prising spades and hoes, are not uncommon in the rich loamy terraces of our rivers, but are generally inferior in size and workmanship to those met with in that portion of Saint Clair and Madison counties known as the American Bottom. The spades are smaller and ruler, and the hoes are plain and without notches for fastening them to handles. The broad hornstone disks, discovered some years ago buried in the sand a short distance above the large Beardstown mound, and which I have described in a previous paper,[1] are supposed by some archæologists to have been intended for agricultural tools, though never introduced in general use. Of this however we have no positive evidence, and until our knowledge of this class of relics is increased, we must regard that strange deposit as an unsolved mystery.
Celts and grooved axes of granite and various augitic rocks, of all sizes and many patterns, have been, and still are, abundant here. The largest grooved ax in our collection weighs twelve and a half pounds; the smallest, one and a half ounces. Our largest celt, cut from a coarse-grained diorite, weighs eleven pounds; and the smallest, obviously a child's toy, weighs scarcely half an ounce. Flint arrow and spear points, knives, scrapers, and hatchets of the usual forms have been collected in Cass County in great profusion. Hammer-stones, nut-stones, discoidal stones, perforated "talismans" or "arrow straighteners" of ribbon-slate, of basalt, and of fossil wood; stone-balls, plain and grooved; in short, all of the ordinary types of rough and polished stone implements in use by the pre-metal Indian tribes have been and still are often found about our streams and bluffs.
The archæological remains of which I have so far briefly treated are not peculiar to this county or to any circumscribed locality, but are common in all those portions of Illinois and of almost all of the Western, Middle, and Southern States contiguous to water-courses, where the aborigines, with identical habits of life and by identical methods, obtained, with little effort, their food-supplies. And the comprehensive generalization which I have attempted of the antiquities observed here will, with trifling variations and additions, apply equally well to those of other counties and States.
I have yet to mention, however, one object recently discovered in this vicinity, of rare occurrence in the prehistoric remains of this State, belonging to a class so suggestive of savage, ethnic characteristics as to incite interest and thoughtful study. On the crest of one of the highest and most prominent points of the Sangamon bluffs, jutting out from the range into the valley, a promontory, conspicuous for many miles in all directions, was one of the common oval swellings of the surface, usually known here as an "Indian grave," but so overgrown with bushes and weeds and tall grass as to have required close inspection to distinguish it from the natural contour of the hill. The owner of the land, having occasion to build a pasture-fence over this point, set a
- ↑ Smithsonian Annual Report for 1876, p. 438 et seq.
