Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/682

 holmes] AURIFEROUS GRAVEL MAN 617

Implements from Deep Tunnels. — But what is to be said of the finds reported from the deep shafts and tunnels that penetrate obliquely or horizontally beneath the lava-capped summits of Table mountain? (See figure 26.) Relics of the swarming Diggers could not fall in horizontally, and if these relics do not belong with the fossil animals and plants in the gravels of the ancient river channels, we are left to determine how they could have been introduced, or how deception was so successfully and generally practiced.

��The fact that the implements recovered from the deep horizontal diggings are, so far as I have encountered them, all identical in type with the prevailing recent forms, emphasizes the need of inquiring with the utmost care as to whether or not these implements could have been introduced while the mines were in operation. As already shown, the mountain Indians were in those days very numerous about the mining camps. The men were employed to a considerable extent in the mines, and it is entirely reasonable to suppose that their implements and utensils would at times be carried into the mines, per- haps to prepare or contain food, or perhaps merely as a natural proceeding with half-nomadic peoples habitually carrying their property about with them from want of a house in which to lock it up. That any kind of native implement should be carried into the tunnels, there to be lost or forgotten and covered up as the handling and rehandling of gravels went on, is not unnatural.

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