History of Monmouth County, New Jersey. Pt. 1, Part 4

Author: Ellis, Franklin, 1828-1885
Publication date: 1885
Publisher: Philadelphia : R.T. Peck & Co.
Number of Pages: 974

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some of the pots another sand was used of an extraordinary angular form, so much so as to be evident that it had not been subjected to the action of water. For a while it was a puz- zle to me. At last a lucky find explained it all. I noticed in the fire-place some pieces of gneiss, or granitoid rocks, not at all belonging to the region, and which were friable to a remarkable degree. These had been heated and used often as boiling-stones. I pulverized a piece and it gave me the very sand which had been used in tempering the clay for the pots. In all this there was real economy, for as cooking stones, unless heated to vitrifaction, they could be used again and again, and for sand-making the oftener they were so used the better. It is a little remarkable that these methods of tempering clay for pottery-that is, using pulverized shell and pulverized burnt rock-are identical with the methods shown in the sherds of the Scandinavian middens.

As to the fashioning of the pots : while some of the more delicate small ones are the result of the hand-cunning of the potter, some seem to have been made by plastering or working the clay upon some suitable form, such as a gourd, and the larger and coarser ones upon a basket woven for the purpose. In either case the form would be burnt out in the baking of the pot. Some of these pots were used for boil- ing by hanging over the fire. In such case a ring of withes was put around and under the lip or flange at the edge of the pot, and to this ring, or band, was attached a handle of the same character, which was suspended to a pole extended across the fire. The band of withes around the pot was protected from the fire by a plastering of wet clay.

Near to the midden I have upon occasion found the remains of what I must call arrow- smithies. These were the places where the Indian arrow-smiths wrought. This making of arrow-heads of stones was, in its best phases, a high art. These smithies told me that then, as now, in a skilled vocation there were grades of professional excellence, with the bungler at bottom and the artist at top. If the modern carpenter is known by his chips, the ancient arrow-maker was known by his flakes. I have

1 The draft on this deposit for material for road-making and ballast for oyster-vessels going to Virginia through Bome twenty years has not left a vestige of this midden.

ARCHÆOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY.

found a place where were flakes of a soft ma- terial, simply indurated clay, being nodules or cores taken from the clay cliffs near by. As those flakes would wear away with age, they were not as numerous as they once were. Here were fragments of the arrows broken in the process of making. They were nearly all of the very simplest type of arrow-head,-the loz- enge form. Elsewhere I have found the smithy where a somewhat better type of work was done, the material being a gray, compact basalt. "Here the flakes were in quantity and the sur- face white from long oxidation. These ar- rows, as the fragments show, were triangular, with a shank at the base. This arrow in per- fect condition is often ploughed up in the fields. But here is a smithy with gay-colored flakes ; some are white and almost transparent, others are red, yellow, and olive, and pellucid ; and the edges of all these flakes are very keen. They are of quartz and jasper. Of these the finest arrow-heads are made, the leaf types and those with shafts and barbs of complicated forms. The broken arrows here showed very fine workmanship.

I must in a few words describe a find which I came upon one day. On scratching up the sand in a place where a pebble would be a curi- osity I exposed the point of an angular stone. Thus incited, I uncovered the place and found that I was in an arrow-maker's shop. Here was the material or stock. A boulder of yel- low jasper as big as a cocoanut had been broken into four pieces. One of these had again been broken into blocks the size of a walnut; each one of these was material for one arrow, the pattern chosen being a narrow tri- angle, with a shank. There lay the three large pieces and several of the small blocks made by breaking up the fourth piece; the flakes, too, lay there and . two unfinished arrows. These were rejected because the stubborn flak- ing of the material defied the workman. The jasper had in it a number of cavities, and, albeit it was brought from a great distance, it proved worthless.

It must have been noticed that already we have instanced three kinds of material used .which were not procurable in our county.

Steatite, or talc, is no nearer than Sussex County. In some places in New England are quarries from which the ancient red man pro- cured his pot-stone in a most laborious way. The nearest basalt and jasper are in Hudson County.

Returning to those oyster-shells. Many years ago I learned from an old man in Ocean County that his grandfather remembered a few Indians coming each summer to the shore to get clams, and that they dried them on slabs of bark and carried them away. Even yet the drying of oysters is practiced in China. And why should not the Lenni Lenapè, or old Delawares, do the same? The question, however, in my mind was, How did they extract the mollusk without tearing it? I recall the delight experienced at finding among the oyster-shells a little imple- ment of jasper, which answered my inquiry. It was about two inches long by an inch and a half wide. At one end it was carefully chipped to a round cutting edge. One side was a little concave, it representing the cleavage of the material; the other side was convex and chipped. It might be called a spoon-shaped gouge. This was the Indian's oyster-knife. Afterwards several were found. Subjected to heat, the mollusk would open a little way ; it was then easy to open the shells wider, and with this gouge-like implement sever the muscle of the mollusk by a scooping movement.

Before the railroad days, in the fall of the year, oysters were taken in sloops up the Hud- son, and supplied to buyers in the towns and villages. These were laid, the round or dish- side down, on the cellar floor, where they kept fit for use several months. In the long ago there were streams in Monmouth County navi- gable by canoes for miles into the interior, but which to-day are insignificant runs. I found in a spot formerly thus advantaged what proved to have been an Indian cache or winter storing- place for oysters. At a depth of several feet a pit was made out of the reach of the frost, in which the bivalves were stored. This pit, de- serted probably before the white man came, had, by the action of the winds, become filled with humus or surface soil, which, when the spade entered, showed a marked contrast with the

HISTORY OF MONMOUTH COUNTY, NEW JERSEY.

yellow, ferruginous sand in which it was origi- nally dug. This fact and the presence of the shells proved conclusive. Thither, with his canoe, the provident aboriginal had, ere the ice had mantled the waters, laid up his winter sup- ply of oysters.

A fair description of the relics of the Stone Age yielded by Monmouth County would need a volume. I can only in studied brevity classify them much in the manner in which my exhibit of the archaeology of our county was done at the exposition of 1876.

I. Women's implements. These might be styled domestic. They comprised specimens of pottery and the material of the potter, also cooking-stones, pestles and mortars. Stone rolling-pins, such as the Mexicans and the Pu- eblo Indians use to-day in making the thin cakes called tortillas. In my collection of stone 'rollers are some displaying remarkable work- manship. They vary in length from seven to twenty-four inches. . Some are crude enough, but others are beautifully symmetrical and true. To understand and appreciate the labor and skill required, suppose the task given from a huge piece of compact gray stone, with only flint flakes for tools, to work out a pestle or rolling-pin about three inches thick and two feet long, and to be as true as a wooden one turned in a lathe. Then came the knives. The fine, sharp ones were long, narrow flakes usually of some quartzose material. These long, thin flakes would have a keen cutting edge ; they were best represented by those of the ancient Mexicans, obtained from obsidian or volcanic glass. The oyster-knives have been described. There were also skin-dressers, and an ingenious lunate- shaped knife, not unlike that of the harness- maker. This knife was made from a slaty stone and not chipped like the quartzose knives, but rubbed or ground into shape ; hence these forms are rare. I think these lunate knives were used for skinning. The woman made the clothes, skinned and cooked the game; she also made the pots, and what of tillage there might be she did it. Hence, here comes the stone hoe. A very singular object is a stone bird, having two small holes through which a cord could · pass, and with it be worn by the woman on top

and front of the head. It seemed to symbol an incubating bird. This brooding bird, it is said, was worn as a taboo by the married woman anticipating maternity.

II. The men's implements. Of these the stone axe is prominent. Of the grooved axe, though, there is a typical form; yet there are varieties which we have not time to enumerate. Round the neck is a groove, in which a withe handle was fixed. The sizes are so different, running from a few ounces to some pounds in weight. There was the axe of war, the toma- hawk, as well as the axe of handicraft. The lighter one was for felling men, the heavier for felling trees. There were hand-axes or celts, a chisel-like tool. There were gouges, too, but these are rare. The stone celt was so common an implement that it is certain it was a tool of very frequent use. Although this is so, I find myself only able to describe its use in one par- ticular,-namely the building of the dug-out, or solid canoe. A log having been fashioned externally to the desired form, was then plas- tered over with wet clay, except the upper part; on this a fire was made, burning into the log. The celt was used to excavate the charred part, when the fire was again applied, and so on.

Some of my relics are symmetrical stones with a groove round them. It seems idle to use such elaborated stones for net-sinkers, and it looks as if they were slung-shots.

The arrow-heads were of great diversity of form and material. The latter has been men- tioned. Until intercourse with the whites had set in they were all made of stone. I found one of iron. It was made from a bit of a hoop, and was an exact isagon, or equal-sided triangle. Of the immense variety of arrow-points there seem to be but four types at most,-the lozenge or diamond-shaped, the leaf or almond-shaped, the triangle and those having shanks and often also barbs. The first is the simplest, and the last the most complex. It is thought by many that those with shanks and barbs were chiefly used in the hunt, as being. secured to the shaft, they could be drawn out of the prey ; and even the barbs would by their laceration when with- drawn provoke the increased bleeding of the game. Those points without shanks, it is

ARCH ÆOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY.

supposed, were preferred in war, as the victim in withdrawing the shaft would leave the head within, hence incurring terrible surgery to get the arrow out, even if possible.

Along the streams where Indian relics are found we meet with stones not shaped at all, but just taken as they occurred, and simply notched so as to hold a withe or cord. These were sinkers, and it is certain that nets were used for fishing.

Besides their wars and hunts, and to some extent their handicraft, these ancients had their games. I am not able to describe them, except by borrowing from the present pastimes in some of the tribes, which use similar implements. I may speak of round stone balls, showing that in some of its modes, ball-playing is an Ameri- can game of extreme antiquity. There was also the game of chunkè. The stone used was a circular disc, concave on both sides, the thumb being put on the one side and the fingers on the other when the disc was thrown by the pitcher. The men on each side of the course with spears, pursued the stone, and then hurled the spears, the effort being to have the weapon fall where the stone would stop.

The medicine man, must not be forgotten. A long and elaborately fashioned stone tube, about twelve inches long, has a perforation for its entire length about three-fourths of an inch in diameter. With one end pressed on the place of his patient's pain and the other at his lips, the native doctor essayed to suck out the evil influence of that mystic thing which he re- garded as disease. Failing in this, he would blow with the tube, thus attempting to drive away the foul spirit who was inflicting the malady.

There were ranks, too, and affairs of state and ceremony. Hence we have implements which were borne as badges of distinction on occasions of ceremonial display. Some of these were gorgets suspended upon the breast. Others wore a sort of two-edged axe, usually very small and quite ornate. These were borne upon a stem or staff; hence such may be called a mace. I have this implement with notches, making it a tally or record of scalps taken, or of . some such notable achievements. A very in-

teresting one is a fragment. It unfortunately got broken in the eye, and the owner has elabo- rated a method of repair by drilling a series of holes in each half, and thus lacing the two parts together. How valuable must this have been to warrant such an outlay of labor that the heirloom should be preserved !

On a farm near Hornerstown I obtained some curious relics which digging had exposed, and which I interpreted as indicating the grave of a noted Indian. There was a human skeleton, and the skull was in fair condition for study. It was undoubtedly that of a red man. I noticed that the incisor teeth sat upon each other like molars, not lapping like shears, as the white man's do. Now this is an Indian trait. I have detected it in jaws taken from undoubted Indian graves. It is also characteristic of the Eskimo. The latter will seize with his front teeth the meat on the bone, pull it up, and while between his teeth cut it off with his knife. Such a mode of using the incisor teeth wears them off, and the tips or crowns become flat. Is it not curious that the human remains found in the Scandina- vian middens show this same peculiarity ? This skeleton indicated a distinguished man. With him were found other bones, those of the black bear, the Virginia deer and the snapping- turtle. Had the turtle something to do with his totem, or heraldry ? Were the bear and deer game to serve the spirit while on its way to the better hunting-grounds ? It was then, as now, the custom to bury with the dead some- thing that was highly prized when living. Here was found an arrow-head of pellucid quartz. The fineness of the material and the marvelous perfection of the workmanship made it a thing of exquisite beauty ; in a word, a gem. Among the thousands of arrow-heads I have inspected this stood peerless and alone. It was my pride. As such, it had a distinguished place in my Philadelphia exhibit. Alas the day ! The case was opened, and the gem stolen, while nothing else was touched !

Du Chaillu describes the sweat-houses of the Laps, in which the sexes together, in a state of nudity, half-cooked themselves, then rushed into the snow. In a less objectionable way the In- dians of our place had a similar usage. In the

HISTORY OF MONMOUTH COUNTY, NEW JERSEY.

white man's knowledge one of these sweat- houses existed near Crosswicks Creek, at a bend where the water was deep and cold. It was a dug-out in the bank. In it a fire was built, and when the hole was heated like an oven, in went the Indian, and while sweating at every pore he plunged into the stream.

In respect to his religion, it is commonly set down that the North American Indian is not an idolater, in that he is not a worshiper of' im- ages. As represented by the stone relics in the East, he certainly cannot be regarded as an im- age-maker, except to a very limited extent. To light upon a bit of this sort of thing is regarded as a very lucky find. I can only mention two instances in our county, and both have suggested to my mind the probability of a fetich, or charm. One of them was plowed up on a farm on the left bank of the Shrewsbury. It was a bit of steatite, hardly so large as a silver half-dollar, with a human face on it cut in relief. As to any art in the thing, many a country boy can be found who could whittle in wood a face even more natural. But the In- dian had an eye for any eccentricity in form, a knack of catching at an accidental hint, such as often occurs in nature, as when a stone bears a fancied resemblance to something animate. Such a lusus naturæ would seize the red man's imagi- nation, and would even arrest his reverence. With a flint flake for his chisel he would im- prove upon the object, and help out the resem- blance. I have a very remarkable specimen of such. It was dug up in clearing off a bit of wild land for a house at a place now called Keansburgh, about four miles northeast of Key- port. The spot was covered with a dense natural growth of scrub pines, with an undergrowth of azaleas and whortleberries. The object is the size of a large cocoanut. It is a human head in stone, and broken off at the neck. It was a clay nodule, and obtained from the clay cliff formerly existing at the shore, about a mile and a half away. The stone had originally borne a remote resemblance to a human head, of which the artist has taken every advantage, and worked it up to a striking resemblance of an Indian head and face, the very racial expression being secured in a remarkable degree. For whatever |

purpose it was designed, I have no doubt that it was held as an object of much interest,-at first, may be, it only incited curiosity ; but when it left the native sculptor's hands it became an object of serious superstition.

In two places near Freehold I have demon- strated the former existence of beaver dams. In excavating peat from one of these old mead- ows which grew upon the desertion of the dams, burnt sticks of great length were found. What was the meaning of a fire in what was a swamp? In the other meadow, near by, under my directions, some remains of a mastodon were exhumed. The head and tusks were entire. Speaking of the Stone Age in America, a French writer expresses his belief that the mastodon, driven into a swamp, might be surrounded by fire in order to suffocate the beast. Who shall say ? Might not the aborigines, when they attacked this behemoth, as I verily believe they did, have used such means? In his paper read at the Montreal meeting of the American Asso- ciation, 1882, the writer showed by his studies of the mastodon remains obtained from differ- ent parts of the county that the roaming- grounds of this monster once were far out to sea, and of course the prehistoric red man's hunting-ground was equally extensive,-so vastly has the ocean encroached upon the land. I have arrow-heads dredged far off from shore, but as they might have fallen from a canoe, we have no certainty in their interpretation. East- ward from the sea-line of the county, the shore, or rather water-bed, slopes almost imperceptibly. Actual soundings show that for one hundred miles to sea, the water deepens at the rate of only three feet to the mile. Thus, at one hundred miles out, the water is only three hun- dred feet deep. Six miles farther it sinks to six hundred feet, thus forming a shelf, while twelve more miles out it plunges to the depth of six thousand feet. Now, this, I contend, was the ancient shore-line, and the shelf, or plateau, marked the seaward extent of the mastodon's range and the hunting-grounds of the red man's ancestor, that prehistoric savage and this ele- phantine beast being contemporaries.

Paleontology .- The allusion to the masto- don naturally introduces the subject of the extinct

ARCHEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY.

forms of life which are revealed by the fossils of the county. Both the flora and the fauna are represented, the latter being especially rich. Still, no more can be done in the space allotted than to mention the prominent and, perhaps, typical forms. As respects the Cretaceous Formation, New Jersey is to the geologist classic ground.

The Cretaceous period, so finely represented in Monmouth County, opened with a flora in many respects similar to that of the preceding Triassic. It was, however, soon to disappear, so far as this continent was concerned, for that order of plants faded away, to be followed by a pobler vegetal régime. From the clay cliff formerly existing at Union we have extracted fossil plants of a lowly rank, and some that we thought might be cycads. Generally they were too imperfect to admit of satisfactory determi- nation. At any rate, their congeners are such as can now only be found in the tropics of Austra- lia, Polynesia and Asia. From the clays of Cliffwood I have often obtained cones and lig- nites of the Abietinec, suggesting the Araucaria, which are now confined to the Southern hemis- phere. Many of these fossil cones were very pretty, not unlike catkins, being about as long and as thick as a finger, and exquisitely sculp- tured by the spiral arrangement of the scales. Of these fossils I was able to get one with the leaves or needles preserved. This received from Professor Newberry the name Cunning- hamites Lockwoodii. In this same Cretaceous occur fossils which indicate a very stately arbo- real growth in those ancient days,-for the Sequoia, that giant tree, now limited to a small space near the Pacific, is found here. The clays near Cliffwood also reveal an extraordinary leap in nature. Not only is the pine family, the gymnosperms, abundant, but there is a sudden and almost incredible display of the angiosperms, the grand deciduous trees. Here they are for the first time in the earth's floral garniture- the sycamore, tulip, poplar, sassafras, willow, oak, maple, beech, hickory, fig, etc., etc. In a word, here is begun the growth of those trees which are to be a special gift to man, since here are the timber trees, and here the beginning of . those that are to be pre-eminently the fruit-

bearers. Of the immense richness of this early flora, so like that of our present American forests, perhaps our conception may be aided by this statement,-in all Europe the number of native trees is hardly more then forty-five, while, leaving out the cycads and the conifers, so rich in the Cretaceous, the fossils collected indicate more than a hundred species in that period, and we know not how many species may have failed to be thus represented.

The fauna, or animal life, of that period was rich in variety of species. Many of these were of monstrous size, and of forms outre and bizarre. I think where our county now is was an estuary of that ancient sea. To me it is quite evident that here the water was land- locked in some way. In these marls are im- mense deposits of shells which were accumulated too quietly for an open, turbulent sea. Besides, as we shall see. some of the reptiles, judging from their construction, had habits not unlike those of the alligator, and some of the turtles, too, seem to have been of this character.

Here appeared the earliest oysters, but dif- ferent from that bivalve of to-day. Two oyster- like mollusks existed then in great numbers, some of them weighing many pounds. They are known technically as Gryphca and Exogyra. An object of a conical form is found in num- bers, and is called by the marl-diggers a thun- derbolt. It is a belemnite, and is really the inner shell or bone of an extinct cuttle-fish. This creature, a species of devil-fish, swarmed in those waters and must have been very for- midable; and yet this hideous creature was close cousin to the nautilus and ammonite, whose shells were so beautiful, and some so large ; for the cycloidal shell of the ammonite sometimes was as large as a carriage-wheel. Of both these beautiful shells the species was numerous; but with the close of this age the ammonites all perished, and of the nautilus to- day we have barely two species in existing seas.

But the vastest exhibition of animal force and form was in the reptilia. This was em- phatically the reign of reptiles. The species were indeed numerous, but our space will only permit us to mention a few typical forms.

The Dinosaurs, or " terrible lizards," were

HISTORY OF MONMOUTH COUNTY, NEW JERSEY.

a group of which not a single representative exists to day. They must have been restricted to the land, as their structure would make them illy fitted for any movement in the water. With aspects most portentous, they were the lords of the soil. Though so heavily weighted, their movements and bearing had a sort of stateliness for the reptilian régime, as they did not crawl on shore like the alligator and the crocodile, but walked as does the ostrich, for these dinosaurs had very long hind legs and very short fore legs, with a very heavy tail. In these particulars there was some similitude to the kangaroo; but it was the merest resemblance, as there was really nothing in common to these animals. The kangaroo is a grazing animal, and when its pasture is ex- hausted it must seek others, even though a hundred miles away. In this movement their forward limbs take no part ; all is done by the hind limbs and tail; the long legs serve for leaping, and the heavy tail is a balancer. The dinosaur walked like a huge bird ; it stood very high on its two hind feet, using the heavy tail as the third limb of a tripod, and it browsed on the evergreen trees. This immense reptile is known to science as the Hadrosaurus. A very much larger individual, with much the same structure, was taken by myself from that old · clay-bank at Union, which the sea has at last carried away. This terrible brute had hind legs thirteen feet in length, and from the tip of its great tail to its snout it must have been over thirty feet long. The part which we unearthed demonstrated the strange fact that this ancient reptile had some true alliance in structure to the present ostrich tribe, or closer still to the extinct moa, the colossal bird of New Zealand. Our relics show that the ankle-bones were wonder- fully bird-like, but so massive; for the tibia- bone at its union with the tarsus is thirteen and three-quarters inches thick. From these curious facts came the name given it by Cope, Ornitho- tarsus immanis-the immense bird-ankled beast.

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History of Monmouth County, New Jersey. Pt. 1, Part 4

Author: Ellis, Franklin, 1828-1885 Publication date: 1885 Publisher: Philadelphia : R.T. Peck & Co. Number of Pages: 974

Author: Ellis, Franklin, 1828-1885
Publication date: 1885
Publisher: Philadelphia : R.T. Peck & Co.
Number of Pages: 974