A PERFORATED TABLET OF STONE FROM NEW YORK.
By William Wallace Tooker, Sag Harbor, N. Y.
In every considerable collection of aboriginal antiquities can be seen those thin, perforated tablets of stone, commonly called gorgets, twine-twisters, pendants, or whatever else the theory or fancy of different writers or collectors have bestowed upon them.[1]
These fanciful titles are mostly conjectures, for it is a recognized fact that no one yet knows the aboriginal use of these tablets with any degree of certain.[2] Those with one to five perforations are all given the same name or put into the same class, without regard to the fact that those with more than two perforations of a recognized form were used for a different purpose and should be classed differently.
We do not call drills arrow-points, nor grooved axes celts, because they have the same kind of points or blades.
So it ought to be with the different forms of these perforated tablets. To those with one perforation perhaps belong the name of pendant, having been used for personal adornment, but as the greater number of those with two perforations bear no marks of having been worn suspended by a string, may be called twine-twisters or anything else that theory may invent but cannot prove. As the writer of this brief article does not care at present to theorize in regard to the uses of the tablets with one or two perforations we will leave those out of the subject and proceed to explain the object of this essay.
The tablets with four perforations similar to one already figured and described as a gorget by a well-known writer on this subject,[3] (who does not say whether the specimen bears any cord marks or not, probably not,) belong to another class, and were no doubt used for an entirely different purpose.
It is one of these tablets in my possession that I intend to describe and to prove, as I have already done to the satisfaction of all who have seen it, that it is neither a gorget, twine-twister, totem, or pendant, but something that I have never seen mentioned in any work bearing on the subject that has been accessible to me.
That something is nothing more nor less than a puzzle, a plaything made to amuse some young savage, or perhaps an older one, as we know they are easily amused.
This tablet, of which figures 1 and 2 show the obverse and reverse, is made of slate with the usual countersunk perforations common to all perforated tablets, and is marked on its edge with twenty-four tally or record marks. These have become nearly obliterated by time and weather. This tablet was found on Montauk Point, New York, and must have been
