Page:Anthropology.djvu/60

Rh pottery made of red clay, and fine gravel. The pieces were half an inch thick, or nearly so, and, judging from the curve, they may have been of considerable size.

One morning in March, 1880, a party of us went to the bluffs known locally as Buffalo Gap, a deep triangular hollow, inclosed on two sides by immense ledges of stone, towering high above the tree-tops, and projecting far over the base, and forming sheltered nooks which bid defiance to the storms of winter and the heat of summer.

All along the base of these rocks the ground is strewn with flint chippings, bones, bits of pottery, arrow-heads, rocks, and rubbish. We made excavations in several places, and to various depths, varying from 1 to 3 feet.

The earth is dry and loose, and composed of considerable vegetable matter, and has the appearance of having been forming slowly for ages. All through this dust we found bits of pottery, arrow-heads, charred bones, charcoal, bones split lengthwise to extract the marrow, mussel-shells, turtle-shells, deers' horns, bones and jaws of various kinds of mammals, a bunch of charred hay, a large limestone mortar, having a bowl nicely cut in the center, which was circular in form and 1 foot in diameter, and deep enough to hold about a gallon. On a fire-bed 2 feet from the surface were the fragments of an earthen pot, probably a cooking vessel, as it contained bones and a fragment of a deer's upper jaw; also other material, which we were unable to determine. Near this pot were numerous spherical bodies, resembling spice in form, white, hollow, and too fragile to be preserved.

The pottery. has markings on the surface like the impression of grass, twine, and sometimes small sticks, showing that the vessels were molded in some kind of woven sack or basket made of willows and twisted grass. Some of the fragments were smooth and thin, the coarser ones one-half inch thick, and made of pounded mussel-shells, small gravel, and red clay. The shells which were found were probably brought up for that purpose, the animal having been used for food. The arrow heads are rude and very poor compared with the field specimens of which I will speak later.

An old foil is near by, on top of a cliff, and cut off from the main land by a wall of stone, which is now nearly flat, covering a base 20 feet wide and about 150 feet long. t The fort is triangular, the wall making one side and the perpendicular rocks below forming the other two sides. It had but one point of access from below, which is a path up a crevice in the rock, and could have been easily defended from above. This has the appearance of being very ancient.

Near the Illinois Central Railroad track, 5 miles north of Cobden, are other large bluffs, and underneath are numerous beds, which have afforded a great many relics. Several human skeletons have been unearthed, more or less preserved, though usually badly decayed, but one skull