Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/47

Rh mallet are given in time with the music, the blow being sharp and rebounding, in which the Indians say is the great medicine or principal knack of the operation.

The Cloud River Indians at the present day use a punch made of deer's-horn for striking off obsidian flakes from which to make arrow-heads.

Such a process as this may well have been adopted in this country in the manufacture of flint flakes; either bone or stag's-horn sets or punches, or else small and hard pebbles, may have been applied at the proper spots upon the surface of the flints, and then been struck by a stone or wooden mallet I have tried some experiments with such stone sets, and have succeeded in producing flakes in this manner, having been first led to suppose that some such system was in use by discovering, in the year 1864, some small quartz pebbles battered at the ends, and associated with flint flakes and cores in an ancient encampment at Little Solsbury Hill, near Bath, of which I have already given an account elsewhere. I am, however, inclined to think that the use of such a punch or set was in any case the exception rather than the rule; for with practice, and by making the blows only from the elbow kept fixed against the body, and not with the whole arm, it is extraordinary what precision of blow may be attained with merely a pebble held in the hand as a hammer.

The flakes of chert from which the Eskimos manufacture their arrow-heads are produced, according to Sir Edward Belcher, who saw the process, by slight taps with a hammer formed of a very stubborn kind of jade or nephrite. He has kindly shown me one of these hammers, which is oval in section, about 3 inches long and 2 inches broad, and secured by a cord of sinew to a bone handle, against which it abuts. The ends are nearly flat. This hammer is now in the Christy Collection at the British Museum and is figured by Ratzel. Another from Alaska, and several such hammers made of basalt from the Queen Charlotte Islands, have also been figured. It seems doubtful whether the proper use of these hammers was not for crushing bones.

Among the natives of North Australia a totally different method