Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/30

12 islands, mounds may be seen, consisting chiefly of thousands of cast-away shells of the oyster, cockle, and other mollusks of the same species as those which are now eaten by man. These shells are plentifully mixed up with the bones of various quadrupeds, birds and fish, which served as the food of the rude hunters and fishers by whom the mounds were accumulated. I have seen similar large heaps of oysters, and other marine shells, with interspersed stone implements, near the sea-shore, both in Massachusetts and in Georgia, U. S,, left by the native North American Indians at points near to which they were in the habit of pitching their wigwams for centuries before the white man arrived.

Such accumulations are called by the Danes, Kjökkenmödding, or 'kitchen-refuse-heaps.' Scattered all through them are flint knives, hatchets, and other instruments of stone, horn, wood, and bone, with fragments of coarse pottery, mixed with charcoal and cinders, but never any implements of bronze, still less of iron. The stone hatchets and knives had been sharpened by rubbing, and in this respect are one degree less rude than those of an older date, associated in France with the bones of extinct mammalia, of which more in the sequel. The mounds vary in height from 3 to 10 feet, and in area are some of them 1000 feet long, and from 150 to 200 wide. They are rarely placed more than 10 feet above the level of the sea, and are confined to its immediate neighbourhood, or if not (and there are cases where they are several miles from the shore), the distance is ascribable to the entrance of a small stream, which has deposited sediment, or to the growth of a peaty swamp, by which the land has been made to advance on the Baltic, as it is still doing in many places, aided, according to M. Puggaard, by a very slow upheaval of the whole country at the rate of two or three inches in a century.

There is also another geographical fact equally in favour