PINEY BRANCH (D. C.) QUARRY WORKSHOP AND ITS IMPLEMENTS.1 BY THOMAS WILSON.2 (Continued from page 885.) II. Mr. Holmes' paper comprises 26 printed pages. The first part is occupied with a description and statement of facts; the second part is as I have shown made up of theory, assumption, opinion. I have examined them sufficiently to show their want of value. But the climax is reserved to the closing portion, for, commencing on page 19 and continuing 8 pages is a chapter relating to the age of the workshop and the race of the men who worked it. Mr. Holmes' conclusion is that though the quarry is prehistoric the age is not great and the race was the Modern Indian. This he argues with profundity, going into the racial question in detail and with great elaboration. I decline to argue these propositions. I am appalled at the temerity as well as the dogmatism with which he decides these abstruse questions. He is a gentleman for whom I have the highest regard. I have known him well and favorably for many years. He has studied and written upon art products and art evolution and their relation with prehistoric man, in a philosophical and artistic strain which has done credit to his logic, and been as much benefit to art as to archæology. But Sir John Lubbock, Sir John Evans, Prof. Tylor, Sophus Müller, Hildebrand, Montellius, Naidallac, Hamy, de Mortillet and Cartailhac and the host of eminent Europeans, archæologists and anthropologists, of whom Keane is the latest author, who have spent their lives in the study of this science, 1Read before the Anthropological Society, Tues day Evening, December 4, 1894. 2 Curator of Prehistoric Anthropology, U. S. National Museum, Washington, D. C. have not ventured upon the determination of these questions of prehistoric ages and races. with the confidence of Mr. Holmes, and certainly they do not decide these important questions with even a fraction of the satisfaction and certainty which seems to have inspired him. Mr. Holmes did not content himself with the things of today which he saw in the quarry, but turned his mind's eye back when the quarry was being made and depicts it in the time of antiquity, with apparently as much certainty as if he had been then and there present. He not only describes the work with the detail and positiveness I have shown, telling the periods to which it belonged and the race and culture of the men who did the work, but he assumes to decide upon the objects not there. He determines not only upon what was left in the quarry, but he decides with equal positiveness upon the ultimate purpose and intention of the workman and the future use and destination of the implements which had been transported elsewhere. * He describes in several places the leaf-shaped blade-the "third stage" of his process-straight and symmetrical, with edges as slightly beveled as consistent with strength, less than half an inch in thickness and shown in i to p, Pl. IV (my Pl. XIX), and says "when they were realized, the work of this shop was ended" (XX), "they, and they only, were carried away to destinies we may yet reveal" (p. 13). "No examples of the successful quarry products were left upon the ground " (p. 15). All forms available for further shaping or immediate use were carried away as being the entire product of the shop * for final finishing" (p. 15). "This was a stage of advancement which made them portable and placed them fully within reach of processes to be employed in finishing, and that they had been carried away to the villages and buried in damp earth (cached), that they might not become hard and (or) brittle before the time came for flaking them into the forms required in the arts. The history of the quarry forms is not completed, however, until we have noted their final distribution among the individuals of the various tribes, until we have witnessed the final step in the shaping process—the flaking out of specific forms with a tool of bone-and their final adaptation to use and dispersal over the country," (p. 18). "Having reached a definite conclusion that the blades were the exclusively worked product of the quarry," he "was led to investigate their subsequent history" (p. 18). The italics are mine. His investigation into the subsequent history of these objects led him to define a cache. "A 'cache' is a cluster or hoard of stone implements, numbering, perhaps, a score or more, secreted or deposited in the earth and never exhumed. Such hoards are frequently discovered by workmen in the fields," (p. 18). Pursuing the "subsequent history" of these implements, I propose to go into the region round about Piney Branch, examine the aboriginal village sites of the District of Columbia, the fields containing these alleged secret hoards or caches, and the known places of aboriginal occupation within the neighborhood where these implements were said to have been carried, and see what have actually been found there, what of caches, what of leaf-shaped blades, and what of implements which had been subjected to the (fourth or other) "processes to be employed in finishing, when they were flaked into the final forms required in the arts" (p. 18), and I propose we compare the the objects actually found in these distant places, with what Mr. Holmes said would be found. I look through my Department in the National Museum for the leaf-shaped implements which, according to the theory of Mr. Holmes, were made at Piney Branch and carried out to the homes of the Indians, their makers, in the District of Columbia, and I find the numbers insignificant; while, as to caches, the Bureau of Ethnology, through Prof. Cyrus Thomas, has lately made a catalogue of the "Known Prehistoric Works in the Eastern United States," among them deposits, hoards, or caches, and there is not a single cache reported from the District of Columbia, this, despite the statement of Mr. Holmes that" such hoards are frequently discovered by workmen in the field.” In the settlement of these questions, it is of high importance that so far as possible, facts and not guesses should be given. I have taken the trouble to segregate the specimens in my Department in regard to material and locality and to ask a similar report from such private collectors as I could reach. The results I have given in the form of tables, and I have attempted in these to draw a sharp line between the implements which might, according to the Mr. Holmes' theory, have come from Piney Branch quarry, and those which did not. No implement of quartz, found here or elsewhere came from the Piney Branch quarry, nor any of felsite or rhyolite, nor of argillite, shale or ferruginous sandstone, nor of flint, chert, or jasper; for Piney Branch was a quarry of quartzite only. The following tables show the Aboriginal chipped stone implements from the District of Columbia and its neighborhood, divided according to material, form, locality, and mode of deposit, so as to show the number of quartzite leaf-shaped blades which might have come from Piney Branch quarry, according to Mr. Holmes' theory, and to compare them with those differing in these conditions, and thereby show what number did not come from Piney Branch. TABLE 1. CACHES, HOARDS OR DEPOSITS OF LEAF-SHAPED BLADES. There have been found in the District (Table I) but two caches of quartzite, containing together only 12 leaf-shaped blades. These are according to Mr. Holmes' theory, "the entire product of the shops" (p. 15), which "had been carried away to the villages and buried in the damp earth (cached) that they might not become too hard and (or) brittle." This was a sorry product of so extensive a quarry as Piney Branch with the "500,000 pieces of waste and failures" found therein by Mr. Holmes; and must have been a sore disappointment to even the cynical and thriftless Indian. Plate XXIII represents 20 specimens of a cache of 32 arrow or spear heads and leaf-shaped implements found near Pierce's Mill, Rock Creek. Most of the specimens are broken. They are of porphyritic felsite and, therefore, never had any relation with the quartzite quarry at Piney Branch. Should it be urged that some of the leaf-shaped blades may not have been cached or, if so, that the caches had been disturbed and the blades scattered over the surface, I have made a schedule of these, (table II), which shows a total of 1,948 leafshaped blades found on the surface, not cached, of which 1,065 were of quartz, felsite, argillite, etc., and but 883 of quartzite. It TABLE II. LEAFED-SHAPED BLADES-NOT CACHED. |