620 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [x. s., I, 1899
sils reported from the deep gravels. The Neale affidavit states that the mortars and other implements therein referred to were found in the tunnel, some 1500 feet from the mouth of the mine, and 200 or 300 feet in beyond the margin of the lava-cap of the mountain, and hence beneath several hundred feet of the volcanic deposits that covered the country before the valleys of today began to be scored out (see figure 26).
Is it not more reasonable to suppose that some of the typical implements of the Indians living at the mouth of Montezuma mine should have been carried in for one purpose or another, im- bedded in the gravels, and afterward dug up and carried out to the superintendent, than that the implements of a Tertiary race should have been left in the bed of a Tertiary torrent to be brought out as good as new, after the lapse of vast periods of time, into the camp of a modern community using identical forms ?
I took pains to have Mr Neale tell me the story of the finds in all possible detail. The account as related in the work of Dr Becker had evidently passed out of his mind in large degree, as it had also passed out of my own. His statements, made from memory, and written down in my notebook during and imme- diately following the interview, were to the following effect: One of the miners coming out to lunch at noon brought with him to the superintendent's office a stone mortar and a broken pestle which he said had been dug up in the deepest part of the tunnel, some 1500 feet from the mouth of the mine (see plate XXVill). Mr Neale advised him on returning to work to look out for other utensils in the same place, and agreeably to his expecta- tions two others were secured, a small ovoid mortar, five or six inches in diameter, and a flattish mortar or dish seven or eight inches in diameter ; these have since been lost to sight. On an- other occasion a lot of obsidian blades, or spearheads, eleven in number and averaging ten inches in length, were brought to him by workmen from the mine. They had been found in what Mr
�� �
