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Culture Influences from Ohio in New York Archaeology111

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

William A. Ritchie
William A. Ritchie*
Affiliation:
Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences, Rochester, N.Y.
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Extract

In the course of its long and eventful prehistory, the territory embraced in the present state of New York was invaded from nearly every direction. For several groups, notably the Iroquois, it was the end of the trail; others sojourned briefly and passed on. In part it was heavily occupied by diverse bands for a considerable period of time. This is especially true of the central and southern sections and of large parts of the Genesee Valley. The latter and the Finger Lakes region, including the Seneca River, are thickly strewn with sites of varying age and size. In one section of the Genesee Valley, just south of Rochester, hardly a knoll is opened without revealing skeletons. Other relatively intensively occupied areas are the Susquehanna drainage, parts of the Mohawk and Hudson valleys and Long Island.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , January 1937 , pp. 182 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1937

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Footnotes

111

Some of the results in this note were given by me in Nouvelles Annales, 1922-3, pp. 109-12. The proofs have been shortened and simplified here.

References

113 Ritchie, William A., New Evidence Relating to the Archaic Occupation of New York, Researches and Transactions of the N. Y. State Archeological Assn., Vol. 8, No. 1, Rochester, 1936 Google Scholar.

114 Parker, Arthur C., Archeological History of New York, Pt. 1, N. Y. State Museum Bull., No. 235, pp. 79–83 Google Scholar. Cf. Strong, A Stone Culture from Northern Labrador and its Relation to the Eskimo-like Cultures of the Northeast, American Anthropologist, N. S., Vol. 32, No. 1; and Willoughby, Antiquities of the New England Indians, Peabody Museum (Harvard), pp. 6–80.

115 Parker, Arthur C., op. cit., pp. 340–343. Cf. Ritchie, William A., An Algonkin- Iroquois Contact Site on Castle Creek, Broome County, N. Y., Research Records of the Rochester Municipal Museum, No. 2, 1934; also, Ritchie, A Prehistoric Fortified Village Site at Canandaigua, Ontario County, N. Y., same series, No. 3, 1936.

116 Reference is here made to the Mohawk-Onondaga-Oneida group which split from the Huron and crossed the St. Lawrence into Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties. See Parker, Arthur C, The Origin of the Iroquois as Suggested by their Archaeology, American Anthropologist, Vol. 18, pp. 479–507, 1916.

117 Crofoot, Fred H., in: History of Livingston County, N. Y., edited by Doty, Lockwood R., pp. 590–593, Jackson, Michigan, 1905 Google Scholar

118 Probably the second of a pair of these was thrown out without notice.

119 See footnote 140.

120 Shetrone, H. C., Exploration of the Hopewell Group of Prehistoric Earthworks, Ohio Archaeol. and Hist. Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 131, 144–145, 151–152, 167, 170, 1926.Google Scholar

121 Shetrone, H. C., The Mound Builders, p. 198, Appleton, 1936.

122 Willoughby, Charles C., The Turner Group of Earthworks, Hamilton Co., Ohio, Papers, Peabody Museum of American Archaeol. and Ethn., Harvard, Vol. 8, No. 3, p. 14 ff., 1922.

123 Shetrone, H. C., Exploration of the Hopewell Group, p. 222.

124 Parker, Arthur C., op. cit., p. 87 ff.

125 Greenman, Emerson F., Excavation of the Coon Mound and An Analysis of the Adena Cultures, Ohio Archaeol. and Hist. Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3, p. 454, 1932. Cf. Satterthwaite, Linton, Jr., Excavation of an Indian Mound at Beech Bottom, The Museum Journal, Vol. 21, Nos. 3–4, Univ. of Pa., 1930.

126 Parker, Arthur C., op. cit., p. 92.

127 Beauchamp, William M., Polished Stone Articles Used by the New York Aborigines, Bull, of N. Y. State Museum, Vol. 4, No. 18, pp. 52, 54, Albany, 1897 Google Scholar.

128 From an account in the Amsterdam (N. Y.) Semi-Weekly Democrat, June 7, 1899, verified by Mr. Percy M. VanEpps of Schenectady, N. Y., its author.

129 Information furnished by Mr. John Swart of Hoffmans, N. Y.

130 Frey, S. L., The American Naturalist, Vol. 13, pp. 637–644, 1879 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

131 Willoughby, Charles C., op. cit., pp. 92–99.

132 Ibid., pp. 83, 84.

133 Ibid., p. 85.

134 Ibid., pp. 85, 86. Also from a personal account by Mr. Olsen and an examination of part of the material.

135 Mills, William C., Exploration of the Mound City Group, Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4, p. 563 ff., 1922 Google Scholar.

136 Nichols, John B., Notes on Rock Crevice Burials in Jefferson County at Point Peninsula, Researches and Transactions of the N. Y. State Archeological Assn., Vol. 5, No. 4, Rochester, 1928 Google Scholar.

137 This is present in other New York sites of this focus, as will presently be noted.

138 The evidence from the Heinisch and Hilltop Mounds at Portsmouth suggests that mounds were sometimes constructed. This is strengthened by Hinsdale's finds in Michigan (see footnote 139).

139 The Intrusive Mound Culture is also present without doubt in Michigan. In 1928, Hinsdale discovered at West Twin Lake, Montmorency County, below the base of a mound, a flexed skeleton with the following grave goods: “Above, eight inches from the right shoulder, a pot which has been fractured by ground pressure was removed. The pot, after reconstruction, has the dimensions of four inches across the rim, six and a half inches through the bulge and seven inches in height. It appears to be of the type usually classified as ‘Algonquin.’ It contained fifteen beautifully chipped chert arrows and one small chert knife, an arrow point of hollowed out antler tip which I sometimes designate as a ‘thimblepoint,’ two two-holed slate gorgets; and two peculiar implements made by the insertion of beavers' teeth through perforations in a prong of deer's horn. There was close by, also, a black clay pipe with massive stem. The height of the pipe barrel from the base is two inches; the length of stem projecting beyond barrel, two and one-half inches. Four bone harpoons with barbs upon one side and a hole through the base of each and a few slate objects that had been greatly damaged by fire were found near the right shoulder of the skeleton.” From Reports of Archaeological Field Work in the Summer of 1928 in Montmorency, Newaygo and Lake Counties, Michigan, Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, Vol. 12, pp. 127–128, Plates 32, 33, 1929.

140 This account was written and submitted in June, 1936. In the following October, a second and larger mound (diameter 42 feet, height 3 feet) was discovered six miles north of Squawkie Hill on the opposite side of the river near Geneseo. The presence of 2 platform pipes and 29 Flint Ridge chalcedony flake knives links it culturally with those herein described. In the central tomb, which consisted of a heap of small boulders over a series of horizontal shale slabs covering the flexed skeleton of a child; with a second flexed burial on the same level; and also everywhere in the mound fill, were found both Hopewellian and VineValley industrial traits. The former embraced the pipes and knives already mentioned, together with a large conch-shell container. The latter included over 100 notched, straight-stemmed, and semi-lozenge shaped projectile points, mostly of thick, broad-bladed form; cache blades; large triangular knife blades; drills; and stemmed scrapers, all of local drab chert; a fragmentary yellow jasper blade; a complete point of this eastern Pennsylvania material; half of an ellipsoidal steatite gorget; a rectangular slate gorget; a plano-convex adze; two celts; a so-called “bolasstone”; a rubbed hematite paint stone; three pitted hammerstones; a plain pottery pipe of obtuse-angle type; about a dozen thick, fabric-marked sherds of poorly levigated pottery; half a vessel of this ware, having a pointed bottom, mildly constricted neck, straight rim, and coarse punctate decorations; parts of four steatite cooking pots; and a native copper awl or punch. This find establishes the contemporaneity of the similar non-Hopewellian and the Hopewellian traits recovered in both of the Squawkie Hill mounds, and leads to the conclusion that this culture focus, as well as the Middlesex and Pt. Peninsula foci described in this paper, was an intrusion into the older Vine Valley horizon in New York.

141 Parker, Arthur C., op. cit., pp. 49–50.

142 Willoughby, Charles C., op. cit., pp. 81–82.

143 Almost certainly with the progress of excavation and analysis most of these traits will be specifically allocated to foci already recognized and to others which must be created. The aspect, phase and pattern concerned remain still the least adequately defined in our sequence.

144 Note that the Hopewell intrusion into the Vine Valley aspect is not described as a focus of this aspect, but because of its fundamental relationship with the Hopewellian phase, is classed as a subdivision thereof, as stated on page 183. See, for clarity, the Table of Classification of Aboriginal Cultures of New York State, in the Foreword to the writer's monograph, listed as the last reference under footnote 115 of this paper.

145 Only cremated remains have been found in the graves of the Orient focus.The five male crania of the Coastal focus available to the writer all are dolichocephalic and otherwise at variance with the type described.

146 This analysis is embodied in a recent and as yet unpublished paper, entitled: Craniological Correlations with Aboriginal Cultures in New York.

147 One example only is dolichocephalic.

148 Dixon, Roland B., The Racial History of Man, pp. 428–430, Scribner's, N. Y., 1923.

149 Hrdlicka, Ales, Catalogue of Human Crania in the U. S. National Museum Collections, No. 2631, pp. 50–78, Wash., 1927 Google Scholar.