. The Antiquarian [serial]. rds (fragments) of hand-made pottervand literally hundreds of busycon (conch)shells, pierced for hafting, the points ofwhich had been variously shaped by grind-ing to form gouges, chisels, picks, hoes,hammers, and yet other kinds of weaponand tool. From all sides of this water plazaor court, graded ways—once beautifullysloped, but now in ruin—led up to thegreater heights around. Suddenly I realized that I was standingamid vestiges of the shell foundations of agreat ruined City of the Sea, so enormousthat I could scarce believe it to have beenthe work of human hands.
. The Antiquarian [serial]. rds (fragments) of hand-made pottervand literally hundreds of busycon (conch)shells, pierced for hafting, the points ofwhich had been variously shaped by grind-ing to form gouges, chisels, picks, hoes,hammers, and yet other kinds of weaponand tool. From all sides of this water plazaor court, graded ways—once beautifullysloped, but now in ruin—led up to thegreater heights around. Suddenly I realized that I was standingamid vestiges of the shell foundations of agreat ruined City of the Sea, so enormousthat I could scarce believe it to have beenthe work of human hands. The plummets, pendants and other or- M THE ANTIQUARIAN. namental and ceremonial objects of stonewhich we found were among the best pro-ducts of the aboriginal lapidarys art I haveyet seen. They were made of a great va-riety of material, from soft soapstone andspar to hard diorite and rock crystal; fromhematite, polished like burnished steel, toclean-cut plates of mica and elaboratelywrought, symbolic objects of tatooed water jar. The range of commerce that thesethings indicated was enormous. There wasa fine-grained stone derived from the farWest Indies, a shell from the Gulf of Cam-peche; the mica and rock crystal were ofthe Georgia and Carolina kinds, and thecopper had been brought both from LakeSuperior and from Cuba while the hema-tite and galena nodules were of the kindso often occurring in Missouri and Iowa. The most interesting objects that wefound, however, were the vessels of pot-tery. Many of them were imitations ofgourd utensils or vessels made from thehard rinds of various other kinds of of the pottery was obviously madein imitation also of wooden ware—probablysurvived a time when the ancestry of thispeople had no other sorts of dishes or ves-sels than these of gourd and wood. The surfaces of some were elaboratelydecorated with involuted concentric de-signs of the so-called Caribbean type, but which I determined were artistic devel-opments
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubj, booksubjectarchaeology
