Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 29.djvu/473

Rh "That the savage is usually a hunter will be admitted, but that this savage hunter dues not grind the stone implements he uses is contrary to the fact; at all events in modern times. What shall be said of the entire aboriginal race of North America?—they are not herdsmen, they never have been herdsmen, and yet very few classes of stone implements from that country are unrubbed, and, strangely enough, one of these, the so-called flint hoe, is connected with a still higher phase in the proposed scale—the agricultural. Indeed, in America, agriculture was practised by the stone-using races to a considerable extent. Almost all the tribes south of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and west of the Rocky Mountains, grew maize. The tribes east of the Mississippi, principally towards the north, were all, however, in the hunter state when first encountered by Europeans. At all events, in North America, rubbed stone implements are not characteristic of the herdsman phase, which indeed never existed there at all; and I doubt whether it can be shown that rubbed stone implements were not equally in use in North America by both the hunting and the agricultural tribes. Nor can it be urged, so far as America is concerned, that great skill in the manufacture of stone implements is necessarily indicative of any advance in general culture, for some of the more highly-finished stone arrow-heads are made by very degraded tribes inhabiting the Rocky Mountains.

"I admit that the bronze-using Mexicans were agriculturists, but the proposed system of classification connecting the hunting phase with the use of chipped stone implements, the herdsman phase with the use of rubbed stone implements, and the agricultural phase with the use of bronze is wholly inapplicable to, at least, the entire continent of North America.

"It would be beyond my limits to pursue this branch of the subject further. Sufficient has been said to show that, in dealing with these periods, no general arguments as to culture can be deduced from the remains found in different countries and districts; each series of facts must be separately and cautiously investigated before an opinion can be safely pronounced upon it.

"The stone hatchets and implements in use by modern savages are, for the most part, fashioned by the processes of "flaking," "pecking," and "grinding." In this respect they resemble the more ancient specimens found upon the surface soil, and in the tumuli, of nearly all countries. Such implements are usually made of the toughest varieties of stone to be found in the neighbourhood; and in chalk districts flint was the material chiefly employed. The stone hatchets of modern savages also bear a general resemblance in form to the pre-historic rubbed stone hatchets, and, as I have before said, they are to be classed together as belonging to the Neolithic, or New Stone Period.

"I commenced by saying that the Stone Period as a whole does not afford a measure of time; but what is true of it as a whole is not true of one of its parts, the Palæolithic, or Old Stone Period, which has a distinct bearing upon time relative.

"The implements belonging to this Period are found in undisturbed beds of gravel, or in caves beneath unbroken layers of stalagmite, associated with remains of animals, some of which are extinct, such as the mammoth, whilst others, such as the musk-sheep and the rein-deer, have migrated to distant and, at present, colder regions.