Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/90

78 In the final chapters there is an illuminating account of the stone- shaping arts; the various processes of fracture, crumbling, abrading, incising, and piercing. The volume is made doubly attractive by numerous and well-chosen illustrations. The author is to be congratulated on having completed so auspiciously the first volume of the Handbook of American Antiquities.

Ever since the veterans of Sullivan's army, who had stormed and burned the native villages in the Iroquois country in 1789, returned to take up their land grants in central and western New York, the attractive relics of the Iroquois have been a prey to the curio seeker. Site after site of incalculable importance to science has been ruined by the clumsy spades of untrained, unobservant diggers, so that today, one hundred thirty years later, the greater number of Iroquoian graveyards are completely looted, the bones of the dead lie scattered on the surface, and the specimens of native manufacture taken from them have been sold or given broadcast half-way around the world.

The task of gathering up the scanty crumbs of data from any given site, as the writer knows from his own field experience, is an onerous one, and it is particularly gratifying to receive from the pen of the man who best knows the Iroquois and their archaeology, the two pamphlets named above, fragmentary though their contents must needs be.

The first booklet concerns a well-known prehistoric Seneca fort on the Reed farm at Richmond Mills, Ontario county, New York, not far from the outlet of Hemlock lake. The site itself, as is usual with Iroquois sites of the period under discussion, occupies a high sandy knoll between two deep ravines, thus being easily fortified against incursions by the Algonkian tribes, whose remains dot the nearby fields. It covers an area of five acres, and, judging by its extensive ash-beds and sidehill refuse dumps, was long and intensively occupied. The cemetery lies across a ravine, but as usual no objects occur with the dead.

In the ash and refuse heaps, however, quantities of pottery sherds, bone and antler utensils; chipped, rough, and polished stone implements occur. Some five effigy pipes, as well as others in terra-cotta and in