The Archaeologist: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Devoted to Archaeology ...

Beginning at Durham. Bucks county, Pa., and following the trend of the Lehigh hills towards the Schuylkill near Reading, and generally in close connection with veins of hematite, occurs a series of outcrops of the hard homogeneous rock known as jasper. This many-colored stone with its smooth conchoidal fracture stood somewhat in the same relation to the North American Indian that iron stands to us. With it he fashioned his best spears, perforators, knives, arrowheads, and scrapers. No less diligently did he seek for it than does the man of the 19th century search for that great lever of his power and progress, iron; and no less persistently did he quarry it, shape it to his needs and transport it to great distances.

So Indians in the West had been known to quarry jasper at the now famous "Flint Ridge." in Ohio; novaculite at their great quarries in Garland county. Ark.: jasper, or hornstone, again in the Indian Territory: quartzite at Piney Branch, in the District of Columbia: obsidian, or volcanic glass, in the Yellowstone Park and Mexico, and other workable stones at other places. But whence the jasper supply came from east of the Alleghenies, has long remained a mystery. Even the State geological surveys did not seem to adequately recognize the existence of jasper in the Eastern Lehigh hills: so that the recent series of discoveries, by expeditions in the interest of the University of Pennsylvania, have thrown a decidedly unexpected light upon the story of ancient man in the Delaware Valley.

The thanks of the university are due to Mr. Chas. Laubach, of Durham, who first introduced the explorers, in 1891, to the aboriginal jasper quarry on Rattle-snake hill, at Durham, Bucks county, and to Mr. A. F. Berlin, of Allentown, who, by a series of valuable clues, greatly furthered the work of subsequent research.

How did the Indian, armed only with tools of wood, bone, stone or beaten native copper, make the excavations averaging sometimes 20 feet in depth and 100 in diameter? Did he use pick-axes made of deer antlers, as did the ancient flint workers of Brandon. in England? Did he encounter the rock in solid ledges as in Arkansas, or in loose nodules? Did he reduce it by fire, splinter it with stone hammers such as are found at the prehistoric copper mines on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, or by battering boulder against boulder? Did he finally chip the material into arrowheads at the quarry, or carry away lumps of the stone to be worked up elsewhere?

These and many other questions we asked ourselves on a first glance at the bramble-grown pits and refuse heaps on the lonely hilltop at Durham. And after a careful study of the place several expeditions set out on this and the preceding summer, resulting in the discovery of eight new quarries lying in a continuous line from the Delaware almost to the Schuylkill.

All, though varying greatly in size and quality of material, tell the same story.

In some the excavations, filled with forest mould and overgrown with trees, would escape the attention of the casual rambler until the piles of flakes, yellow and rose-tinted, easily displayed by scraping away the leaves that concealed them, revealed the handiwork of the ancient quarryman.

But at others, as at Macungie and Vera Cruz, the passer-by would halt in amazement. The appearance is too unusual, the work too vast-100 to 150 pits, some of them 15 feet deep and 100 to 150 feet in diameter, is no everyday sight. Again the tinted flakes and refuse heaps tell the tale, and the neighboring wheat field glistens with fragments, yellow, blue, purple, red, lavender and veined in many hues. The forest, too, has set its stamp of age upon the scene, and an old chestnut stumpt growing on the side of one of the pits, upon which we counted 196 rings, proves that the workman had abandoned his shaft to the growth of underbrush before the time (1682) that William Penn bought his first tract of land from Indians on the Delaware.

As, standing before the ancient works of the Mound-builders at Grave creek Marietta and Newark a strange feeling born of awe steals over us, so here by degrees the scene assumes its true hue of wonder. We have had a glance beyond the boundary lines of history into the unilluminated darkness of this continent's past, and for a moment heard the echoes of that vast forest mysterious with the fate of lost races that for untold ages darkened the new world before the coming of Columbus and DeSoto.

It was important to learn that at two of the largest quarries, farmers. believing the pits to have been the work of early Spanish gold seekers, had dug deep trenches across several of them to find that in most instances their original depth was greatly lessened by the caving in of the sides; that some of them, judging from the traces of disturbance in the soil, had reached a depth of 40 feet: that some were square rather than round; that there had been no tunneling done, but that the pits had been enlarged laterally from the surface downward.

In the bottom of two pits. at least, said my informant. charcoal was found, and in two cases, deep buried in clay at the very bottom, round billets of wood about three feet in length with points at one end hardened by charring. all cases nodules of jasper were to a great extent wanting in the pits, but were found embedded in the soil as soon as the unworked edges of the excavations were reached.

Our own preliminary work seemed to indicate that the Indians had in no cases attacked a solid vein of the material, but finding it in nodules on the surface had removed these to find others embedded beneath them. It was by prying these out one by one and scraping away the surrounding clay that the pits were made. That fire had been extensively used on the surface nodules there was no question, whether in the clearing away of underbrush for mining at successive times, or, as seemed probable in one case, in reducing the larger fragments and coloring yellow jasper red.

Turning to the refuse heaps, and from the myriads of artificially flaked fragments exhibiting no succinct design that strew the surface everywhere, we find―(a) a series of well battered quartzite hammer stones, not pitted on their sides, and variously from 14 to 5 and 6 inches in diameter; (b) a mass of very interesting, artificially shaped blocks, that all tend in the direction of an

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