suppose that more than forty skeletons, each in its separate grave, have been. taken up since the last overflow.

2d. The evidences of manufactures habitually followed.-These are flint. weapons and implements and pottery. Where the greater part of theflint-implements were found innumerable chips and flakes of flint were also observed, such as are struck off in the manufacture of flint articles; these are found in great abundance. In reference to the pottery, still stronger evidence of its being manufactured on the spot was discovered. We found an excavation of a circular form about six or eight feet in diameter, and four or five feet deep, which had been loosely filled with sand that was easily removed; and in shoveling it

out, there were found mixed with it in great abundance fragments of pottery, a quantity of charcoal, many charred and half-burned pieces of bark which had passed through several stages of combustion, some of them being in part entirely unaltered by the fire; and, above all, several large lumps of unworked clay, partially hardened by fire. The neighbors inform me that this clay must have been brought from a considerable distance, as none like it, and, indeed, no clay at all, is found within many miles of this place. In the specimens of pottery sent, I would call your attention to the peculiar markings on the concave surfaces of most of it. I at first supposed that these were made by some artificial process for decorative purposes, though it seemed strange to place decorations inside, the objects; but a neighboring gentleman called my attention to the exact resemblance these markings bore to the corrugations on beech-bark, and I was led to the conclusion that the pottery had been molded around an interior core constructed of beechbark. I think there is no doubt but that the excavation I have described was an oven or kiln for baking the pottery.

3d. The presence of infant skeletons in great number, buried with the same elaboration in all its details as above described in the case of the adult sepulchre. Some fragments of cranial bones from these are inclosed in package No. 7. The undeveloped and imperfectly ossified condition of the infant cranium renders it improbable that entire infantcrania will be discovered; which is the more to be regretted as it would be interesting to observe the bones in the early stage of the flattening process, which seems to have been customary in this tribe.

To sum up this part of my view, then: The elaborate and substantial character and large number of the graves, the evidences of arrangement for the manufacture of stone implements and pottery, and the presence of a considerable number of infant skeletons, all carefully buried, satisfy me that this burial-place was an appendage to some permanentlyoccupied Indian village.

But, when? There are some considerations which seem to throw us back upon prehistoric times for an answer-that is, what are to us Americans prehistoric times.

In Europe, these flint-weapons would carry us back to the mysterious nationalities which occupied the site of Troy before the Troy of Priam and Hector existed, or to those unknown tribes which lived in Hebron before the seed of Abraham had germinated in Palestine. With us, prehistoric times come down to a much more recent period. Anything previous to the permanent occupation of a region by the European races is with us prehistoric, and west of the Rocky Mountains there are tribes still in the neo-lithic stage of development, using just such flint arrowheads and hatchets as I send you, to-day.

The evidences that, relatively to the Boones and Donelsons and Robertsons who first settled these regions, the remains now under discussion are prehistoric, are as follows:

First. I have had conversations with very old settlers-persons whose recollections extend back fifty and even sixty years, and they report that no Indian village existed in that locality or anywhere near Clarksville; and not only so, but they speak of conversations with the Indians, who, in their childhood, frequently came here on hunting-expeditions, and that none of them knew of any tribe or had any tradition of any who ever had any permanent residence either near this burial-place or in the region at all; it was never within their knowledge anything but a hunting-ground.

Secondly. In his first visit to Kentucky, Daniel Boone spent a whole winter encamped near the mouth of Red River, (a small affluent of the Cumberland ;) in other words, on what is now the site of Clarksville; and that during that winter he did not see a single Indian, the country being only visited for hunting-purposes in summer-time.

This last statement I have on the authority of my friend, Professor Stewart, well known to your Institution. I have no means of verifying it by documents, though in Washington you have, I suppose, the means of doing so in the National Library.

Supposing, then, that I have rightly interpreted the facts so far before us, we are thrown back on all prehistoric times for the period of our village's existence, and have no means of determining whether it dates. before or after the discovery of the American continents by the European races.

The small package, No. 8, contains an invaluable relic in reference to our chronological difficulty. On examination you will find it to be a leaden bullet, completely covered with a bony accretion. This was found in close contact with the scapula of one of the exhumed skeletons. The manner in which it is enveloped with bony matters convinces me that it was lodged in the shoulder long before the Indian's death, and carried there for years. This proves that the Indians in question had relations, hostile at least, if not more intimate, with persons possessing fire-arms, and so brings down the antiquity of our village to a date subsequent to the appearance of the European races in the valley of the Mississippi. The closest estimate, then, we can make of the period when the vil lage existed from which these relics are derived, is that it was prior to the permanent settlement of this portion of the basin of the Cumberland, and subsequent to the first visit of European races, which still leaves us a range open to conjecture extending from the middle of the seventeenth century to, say, the time of the revolutionary war-a range of from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty years. This much premised, I would call your attention to some matters of detail in the relics to which this paper refers.

Opening the packages Nos. 4 and 5, I think you will be struck by a great diversity in the workmanship of the different articles. Thus, most of them are as roughly chipped out of the original flint as anything we know of in the rudest paleolithic times, and others are shaped with

some artistic skill to a predetermined form. Give your special attention to one article in package No. 5, wrapped in a separate piece of newspa per-probably the blade of a tomahawk. You will observe that it is ground down to a preconceived shape with a precision and finish which would do credit to a modern lapidary. I have also given a separate envelope to a curious implement made of a thin lamina of flint, in package No. 4. I am informed by persons acquainted with present Indian usages, that an exactly similar implement is now employed to scrape clean the inner surface of raw hides, prior to curing them for use.

Now, a few words about the three crania. Those in the packages 1 and 2 present the ordinary type of the Indian skull; narrow, with a low facial angle, and with the prognathous character very strongly marked in the facial bones-these characteristics being most pronounced in No. 2. But No. 3 rather puzzles me. The American Indian type is here much less pronounced, the facial angle higher, and the prognathous type scarcely marked at all. In all respects it seems to approximate the Caucasian type. You will also observe that the process of artificial flattening, so common among Indian tribes, has been applied to Nos. 1 and 2 with complete success, the flattening of the occiput being so great as to render the plane extending from the occipital condyles to the vertex absolutely vertical.

Now, on No. 3 this process has been very incompletely effected, having succeeded not at all on one side, and only imperfectly on the other.

If I knew more than I do of the tribe whose remains we are studying, I think I should venture upon the conjecture that No. 3 is the cranium of a half-breed, which would imply a still more intimate association with the white race than that short and sharp interview suggested by the impacted bullet.

Such as they are, however, the foregoing remarks are submitted to your riper judgment; they have been considerably longer than I anticipated when I commenced them, but I think that some interesting problems are suggested by the relics, and could not resist the temptation of attempting a solution.

I should remark that, although a large number of entire skeletons was exhumed, I did not see much to be gained by sending you anything beyond the crania. The only thing really noticeable about them was their great thickness, especially that of the maxillaries and the bones of the extremities; some of the femurs, though evidently not those of tall men, would, in bulk and weight, largely surpass those of any white man I have seen.

I forgot to state that the crania Nos. 1 and 2 are presented by Dr. W. T. McReynolds, of this place, who had obtained possession of them before my exploration.

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