Page:Anthropology.djvu/152

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY.151

and, furthermore, he has since received a number of pipe-heads, resembling it in shape, from the Upper Ottawa.

There is, in the Provincial Museum at Halifax, a collection of various aboriginal antiquities. It contains, besides the usual stone axes and arrow-heads, some small pieces of copper, similar to those from Bockman's Beach, and a flat pipe found in the interior of the province, remarkable from the circumstance of its having been found so far east, it being held that this is characteristic of the mound-builders or tribes of the tar West. There are also a few articles in the museum of the Mechanics' Institute of St. John, N. B. The most remarkable are the sculptured figure and medallion already referred to, and a small hammer with a short stick for a handle, remarkable for the manner in which it is fastened to the helve, being merely held by a band of burnt clay. Professor Jack, of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, N. B., is said to be the best authority in that province on this subject. In the collection of Judge Desbusay, of Lunenburg County, N. S., are also small pieces of copper from Bockman's Beach. Dr. Gray, of Mahone Bay; in the same county, also has a collection.


THE ABORIGINES OF FLORIDA.

By S. T. Walker.

In comparison with their number and size, the shell-heaps of Florida contain but few relics of the people who constructed them. Besides the ashes of their fires, the refuse of their feasts, and the fragments of their utensils, we find but little to aid us in our researches into their civilization or condition. The shell-heaps are so vast in size that it is only when the sea has swept away their slopes or when the lime burner has attacked their sides that we get an insight into the mysteries of their interior, and even then there is little to be obtained and but few uncertain data given upon which to base a calculation. By far the greater mass of these heaps is composed of shells, bones of mammals and birds, ashes, charcoal, and thin layers of soil. Scattered throughout the heap however there are quantities of broken pottery and near the top, a few objects of stone, and numerous implements of bone or shell.

The accompanying diagram represents a section of a shell-heap at Cedar Keys, Fla., formed by cutting through the center of a mound to open a street. This may be considered a fair representation of the interior of all shell-heaps with the exception of the unusually thick stratum of soil near the center of the mass. From this it will be seen that the pottery is pretty uniformly distributed throughout the heap from the bottom to the top and is generally in small fragments, most probably pieces of pots and utensils accidentally broken during the ordinary culinary opera-