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Tremor is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Teju Cole
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House
LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Cole, Teju, author.
Title: Tremor: a novel / Teju Cole.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Random House, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022056649 (print) | LCCN 2022056650 (ebook) | ISBN 9780812997118
(Hardback) | ISBN 9780812997125 (Ebook)
Classification: LCC PR9387.9.C67 T74 2023 (print) |
LCC PR9387.9.C67 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/20111128
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022056649
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022056650
Ebook ISBN 9780812997125
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Alex Merto

ep_prh_6.1_145126116_c0_r0
 Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight

By Teju Cole
About the Author
ONE
T he leaves are glossyand dark and From the dying blooms rises a fragrance
that might be jasmine. He sets up the tripod and begins to focus the camera.
He has pressed the shutter twice when an aggressive voice calls out from
the house on the right. This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has
happened to him but still he is startled. He takes on a friendly tone and says
he is an artist, just photographing a hedge. You can’t do that here, the voice
says, this is private property. The muscles of his back are tense. He folds the
tripod, stows the camera in its bag, and walks away.

on monday he goesto the department where packages and other mail await him,
among them a white envelope with a quarter-inch-thick black line along its
flap. Two or three envelopes of this kind arrive each month, official
announcements of the passing of past or current members of the faculty.
The envelope is almost square. He sits in his office and opens it. The card
inside is also trimmed in black. An emeritus professor of microbiology, not
someone he knows, has died. The cards don’t deviate from a formula: the
dean expresses regret at the death of the professor in question in antiquated
language. A death that “occurred on the sixth instant” is one that happened
on the sixth of this month; “the fifteenth ultimo” is the fifteenth of last
month. He has begun to collect the cards, thinking of them in their high-
toned formality as an echo of the mourning dress worn in previous times,
the silks and grenadines of widows’ gowns in the Civil War era, the black
veils, black gloves, and black jewelry that let society know a grief was
being observed. That symbolic order of colors is gone now, that tracking of
heavy, full, or partial mourning in the language of black, gray, purple,
lavender.
There are two books on his desk: Calvino’s Invisible Cities and a
translation of the Epic of Sundiata. The latter contains versions of the epic
by two different djeli, Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute, and he has recently
finished reading Bamba Suso’s version. On one of the bookcases is a bottle
of dark ink sent to him by Paul Lanier. The ink is made from wild grapes
collected around railway tracks in St. Louis and because it is homemade,
the color has shifted. In the bottle it still looks deep, close to violet, but
brushed on paper it has now taken on a pale color reminiscent of the sea.
But “the sea” how? When we say the sea is blue we are thinking of a light
or pale blue, a color close to sky blue. The sea is sometimes one of those
blues and sometimes a darker version of them but the sea is also often not
blue at all: it is sometimes orange, sometimes gray, sometimes purple with
the iridescence of Homer’s , sometimes nothing, transparent,
water. At dusk it goes from silvery to pewter. On a moonless night it is
black.
He picks up the bottle of ink, an aged lavender, a purple haunted in its
lower registers by indigo. The African violet is where the name comes from
but he also loves the false web of etymologies the name summons: the
tenderness of a viol, the strain of a violin, the hint of violence. Not the
violet of medieval bishops and university professors but rather the violet of
darkest African skin. Paintings by Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Lorna
Simpson, but above all Chris Ofili in the lower register of whose Mary
Magdalene is a violet so deep it could drown the eyes, in whose Raising of
Lazarus there is a violet so base it could raise the dead. The hand-dyed,
hand-spun cloth that he took from his grandmother’s wardrobe a few
months after her death. Gray for loss, violet for love.

Maine to shop for antiques. The trip takes an hour and a half and
they go up to

during the brief crossing into New Hampshire they switch places and she
drives. The plan is to do a small stretch of southern Maine up to
Kennebunk, visiting several shops. They have set aside the entire afternoon.
At a large emporium in York he looks at a nineteenth-century map of North
America hand-drawn by a child. On the outskirts of Ogunquit are yard signs
saying “Blue Lives Matter” which in town give way to rainbow flags.
Finally they come to Wells where they find a large shop set in a building
that might once have been a barn. The shop, on two levels, is crammed with
furniture, paintings, glassware, and porcelain, many of them from the early
or mid-nineteenth century and quite a few older. They wander separately.
She looks at a maple colonial-style drop-front desk. He is surprised to find a
section with an assortment of wooden masks and sculptures, three of them
recognizably African, the others possibly Pacific, Asian, or Native
American. He is immediately drawn to an elegant antelope headdress with a
soaring pair of horns, a ci wara. It stands around four feet tall and appears to
be old, its wood stained dark, the information on the label imprecise. The
sinuous lines and open-work carving depict a female antelope with a baby
antelope carved onto her back, the fawn a miniature of the mother, their
main difference being that its horns are not as proportionally long. Ci wara,
credited by Bambara people with having brought agriculture to humanity, is
danced in its male and female forms as headdresses for young men during
sowing and harvesting festivals.
The two men who run the antiques shop seem to be in their mid-to-late
eighties and their banter has the feel of a long-practiced comedic act. They
tell Tunde that they are brothers-in-law but frequently taken for brothers.
One jokes about the other being too old, the other jokes about the other not
being handsome enough to be related to him. Tunde asks the slightly
younger-looking man about the ci wara but the man has little additional
information beyond the notion that the sculpture “might be authentic.”
To himself Tunde wonders what authenticity would mean. That this
particular ci wara has been danced in a Bambara agricultural festival? Or
that whether or not it was danced it was not made for the tourist trade, that
it was made by Bambara people for the use of Bambara people? Whatever
its story it had found its way to the coast of New England. It was in a shop
among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or
foul from across the globe. In the West a love of the “authentic” means that
art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what
has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not
be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the
object’s makers mystically confers monetary value to the object and the
importance of the object is boosted by the story that can be told about its
role in the history of modern European art.
He has seen, in the past, a female ci wara figure comparable to the one
he is looking at now sold at auction for $400,000. Those zeros, he knows,
have everything to do with the trail of magic words that the auction house
brushed over the object: “collected in situ,” “acquired,” “exhibited.” The
more extensive this account of ownership the greater the sums that can
change hands between sellers and buyers. The ci wara he is looking at in
Wells is priced at $250 which seems to settle the question of authenticity:
the sculpture has no “provenance” and thus its value is minimal. He feels he
ought to rescue it. He wants to bring it closer to home, closer to his own
home where it can be seen by kinder eyes, by eyes that place authenticity
elsewhere. Why should the labor of the contemporary artist who makes a ci
wara to sell to visitors be less deserving of honor than that of the
“traditional” artist who makes a ci wara to be danced at a harvest festival?
But he doesn’t want to fool himself. Money is still changing hands.
Sadako has decided that she wants the maple desk. It is compact and
likely to fit into the back of their rented SUV. At the last minute he has
doubts about the ci wara but Sadako insists that they buy it. They go up to
the front of the shop where the rafter above the sellers is covered with
photographs, cartoons, and clippings from old ads. Behind the counter is a
card signed by Laura Bush. This does not surprise him as the Bush family
compound is only fifteen minutes away in Kennebunkport and this part of
Maine is a venerated area for the genteel wing of the political right. On a
wooden post near the counter, among the faded flyers and curling laminated
notices, he sees a small photocopied note in all-caps, worn by time and
undated:

wells homestead. this homestead was settled in 1657 by dr.

thomas wells. in august of 1703 his grandson deacon thomas was
away looking for a nurse for his wife sarah (browne) who had
given birth the evening before to a daughter. while he was away
 the town of wells was attacked by indians. they struck at this
farm first. axing their way into the house, they massacred mrs.
wells, her infant, 4 year old sarah and 2 year old joshua. then
they burned the house down. after this terrible tragedy mr.
wells left for ipswich, massachusetts, returning sometime after
1718 with a new family to reclaim the homestead. it remained in
the wells family until 1906.

The older of the brothers-in-law rings them up. He tries to figure out the
sales tax on a calculator with large buttons and gets it wrong the first time.
Slowly he repeats the calculation and gets it wrong again, arriving at the
correct figure only on his fourth attempt. The equipment in the shop is
rudimentary, evidently by design. The card reader into which Tunde’s credit
card has been inserted beeps for a few moments before letting out an even
tone. The man writes out a receipt on thin yellow paper then the brothers-
in-law wrap the ci wara in sheets of soft white paper. Their trembling liver-
spotted hands seem to be caressing the sculpture, arraying it in gossamer
white robes for a bridal. The antelope horns poke through the soft paper.
Thus dressed the ci wara feels light as air. Sadako carefully takes it out to
the SUV. Tunde brings the three drawers of the maple desk outside, then the
desk itself.
Wild geese cross overhead honking in the falling dusk. Sky and sound
are one and across from the barn is a house with the obvious modern
additions of a third floor and a screened-in porch. Between the house and
the barn stands the great old tree under which their SUV is parked. All time
is now.

of them on I-95. “If You Don’t Believe” by Deniece

the headlights pool ahead

Williams is the music that fills the car. A favorite of Sadako’s. Thinking
about Wells he can feel something unknotting in his brain. After nearly
three decades in the U.S. his sympathies have been tutored in certain
directions. He learned early that a “terrible tragedy” meant the victims were
white. Later and by bitter experience he came to understand that there is
always more to tragedies than is narrated, that the narration is never neutral.
But what is happening to him now is stranger: this lack of sympathy for the
Wells family, the way he struggles even to imagine them. So great a
counterreaction is a new, brutal tone in him. Is it brutal? All he can think
about is that in the period of the so-called Third Indian War, Abenaki
people were dispersed by the colonial settlers, dispersed by those who took
it as their God-given right to seize their lands, who took it as their right to
kill them if they resisted.
But the note in the antiques shop was a fever dream of mindless Indian
violence against people like “us.” Later Tunde will find the names and birth
dates of Deacon Wells’s children in county records: Sarah Wells, March 9,
1699; Joshua Wells, October 9, 1701. The Indians were without names and
they had come bearing axes and they had killed and scalped and they had
burned the place down. And yet Deacon Wells had returned fifteen years
later with his losses restituted to him as Job’s were, bringing with him a
new wife, a cousin from Salem who had borne him three children. In time
the land was pacified. The Indian problem went away and Deacon Wells
lived long, until August 1737 when he committed his soul to the Lord. His
will was proved the month after that. “I give and bequeath unto my dearly
beloved wife Lydia Wells all my household stuff of every sort and kind,
[and] my negro man Jeff.”

have dinner with their friend Emily Brown at her

the following weekend they

home on Dana Street, a ten-minute stroll from their house on Ellis. A warm
night, the feeling more late summer than early fall. At dinner he mentions
the excursion to Wells. His recollection of the violent incidents at the
homestead prompts Emily’s partner Mariam to tell him about a book
published in 2007 by Susan Faludi. The Terror Dream, Mariam says,
connects the machismo of the Bush presidency to a long-running American
obsession with captivity narratives, a tradition that began in colonial times
and saw its main task as protecting white women from dark-skinned
invaders. At home that night Tunde looks up the book and sees that there is
a copy available at the library of the Kennedy School.
On Tuesday an hour before he is to teach his Digital Color seminar he
walks across the Yard through Harvard Square and down John F. Kennedy
Street to the brick complex of the Kennedy School. In the library he
dawdles. He has just settled down with a handful of magazines when one of
the librarians hurries towards him. She wants to know if she can “help” him
with anything. It is said in a tone he recognizes. Without a word, he walks
away from her. He finds The Terror Dream and uses the self-checkout
machine.

while cooking dinner heputs on the recording of Bach’s Cello Suites he had
bought on your advice sometime around 2001. In those days you were
interested in the way Bach’s written scores showed evidence of having
originated in improvisation. You described it as “embodiment”: the
multifocal sensitivity an animal would have in a forest but also the alertness
and contained intensity of a hunter in a different part of the same forest.
Bach was not merely arranging notes, you said to Tunde at the time. He was
conveying a living and intentional search, the presence of which could most
deeply be felt in his solo works. A listener could follow this movement like
a tracker, from one phrase to another, from one argument to another, a
listener could inhabit this present tense no matter how festive or solemn the
music got. And it was precisely the ability of the cellist Anner Bylsma to
draw out these improvised-sounding lines that led you to recommend his
recording to Tunde.
At the time of that correspondence Tunde had his own long-nurtured
enthusiasm for recordings of Bach’s solo works. He loved the debut on solo
violin by Hilary Hahn, the Goldberg Variations played on piano by Chen Pi-
hsien, and Jean-Pierre Rampal’s performance of the partita for solo flute. In
each of these recordings he found that quality of personal impersonality that
made Bach feel less like a composer and more like a philosopher, a
counselor, a scientist, an architect, or a prophet; anything but a regional
court musician in eighteenth-century Germany.
Your recommendation of Bylsma, whom you described as having the
verve of a fencer and the poise of a dancing master, had helped him
experience this personal impersonality in a new way. It was almost, you
said, as if Bylsma were making a drawing not playing a cello, so precise
was his combination of light attack and ample sound. Tunde listened
carefully to the recording back then and Bylsma’s playing added much to
his experience of works he already knew through several recordings.
The special value you saw in Bylsma’s version and that you conveyed
to Tunde was perhaps connected to your own practice in those days of
composing free improvisations for piano, an approach that had less to do
with the interpretation of preexisting works than with a spirit of discovery
that invited the piano to reveal its secrets to you in real time. You said
embodiment was not only the animal in the forest and the tracker following
that animal but also the forest as a self-aware system, attentive to the rustle
of its own leaves, the shifting colors, the air, the water, the panoptic view of
many moving parts, the interactions of light and shade. Collective listening,
you called it.

between Native Americans and American settlers

during the many conflicts

abductions were frequent, abductions that were later pressed into the service
of a national myth. As many as a third of the hundreds of women who were
kidnapped by Native Americans later refused to rejoin their white
communities, finding that they preferred their new lives with their now
adopted families. Meanwhile their white family members continued to
believe that rescuing an abducted woman was the highest ideal no matter
what the women themselves wanted. Hundreds of captivity narratives
resulted and the ideal of heroic rescue deeply influenced American culture,
not least in films like the 1956 John Wayne vehicle The Searchers.
The Searchers was a fictionalized account of the life of Cynthia Ann
Parker who was taken by Comanche warriors in 1836 when she was ten.
Parker lived with Comanche people for twenty-four years until she was
brought back to her white family against her will. The story the film
presents is one of pure heroism but in reality Parker, named Naduah by her
Comanche family, had become a wife to a chieftain and a mother of three
children and had spent ten years failing to reintegrate to white society. She
tried to return to her Comanche family but was forcibly brought back a
second time. Finally, following the loss of her daughter to pneumonia in
1871, she began to refuse food and slowly starved herself to death.
Long before that the brutality of the New England colonists had forced
the Wampanoag chief Metacomet to go to war in defense of his people.
Metacomet’s Rebellion or King Philip’s War as the colonists called it was
costly for all the belligerents but especially devastating for the Native
people of New England. In 1675 the colonists had burned alive six hundred
Narragansett people, about half of them women and children, in Rhode
Island. In March 1697 a band of Abenaki people responding to the French
offer of bounties for British scalps attacked the village of Haverhill. They
killed twenty-seven people and abducted thirteen. Among the abducted
were Hannah Duston who had just had a baby and Mary Neff her midwife.
Duston’s week-old daughter Martha was immediately dashed against a rock
by the attackers. Two weeks later and a hundred miles from home the two
women were held by an Abenaki clan of twelve on Contoocook Island in
the Merrimack River in what is now New Hampshire. Alongside them was
Samuel Lennardson a British boy who had been captured eighteen months
earlier.

of horrors with a neutral spirit. He cannot decide now

tunde reads this catalog

where his compassion is directed or whether his mood is as cold as it was in

considering the Wells massacre. Perhaps it is Faludi’s book that has fatigued
him. No, not the book: it is history’s own brutality, which refuses
symmetries and seldom consoles. One night on Contoocook Island as the
Abenaki family slept the white captives armed themselves with hatchets
and went to work. Two of the Natives escaped, a woman and a boy. As for
the others, Mary Neff killed one and Hannah Duston killed nine. Of those
dead two were men, two women, and six children. Duston and Neff made
their escape and had gone a little way already when, remembering a reward
promised by the Massachusetts legislature, a reward for which evidence
would be needed, Duston returned to the island and scalped all the dead.
Carrying the grisly trophies she once again began the long journey home.
She scalped them all. Their names are not known.
In the period that followed word of her exploits spread and she was
positioned as an ambiguous hero. What she did was a strange thing for a
woman to have done and the consensus that emerged is that she had
demonstrated too much savagery. A legend requires clarity: who the enemy
is, who the victim is, who the hero is. If that clarity is muddled all is lost.
The Indians surely must be massacred, they surely must be scalped, but it is
unwomanly work.
Faludi, citing the historian Mary Beth Norton, connects the idea of the
Indian attack to the idea of the witch hunt. The girls who in that fateful final
decade of the seventeenth century were bewitched or thought of as being
bewitched in Salem, Massachusetts were often orphans who had lost one or
both parents in the frontier wars. There was for instance Mercy Short who
had been abducted from Salmon Falls, New Hampshire by Abenaki
warriors in 1690. Both her parents and three of her siblings were among the
thirty-four villagers killed during that raid. Freed eight months later through
a ransom Short became a maid in Salem to a widow named Margaret
Thacher. In 1692 after an errand to the Boston jail where some accused
witches were being held, Mercy Short fell into fits. She had been
“bewitched.” But there can be little doubt her imagination was affected by
her recent captivity and the horrors she had witnessed. Short gave a
testimony to the fanatical Harvard-trained cleric Cotton Mather in which
she said that she had seen the Devil. He was, she said, “a Short and a Black
Man.” But, she clarified, he was “not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an
Indian color.”

of these thoughts by Sadako’s return from work. They talk

tunde is startled out

for a moment. She remains downstairs. He moves upstairs to her study. The
room is lit by a single lamp and he continues reading. The conflict between
the spirits of the invisible world and the people of New England had made
Mather think “that this inexplicable War might have some of its Original
among the Indians,” who he believed had among them “horrid sorcerers,
and hellish conjurers” who “conversed with Demons.” A fear of the Indian
invader most affected those towns on the outer reaches of the colonial
settlements, the towns the colonists thought of as being in the border zone
between order and disorder, Christianity and savagery, God and the Devil.
The infamous witch hunts that convulsed the Salem Colony in 1692 and
which swept along with them some twenty-four blameless souls, most of
them women, most of them killed by hanging, had its beginnings in the
false accusation made against Tituba, an enslaved woman likely of Taino or
Carib origin who was described by her neighbors simply as “Indian.” Under
torture and after beatings Tituba confessed to being a witch. Because she
confessed and because she was subsequently coerced into accusing others
she was spared hanging. But the man who had enslaved her in Barbados,
and in whose home she had lived in Salem, the Puritan minister Reverend
Samuel Parris—he too had been trained at Harvard—now sold her off into a
further and likely more brutal slavery. After that second sale Tituba, who
had been forced to leave her toddler daughter in the Parris household,
disappeared from the historical record. When Reverend Parris died twenty-
eight years later in 1720 Tituba’s daughter was bequeathed to his son
Samuel Parris, Jr. and from that moment nothing further is known of the girl
except for her name as written in the will of the old man: Violet.
TWO
M asako and sean have left. Sadako has gone to bed. The evenings are not
yet cool enough for jackets and Tunde, with Rae on the rooftop deck, pours
more whisky. Saturn and Jupiter are low tonight and the moon which was
full three days ago is waning. He does not know the night sky well but he
knows some names and can make good guesses: Sirius, Arcturus, the
brighter planets. Behind him where the sky is darker the galaxy pulses and
he remembers that there is an app he seldom uses on his phone. When he
was twelve, he tells Rae, he used to stand outside their new home in Ojodu
and look at the stars. The skies were clear back then, the house in a still-
forested area at the city’s edge. One night, he remembers, he was with
Michael the houseboy. If Michael is alive now, if there were any way of
finding him, he would be approaching fifty and this is hard to imagine.
Back then Michael was a skinny hard-eyed boy with yellowish skin that
seemed stretched over his skull. He worked in the house and didn’t go to
school, an unjust but not unusual arrangement. That night they were looking
at the moon and Tunde had said that he found it amazing that men had gone
there. Michael had laughed. No one had gone to the moon, he said, and he
had laughed again. After Tunde tells Rae this story they tell him about
growing up in Alabama and attending Space Camp. My problem was the
opposite, Rae says. There was astronaut imagery everywhere. Space travel
was so real that it lost its magic.

shower is running hot. Just as he is about to step in he

the following morning the

sees that the bath soap is out. He can’t find a replacement in the bathroom
cabinets, neither the lavender he likes nor the plain white soap Sadako
prefers. He decides to use one of two special bars of soap he has been
saving. He will use one and save the other forever. This is soap he bought at
one of the galleries in Kassel where documenta 14 took place. The raw soap
was stacked and packaged there and sold, each bar in a dark gray cardboard
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 Fig. 95.—Discoidal stone.

The following groups are represented in the collection:

A. Sides hollowed out, edge convex; 2 to 6 inches diameter, seven-eighths to 2¾ thick.

1. Edges of concavity sharp.

a. Cavity a regular curve from side to side. The type (figure 95) is of quartz, from Cherokee
county, Georgia. There are also, from Kanawha valley, West Virginia, one of sandstone, of
which one side has been worked out by a flint, the little pits being distinctly visible, while the
other side has natural surface; from Loudon county, Tennessee, one of quartzite, 6 inches
diameter, which has been used as a mortar, the cavities being roughened, with their edges
broken and scarred (the edge of the stone is battered entirely around midway between the
sides as though used for a hammer); from McMinn county, Tennessee, one of quartzite, about
the same size as last, with a slight pit in the center of each cavity, the edges of the concavity
being considerably chipped, and the edge of the implement very smooth; from Polk county,
Tennessee, one of quartzite, 3½ inches in diameter, with the edge polished except in one spot,
where it shows marks of use as a hammer or pestle—it has been used also as a mortar, the
edges of the concavity being much chipped and broken; one each from Craighead county,
Arkansas, of novaculite; Randolph county, Illinois, of granite; Cherokee county, Georgia, of
quartz; and Obion county, Tennessee, of sandstone. In the four last mentioned the entire
surface is quite smooth or even highly polished.
 Fig. 96.—Discoidal stone, with perforation.

b. With a small perforation at the center. The type is shown in figures 96 (of sandstone, from a
grave in Union county, Illinois), and 97 (of granite, from Virginia). There is another specimen,
of sandstone, from Red River county, Texas.

Fig. 97.—Discoidal stone, with perforation.

c. With a secondary depression in each cavity. Figure 98 (yellow quartz, highly polished, from
Fulton county, Georgia) is typical. There is also one of quartzite, with a secondary depression
in one side only, from Roane county, Tennessee, which may be supposed, from this and other
imperfections, to be unfinished.

2. Edges of concavity rubbed off blunt. These are grouped simply by form, as the specimens
from Kanawha valley, West Virginia, and northeastern Kentucky are nearly all roughly finished,
quite different from the smooth or polished ones from farther south. Some are worked out into
the form of a ring, and there is every stage between that form and the flat disk whose sides
show no trace of pecking. Figure 99 (quartzite, from Sevier county, Tennessee) illustrates a
typical example, roughly worked but entirely perforated, and figure 97 shows the same type in
another form.
 Fig. 98.—Discoidal stone, with secondary depression.

Fig. 99.—Discoidal stone, in form of a ring.

District. A B C D E F
Caldwell county, North Carolina 1
Crittenden county, Arkansas 1
Drew county, Arkansas 1
Randolph county, Illinois 1 2
Eastern Tennessee 1 1
Bartow county, Georgia 1
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 1 1 1
Northeastern Kentucky 22
KEY:
A = Quartz.
B = Novaculite.
C = Flint.
D = Quartzite.
E = Sandstone.
F = Granite.

B. Flat or slightly concave sides, edges straight and at right angles to the sides; diameter, 1⅝
to 5 inches. The type shown in figure 100 is of sandstone from Lauderdale county, Alabama.
 Fig. 100.—Discoidal stone.

District. A B C D E
Lauderdale county, Alabama 1
Mississippi county, Arkansas 1 1 1
McMinn county, Tennessee 1 4
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 1
KEY:
A = Sandstone.
B = Quartzite.
C = Very fine schist.
D = Yellow jasper.
E = Argillite.

Fig. 101.—Discoidal stone.

C. Sides flat; edges straight, sometimes rounding off into the sides; diameter, 2¼ to 6 inches;
thickness, three-quarters to 2¼ inches. A number from southeastern Tennessee, especially the
smaller ones, are quite rough, being merely pecked or chipped into shape with no subsequent
rubbing. Figure 101 (chalcedony, from a mound in Monroe county, Tennessee) represents the
type. The material is variable.

District. A B C D E F G H I
Southeastern Tennessee 5 5 1 3 1 9
Western Tennessee 1 1
Savannah, Georgia 1 7 1
Mississippi county, Arkansas 1
 KEY:
A = Quartz.
B = Sandstone.
C = Argillite.
D = Chalcedony.
E = Limestone.
F = Marble.
G = Granite.
H = Jasper conglomerate.
I = Quartzite.

D. Like the last, except much smaller. Very few are polished over the entire surface; some are
rubbed more or less on the edges or sides, but a majority have the edge rough as it was
chipped or pecked out; many have either the edge or sides in the natural state. From those
smoothly polished to those very rudely worked the gradation is such that no dividing line can
be drawn. This is true, also, of the smaller specimens of other types. Some of the quartzite
specimens are very loose in texture. From seven-eighths to 2 inches in diameter and one-
fourth to three-fourths of an inch thick.

District. A B C D E F G H I J
Eastern Tennessee 1 54 64 32 1 12 4
Bartow county, Georgia 1 1 1 4
Savannah, Georgia 2
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 7 20 1
Northeastern Kentucky 14 5
A = Marble.
B = Sandstone.
C = Argillite.
D = Granite.
E = Red jasper.
F = Quartzite.
G = Micaceous sandstone.
H = Limestone.
I = Quartz.
J = Cannel coal.

Fig. 102.—Discoidal stone, convex.

E. Convex on both sides, edges straight. One of white quartz from Caldwell county, North
Carolina, has the sides much curved, making the stone very thick in proportion to its width;
there is a deep pit on each side, the entire surface being highly polished. Diameter, 2 to 3½
inches; thickness, three-fourths to an inch and a half. Illustrated by figure 102 (of porphyry,
from a grave in Caldwell county, North Carolina).

District. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S
Eastern
Arkansas 3 1 1 1 4 7 1 7 1 1
Eastern
Tennessee
(many of
these
rough and
entirely
without
polish) 1 88 29 1 1 31 27 8 1 1 2
Kanawha
valley,
West
Virginia
(rough) 1
Savannah,
Georgia 1 3
Union county,
Mississippi 1
Caldwell
county,
North
Carolina 1 10 4 1 2 1 2 1
KEY:
A = Yellow jasper.
B = Iron ore.
C = Mica schist.
D = Novaculite.
E = Jasper conglomerate.
F = Quartzite.
G = Quartz.
H = Hornblende.
I = Marble.
J = Clayey limestone.
K = Argillite.
L = Sandstone.
M = Limestone.
N = Sienite.
O = Granite.
P = Chalcedony.
Q = Steatite.
R = Black flint.
S = Porphyry.

F. Same form as the above; 1¼ to 2 inches in diameter, one-half to seven-eighths of an inch

thick.

District. A B C D E F G H I J
Elmore county, Alabama 2 1 1 1
Western North Carolina 1 2
 Eastern Tennessee 2 1 9 1
Bartow county, Georgia 1 1 1 2
Savannah, Georgia 3
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 4
Drew county, Arkansas 1
KEY:
A = Jasper.
B = Mica schist.
C = Micaceous sandstone.
D = Quartzite.
E = Quartz.
F = Marble.
G = Argillite.
H = Sandstone.
I = Limestone.
J = Steatite.

Fig. 103.—Discoidal stone.

G. Flat or slightly convex on one or both sides, edge straight, one side wider than the other.
Some have the edge battered or chipped and it is always at the angle of the edge with the
wider side. From 1⅝ to 3½ inches in diameter, and three-fourths to an inch and a half thick.
The specimen shown in figure 103 (of compact quartzite, from Bartow county, Georgia) is
typical. The material is quite diverse.

District. A B C D E F G H I J K
Eastern Tennessee 2 1 2 2 1
Savannah, Georgia 1 3
Bartow county, Georgia 1 1
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 2 1
Caldwell county, North Carolina 3 1 1 2
Mississippi county, Arkansas 1
KEY:
A = Sandstone.
B = Marble.
C = Quartzite.
D = Quartz hornblende.
E = Granite.
F = Quartz.
G = Compact quartzite.
H = Sienite.
I = Chalcedony.
J = Schist.
K = Flint.

There are also of this type, one of very hard black stone (not identified) from Red River
county, Texas, three-fourths of an inch in diameter; one of barite from Bartow county, Georgia,
one inch in diameter, three-fourths inch thick; and one of granite, from Chester county, South
Carolina, an inch in diameter. There are also one of quartzite from Drew county, Arkansas, with
a shallow pit on each side; one of the same material from southeastern Tennessee, with a
deep pit gouged in smaller side; and from the same locality, three of quartzite, one of quartz,
and one of sandstone, each with a deep pit in the larger side. All of these are small and none
of them polished.

Fig. 104.—Discoidal stone.

H. Convex sides and curved edges; size as in group G. The type (figure 104) is of quartz, from
Caldwell county, North Carolina.

District. A B C D E F
Catahoula parish, Louisiana 1
Eastern Tennessee 2 3
Caldwell county, North Carolina 2 1
Northeastern Arkansas 1 1
KEY:
A = Jasper conglomerate.
B = Quartz.
C = Limestone.
D = Quartzite.
E = Sandstone.
F = Conglomerate.

I. Same form, rough and not polished; 1 to 2¾ inches in diameter, one-half to 1 inch thick.

District. A B C D E F
Eastern Tennessee 50 3 11 10
Northeastern Arkansas 1 3 3
Caldwell county, North Carolina 1
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 36 1
KEY:
A = Quartzite.
B = Flint.
C = Yellow jasper.
D = Argillite.
E = Quartz.
F = Sandstone.
J. Sides slightly convex, edge slightly curved; 2¼ to 3½ inches in diameter, three-quarters to
an inch and a half thick.

District. A B C D E F G H
Kanawha valley, West Virginia (evidently used for a hammerstone) 1
Eastern Tennessee 2 3 4 1 2 1
Lauderdale county, Tennessee 1
Caldwell county, North Carolina 2 1
Fulton county, Georgia 1
KEY:
A = Sandstone.
B = Quartz.
C = Quartzite.
D = Chalcedony.
E = Argillite.
F = Clayey limestone.
G = Steatite.
H = Sienite.

K. Sides flat; edges convex; roughly finished, no polish; 1⅛ to 2¼ inches in diameter, three-
eighths to three-fourths of an inch thick.

District. A B C
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 1 1
Eastern Tennessee 4 1 7
KEY:
A = Sandstone.
B = Quartz.
C = Quartzite.

L. Not polished; roughly chipped edges; 2 to 3½ inches in diameter.

District. A B C D
Mississippi county, Arkansas 1 1 1 3
Bartow county, Georgia 1
Union county, Mississippi 3
KEY:
A = Sandstone.
B = Quartzite.
C = Chalcedony.
D = Yellow jasper.

M. Edges V-shape; 1¾ to 2½ inches diameter, 1 to 1½ inches thick. The type (figure 105) is
of granite, from Randolph county, Illinois, with insunk pecked sides and polished edge. A
specimen from Kanawha valley, West Virginia, is of flint, with only the edge worked;
apparently a hammer. One from Craighead county, Arkansas, has flat sides and the entire
surface polished; another from McMinn county, Tennessee, is also polished entire. A good
specimen from Cocke county, Tennessee, is of flint, one side rubbed flat, the other a rounded
cone, highly polished.
 Fig. 105.—Discoidal stone, with V-shaped edges.

N. Sides hollowed out; edges straight or slightly curved; very thick; used as mortars,
hammers, or pestles. This form gradually merges into disk-shaped, pitted, or entire dressed
hammers, which in turn run into the ordinary hammerstones. The types are figures 106
(quartzite, from Bradley county, Tennessee) and 107 (quartzite, from Nicholas county,
Kentucky). There are in this group from eastern Tennessee three of quartzite, 2¼ by 4½
inches, 4¼ by 5¾ inches, and 1¾ by 3¼ inches, and one of granite, 2¾ by 3 inches; from
Caldwell county, North Carolina, one of granite; and from Montgomery county, North Carolina,
three of quartzite. The last four are evidently hammers or pestles. In addition there is a
specimen from Jackson county, Illinois, of ferruginous sandstone, 3 inches in diameter. On one
side there is a pit and on the other a shallow, mortar-like cavity extending entirely across.

Fig. 106.—Discoidal stone, used as mortar.

Fig. 107.—Discoidal stone, probably used as hammer.

O. One side flat, the other rounded; of convenient size for grasping. In some the bottom is
quite smooth. There is sometimes a pit in one or both sides, more frequently in the bottom.
They were used as mullers or pestles; in the latter, either the side or the edge may have been
the pounding surface. The line between these implements and the cylindrical, dome-topped
pestles can not be drawn (see figure 91).

District. A B C D
Eastern Tennessee 1 2
Southwestern Wisconsin 2 1 1
 Kanawha valley, West Virginia 1
Crittenden county, Arkansas 1
Jackson county, North Carolina 1
Warren county, Ohio 1
Savannah, Georgia 2 1 2 8
KEY:
A = Quartzite.
B = Quartz.
C = Sandstone.
D = Granite.

P. Sides flat; edge convex; same size and use as last.

District. A B C D
Southeastern Tennessee 1 1
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 3 5
Warren county, Ohio 1
Madison county, Alabama 1
KEY:
A = Quartzite.
B = Quartz.
C = Sandstone.
D = Granite.

Q. From southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia there are many disk-shape
fragments of pottery, small, thin, and coarse, with the edges roughly chipped; and from
northeastern Kentucky there are similar pieces, except that they have been fashioned from
fragments of limestone and sandstone. These specimens are illustrated by figure 108 (pottery,
from a mound in Bartow county, Georgia).

Fig. 108.—Discoidal pottery fragment.

Spuds.

It has been a puzzle to archeologists to assign to any class the peculiar stones called “spuds.”
They are usually of a comparatively soft material, carefully worked and polished, and bear no
marks of rough usage. On the other hand, they seem too large for ornament. Perhaps their
office may have been in some ceremony or game. Something similar in form seems to be
denoted in the following extracts:
Col. James Smith81 says, speaking of the Indians of western Pennsylvania, that as soon as the
elm bark will strip in spring, the squaws, after finding a tree that will do, cut it down, and with
a crooked stick, broad and sharp at the end, take the bark off the tree, and of this bark make
vessels. The Twana Indians, who formerly lived at the south end of Hoods canal, Washington,
in barking logs use a heavy iron implement about 3 feet long, widened and sharpened at the
end;82 and the tanbark workers of our day use an instrument of somewhat similar form.

The ordinary spud is too weak to endure such usage, though it is claimed by old people living
in the Shenandoah valley, Virginia, that in the last century the Indians in that locality used an
implement of this pattern for stripping the bark from trees. The implement may have been
used in dressing hides, the hole being for attachment of a handle.

Fig. 109.—Spud.

A celt of argillite, highly polished, from Loudon county, Tennessee, of the pattern shown in
figure 64, has a neatly drilled cylindrical hole about a third of the way from the top; but such
cases are unusual. The spuds may be divided into three general classes, as follows:

A. Blade circular in outline, including 180 degrees or more, or semielliptical with either axis
transverse; sides of stem straight or slightly curved, parallel or slightly tapering to top, which is
either straight or slightly rounded; shoulder nearly at right angles to stem, with sharp or
rounded corners or sometimes barbed; stem and blade not differing greatly in length. The
type of the class, presented in figure 109, is of clay slate, from a mound in Monroe county,
Tennessee. The other six specimens in the collection were distributed as shown in the table.

District. A B C D E
Western North Carolina 1 1 1
Monroe county, Tennessee 1 1
Phillips county, Arkansas 1
Pulaski county, Arkansas 1
KEY:
A = Green slate.
B = Mica-schist.
C = Compact quartzite.
D = Clay slate.
E = Quartzite.
B. Lower part of the blade a half circle or less; top square or slightly rounded; stem rapidly
widening, with increasing curve to the blade, making an angle with it; stem and blade nearly
the same length. A specimen of green slate, from Mississippi county, Arkansas, is illustrated in
figure 110. Another, of compact quartzite, comes from Loudon county, Tennessee.

Fig. 110.—Spud.

C. Handle or stem round; very much longer than the blade, which is semicircular or
semielliptical, with square or barbed shoulders. Illustrated in figure 111 (probably of chloritic
slate, from Prairie county, Arkansas).

Plummets.

The specimens known as plummets vary considerably in form, size, and degree of finish,
indicating diversity of purpose, and different writers have assigned to them various uses.

According to Abbott, one of these relics was found at Salem, in a mortar.83 Stevens says,
quoting from Schoolcraft, that the Pennacook Indians used sinkers very much like a plummet
in shape.84 In Florida very rough plummets with deep grooves are found in the shell mounds,
which were no doubt used as sinkers. The Indians of southern California use them as medicine
stones to bring rain; the Eskimo use similar stones as sinkers, but have them perforated at the
end. The larger objects of this form may have been used as pestles.85 They might be made
very efficient in twisting thread, as they revolve for a considerable time when set in motion.

Fig. 111.—Spud.

The general form is ovoid, sometimes quite slender, sometimes almost round; the ends may
be either blunt or pointed. They may be grooved near the middle or near either the larger or
smaller end. Some have two grooves, some are only partially grooved, while others have the
groove extending lengthwise. There are forms that differ somewhat from this description, but
such are rare.

Fig. 112.—Plummet, grooved near one end.

Fig. 113.—Plummet, double-grooved.

Many small and otherwise unworked waterworn pebbles and pieces of steatite pots from
southeastern Tennessee and from Montgomery county, North Carolina, have grooves near the
middle or near one end; they were probably applied to some of the uses for which plummets
were intended.

The plummets in the Bureau collection may be grouped as follows:

A. Grooved near smaller end. The types are illustrated in figure 112 (sandy limestone, from a
mound in Catahoula parish, Louisiana), and figure 113 (hematite, double grooved, with
notches cut in various places, from a mound in Kanawha valley, West Virginia). Other
specimens are, one from Arkansas county, Arkansas, of sandstone, and one each from Brown
and Randolph counties, Illinois, both of hematite.

B. Grooved near larger end. A good example, of hematite, is from Kanawha valley, West
Virginia, with a second groove partially around the middle.
C. Grooved near the middle. The class is represented by a beautiful specimen (figure 114) of
hematite, with the groove much polished and irregular, and a deep notch cut in one end, from
Ross county, Ohio. Another specimen, from Kanawha valley, West Virginia, is a double conical
implement of hematite, elliptical in section with both ends ground off on flatter sides only.

Fig. 114.—Plummet, grooved near middle.

Fig. 115.—Plummet, grooved lengthwise.

D. Grooved lengthwise. This class includes a plummet of quartzite, from Yellowstone park
(figure 115), and another of hematite, much shorter than the Yellowstone specimen and with
blunt ends, from Kanawha valley, West Virginia.

Fig. 116.—Plummet, grooveless, perforated.

 Fig. 117.—Plummet, double cone in shape.

E. Grooveless. A good specimen (figure 116) is of quartz and mica, elliptical in section, pointed
at ends with one end perforated, from Yellowstone park; another, from Randolph county,
Illinois, of hematite, rough, perhaps unfinished.

F. Double cone, with one end ground off flat and hollowed out. The type (figure 117) is of
granite, one of three from Savannah, Georgia.

G. Top flattened and hollowed out; sides incurving to the middle; lower half a hemisphere. The
class is represented by figure 118 (quartzite, from Randolph county, Illinois), and figure 119
(sandstone, from Adams county, Ohio). From Kanawha valley there is one of hematite, similar
in form to the last.

Fig. 118.—Plummet.

H. Ovoid, with the smaller end ground off flat.86 A good specimen of this class (figure 120) is
of magnetite, from Caldwell county, North Carolina. From Savannah, Georgia, there are two of
sandstone, both smaller than the type and rough; from Kanawha valley there is one of
quartzite, nearly half ground away, leaving almost a hemisphere; and from eastern Tennessee
there are one of magnetite and one of quartzite, the latter nearly round.

I. Cylindrical. A unique specimen, from a mound in Loudon county, Tennessee, is illustrated in

figure 121. It is of sandstone; a short cylinder with incurved sides, each end terminating in a
blunt cone.
 Fig. 119.— Fig. 120.—Plummet, Fig. 121.—
Plummet. end ground flat. Plummet.

Figure 122 represents a piece of smoothly dressed steatite from Desha county, Arkansas, with
a two-thirds round section, the ends rounded, with a groove near one end, which may be
classed with the plummets. There are pieces of sandstone from the same locality which
connect this pattern with the simpler “boat-form” stones, except that the flat side is ground
smooth instead of being hollowed. This is only one of numerous examples where the shapes
of implements whose “typical forms” seem utterly dissimilar merge into one another so
gradually that no line of demarkation can be drawn.

Fig. 122.—Plummet, cylindrical.

Cones.

Fig. 123.—Cone. Fig. 124.—Cone.

The relics known as “cones” have the base flat and the side curving slightly; usually the curve
extends regularly over the top, but sometimes the apex is rubbed off flat. The conic surface
may form an angle with the base, or the line of junction may be rounded into a curve. They
vary considerably in thickness, some being nearly flat, others having a height equal to the
diameter of the base. One of steatite from Savannah, as also one of sandstone from Kanawha
valley, has a slight pit or depression on the flat side. Among the best examples are one (figure
123) of steatite from Bradley county, Tennessee, and another (figure 124) of hematite from
Loudon county, in the same state; one (figure 125) of compact quartzite from a mound in Ogle
county, Illinois, and a fourth specimen (figure 126) of granite from Kanawha valley, West
Virginia. The distribution is as follows:

Fig. 125.—Cone. Fig. 126.—Cone.

District. A B C D E
Eastern Tennessee 3 4
Ogle county, Illinois 1
Savannah, Georgia 1
Haywood county, North Carolina 1
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 1 1 1
KEY:
A = Steatite.
B = Hematite.
C = Compact quartzite.
11 D = Granite.
E = Sandstone.

Hemispheres.

Hemispheric stones, like the cones, can receive a name only from the form and not from any
known or imagined use to which they could have been applied.

All such specimens in the collection, except one, are from Kanawha valley, and of hematite;
many if not most of them have been ground down from the nodule, and were probably paint
stones originally; at least, the material rubbed from them was used as paint while the maker
had their final form in view. One, however, has been pecked into shape and is entirely without
polish. In all, the base is flat and varies in outline from almost a circle to a narrow ellipse. A
section of the stone parallel to either axis of the base varies from a little more to a little less
than a semicircle. Typical forms, both from Bracken county, Kentucky, are illustrated in figure
127.
 Fig. 127.—Hemispheres.

The specimen, illustrated in figure 128 (yellow quartz, from a mound in Kanawha valley) is
intermediate between cones and hemispheres. The sides are polished, while the flat bottom
and rounded top are roughened. As it has faint red stains, it may have been used as a paint-
muller.

Fig. 128.—Hemisphere.

Paint Stones.

The articles known as paint stones scarcely come under the head of implements. Some of the
hematite pieces are incipient celts, hemispheres, or cones; but most of them were used merely
to furnish paint, at any rate until rubbed down quite small. They are of every degree of
firmness, some being as brittle as dry clay, others like iron. Most pieces in the collection are
from Kanawha valley, but others are from southeastern Tennessee, northeastern Arkansas,
and Caldwell county, North Carolina. From the last-named section, as well as from Chester
county, South Carolina, and McMinn county, Tennessee, come pieces of graphite more or less
rubbed; and one has been sent in from Elmore county, Alabama.
 Fig. 129.—Paint stone.

The specimen illustrated in figure 129, from a mound, is a good example of the manner in
which the harder hematite was ground.

Ceremonial Stones.

Functions and Purposes.

The so-called “ceremonial stones” are variously subdivided and named by different writers.
They are supposed to have been devoted to religious, superstitious, medical, emblematic, or
ceremonial purposes; to be badges of authority, insignia of rank, tokens of valorous deeds, or
perhaps some sort of heraldic device; in short, the uses to which they might, in their different
forms, be assigned, are limited only by the imagination.

According to Nilsson the ancient Scandinavians wore “victory stones” suspended around their
necks,87 and the Eskimo wear charms and amulets to bring success in fishing and hunting.88
Adair (1775) says that the American Archi-magus wore a breastplate made of a white conch-
shell, with two holes bored in the middle of it, through which he put the ends of an otter-skin
strap and fastened a buck-horn button to the outside of each.89 An explanation of the purpose
of many of the smaller perforated stones also may be found in Nilsson’s remark90 that the
small ovoid or ellipsoid ones were used as buttons; a string being tied to the robe at one end,
run through the hole and tied in a knot.

The various Indians of Guiana in their leisure hours often fashion highly ornamental weapons
and implements which they never use except ceremonially, but keep proudly at home for
show.91

So, too, the Yurok and Hupa Indians of California, as well as some of the tribes of Oregon,
have very large spearheads or knives, which are not designed for use, but only to be produced
on the occasion of a great dance. The larger weapons are wrapped in skin to protect the hand;
the smaller ones are glued to a handle. Some are said to be 15 inches long.92 The Oregon
Indians believed the possession of a large obsidian knife brought long life and prosperity to
the tribe owning it.93

Some of the wild tribes of the interior have something which they regard as the Jews did the
Ark of the Covenant. Sometimes it is known; again it is kept secret. The Cheyenne had a
bundle of arrows; the Ute a little stone image, and the Osage a similar stone.94 The Kiowa had
a carved wooden image, representing a human face; the Ute captured it, and the Kiowa
offered very great rewards for its return; but the Ute, believing the Kiowa powerless to harm
them so long as it was retained, refused to give it up.95

The North Carolina Indians, when they went to war, carried with them their idol, of which they
told incredible stories and asked counsel;96 and as a token of rank or authority, the Virginia
Indians suspended on their breasts, by a string of beads about their neck, a square plate of
copper.97 These were worn as badges of authority. The native tribes, from our first
acquaintance with them, evinced a fondness for insignia of this kind.98

Simply for convenience the ceremonial stones in the Bureau collection will here be divided into
two general classes. The first, comprising those pierced through the shortest diameter, will be
called gorgets, which name, like that of celt, has no particular meaning, but is in common use.
The second class will comprise all others, which will have some name that may or may not be
suitable to their form, but by which they are usually called. In this class are included boat-
shape stones, banner stones, picks, spool-shape ornaments, and bird-shape stones, as well as
engraved tablets or stones.99

Gorgets.

The relics commonly called gorgets have been found in Europe; they may be convex on one
side, concave on the other, and are supposed to be for bracers.100 It is said that the Miami
Indians wore similar plates of stone to protect their wrists from the bowstring.101 Herndon and
Gibbon remark that a gold ornament in shape like a gorget, but not pierced, is worn on the
forehead by some of the Amazon Indians.102 According to Schoolcraft the so-called gorgets
were sometimes used as twine-twisters;103 but Abbott holds that while some may have been
twine-twisters, or may have been used for condensing sinews or evening bowstrings (that is,
reducing the strings to a uniform diameter), most were simply ornaments, as they are
generally found on the breast of a buried body.104 Stevens is even more conservative, holding
that they were neither twine-twisters nor devices for condensing sinews or evening
bowstrings, as they show no marks of wear in the holes.105

Some writers suppose the gorgets to have been shuttles; but this supposition can hardly be
entertained, although it is true, according to Chase, that the Oregon Indians passed thread
with a curved bone needle.106 As twine-twisters they would be about as awkward as anything
that could be devised. As to evening bowstrings, it would seem that if a string were too large
in places to pass through a hole it could not be pulled through; pounding and rolling the wet
string with a smooth stone, or some such means, would be the remedy. The bracer theory is
plausible; but no one seems ever to have seen a gorget used for this purpose.

Few of the gorgets in the Bureau collection show such marks of wear around the edges of the
hole as would be made by a cord; but the majority are thus worn at the middle, where the
hole is smallest. Some specimens among every lot are not perforated, or only partially so; the
drilling seems to have been the last stage of the work. The hole is almost always drilled from
both sides, and the few in which it goes entirely through from one side would probably have
had it enlarged later from the other. A number are fragments of larger gorgets, the pieces
having been redrilled.
Some of the specimens have various notches and incised lines, the latter being sometimes in
tolerably regular order; but there is not the slightest indication that these marks had any
meaning or were intended for any other purpose than to add to the ornamental appearance of
the stone.

If they were to be worn at the belt or on any part of the dress they could easily have been
fastened by a knotted string, or if the wearer desired he could have an ornamental button of
some kind. If suspended around the neck, in order to make them lie flat against the breast
they probably had a short cord passed through the perforation and tied above the top of the
object, the suspending cord being passed through the loop thus formed.

Fig. 130.—Gorget.

The principal division is into group A with one hole and group B with two holes, though in
many cases this forms the only difference between two specimens.

A. General outline rectangular, or perhaps slightly elliptical, sometimes with one end somewhat
narrower than the other, or with one end rounded off, or with the corners slightly rounded.
Perforation commonly near one end. The form is represented by the specimen with two
perforations illustrated in figure 133, which otherwise fully answers the description. The
argillite specimens have the broader ends striated as though used for rubbing or scraping, but
in other respects conform to those of other materials. The materials are generally the softer
rocks, as shown in the accompanying table:

District. A B C D E
Eastern Tennessee 2 3 2 3
Wilkes county, North Carolina 1
Knox county, Ohio 1
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 7 2
KEY:
A = Steatite.
B = Slate.
C = Sandstone.
D = Schist.
E = Argillite.

A related type is rectangular or with incurved sides (forming either a regular or broken curve)
and rounded ends, and differs in having the perforation near the center. The same pattern
sometimes has two holes. It is illustrated in figure 130 (striped slate, from a mound in
Kanawha valley, West Virginia). There are also from the same place one each of slate, cannel
coal, and clay slate, and from eastern Tennessee one each of slate, shale, and clay slate.

Fig. 131.—Gorget(?).

There are a number of small pebbles, thin and flat, with a hole drilled near the edge, from
southeastern Tennessee, North Carolina, and southeastern Arkansas. One of these, from
Caldwell county, North Carolina, is of banded slate; the others are of clay slate or sandstone.
Two of them have straight and zigzag lines on both faces, and notches around the edge.

Allied to these are a number of pieces of flat stone from southeastern Tennessee, Kanawha
valley, and North Carolina, with the faces partially rubbed down smooth, the edges being
untouched. They are of slate, talc, or argillite.

From southeastern Tennessee and North Carolina there are several pieces of steatite, which
may have been for sinkers. Some have a hole near one end, others a hole at each end, while
still others are not perforated. All have been worked over the entire surface, and some of them
are well polished. One of these is represented in figure 131.

B. Gorgets with two holes. Of these there are several subdivisions, differing more or less
widely in form. They are as follows:

1. Thick, with both the sides and the ends incurved or reel-shape; faces flat or slightly convex.
This form is represented by the specimen shown in figure 132, from a mound, Knox county,
Ohio. There is another from the same place, a third from Kanawha valley, and a fourth from
Butler county, Ohio; all of green slate.

Fig. 132.—Gorget, reel-shape.

2. Rectangular, or with sides or ends, or both, slightly curved, either convex or concave; faces
flat. Shown in figure 133 (green slate, from a grave in Kanawha valley, West Virginia).
 District. A B C D E F
Nicholas county, Kentucky, with ends V-shaped 1
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 11 3 3
Eastern Tennessee 6 1 1 1
Ogle county, Illinois 1
Forsyth county, Georgia 1
Haywood county, N.C. 1
Davidson county, N.C. 1
Chautauqua county, N.Y. 1
KEY:
A = Slate.
B = Limestone.
C = Sandstone.
D = Shale.
E = Argillite.
F = Fine quartzite.

Fig. 133.—Gorget.

3. Widest at middle, with single or double curve from end to end; very thin; both sides flat.

District. A B C
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 1 4
Davidson county, North Carolina 1
Savannah, Georgia 1
Eastern Tennessee 5 1
KEY:
A = Slate.
B = Sandstone.
C = Schist.

4. Same outline but thicker; one face flat, the other convex. Represented by figure 134 (shale,
from Jackson county, Illinois). The distribution of the form is as follows:

District. A B C D E F G
Eastern Tennessee 2 3 1 1
Haywood county, North Carolina 1 2
Davidson county, North Carolina 1
Savannah, Georgia 2 2
Kanawha valley, West Virginia 1
Jackson county, Illinois 1
Desha county, Arkansas 1 1
KEY:
A = Sandstone.
 B = Slate.
C = Schist.
D = Steatite.
E = Talc.
F = Argillite.
G = Shale.

Fig. 134.—Gorget.

5. Same outline, but quite thick, approaching the “boat-shape” stones in form. In some the flat
side is slightly hollowed out. A majority of them are not perforated. The type (figure 135) is of
sandstone, from a mound at Adelphi, Ohio.

There are also, from Butler county, Ohio, Kanawha valley, West Virginia, and Savannah,
Georgia, one each of slate; from Ross county, Ohio, two, and from Kanawha valley, and Cocke
county, Tennessee, one each, all of sandstone. There are two (of sandstone and slate) from
Kanawha valley, which differ from the others in having the sides parallel, giving them a
semicylindrical form.

The pattern of the specimen illustrated in figure 136 (striped slate, from Butler county, Ohio, of
which a number have been found in that state), may be classed between the gorgets and the
boat-shape stones. The shorter end of the object has, sometimes, a projection or enlargement
at the top, apparently for suspension, although no perforated examples have been found.

Banner Stones.

Under the head of “banner stones” are placed ornaments having the ends at right angles to
the perforation. The hole is drilled in a midrib, from which the faces slope by either straight or
curved lines to the edges. The two halves of the stone are symmetrical. In most specimens
one face is flatter than the other, even plane in some cases. Some specimens are finished to a
high polish, before the hole is started; others have the hole completed with the exterior more
or less unfinished. The specimens in the Bureau collection may be classified as follows:

A. Rectangular or trapezoidal, with sides and ends sometimes slightly curved inward or
outward.

B. Reel-shape.

C. Crescentic.
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