Some observations on the ethnography and archaeology of the American aborigines / By Samuel George Morton.

  • Morton, Samuel George, 1799-1851.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some observations on the ethnography and archaeology of the American aborigines / By Samuel George Morton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/24 (page 16)
    Besides these there are other slight modifications of form which it is unnecessary to particularize. These disks are made of the hardest stones, and wrought with admirable symmetry and polish, surpassing any thing we could readily conceive of in the humbler arts of the present Indian tribes; and the question arises, whether they are not the works of their seemingly extinct progenitors ?—of that people of the same race, (but more directly allied to the Toltecans of Mexico,) who appear in former times to have constituted populous and cultivated communities throughout the valley of the Mississippi, and in the southern and western regions towards the gulf of Mexico, and whose last direct and lineal representatives were the ill-fated Natchez ? I have made much inquiry as to the localities of these and analogous remains, but hitherto with little success. I am assured that they have been found in Missouri, perhaps near St. Louis; and in very rare instances in the northern part of Delaware. Dr. Ruggles has sent me the plaster model of a small, perforated, but irregularly formed stone of this kind, taken from an ancient In¬ dian grave at Fall River in Rhode Island; but Dr. Edwin H. Davis, of Chilicothe, in a letter recently received from him, in¬ forms me that he had obtained, during his excavations in that vicinity, no less than “ two hundred flint disks in a single mound, measuring from three and a half to five inches in diameter, and from half an inch to an inch in thickness, of three different forms, round, oval and triangular.” These appear, however, to be of a different construction and designed for some other use than those I have described; and Dr. Davis himself offers the probable sug¬ gestion, that u they were rude darts blocked out at the quarries for easy transportation to the Indian towns.” The same gentle¬ man speaks of having found other disks formed of a micaceous slate, of a dark color and highly polished. These last appear to correspond more nearly to those we have indicated in the above diagrams. Besides these disks, I have met with a few spheroidal stones, about three inches in diameter. One of these accompanies the disks from South Carolina, and is marked with a groove to re¬ ceive the thumb in throwing it. A similar but ruder ball is con¬ tained among the articles found by Mr. Atwater in the mound near Huron, Ohio.