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The Indians of Greater New York and the Lower Hudson
The Indians of Greater New York and the Lower Hudson Author:Clark Wissler Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: nearby. Several small shell-heaps averaging ten by six feet, and from four to six inches deep, containing the usual camp refuse, were also opened. In the nearby ... more »fields, portions of a couple of bannerstones, grooved axes, a couple of celts and a number of celt (?) blades were picked up. Celts are very rare on the north shore of Staten Island; the writer in ten years of collecting has never obtained a single specimen, and has not seen more than Fig. 1. Sites at Mariner,s Harbor. two or three. A stone gouge, the only one reported from Staten Island, was also found nearby. 4. Mariners' Harbor, Bowman's Brook site is situated on the shore of Kill van Kull, running inland for some distance along the north shore of Bowman's Brook, or, as it is often called, Newton's Creek or Deharts Brook (Fig. 1). In the early spring of 1903, the firm of Milliken Bros. chapter{Section 4started work on a large steel plant which now covers the entire ground once occupied by this site. As the sand was dug out and carted away, the shell pits, f1replaces and refuse dump of a large village were exposed and many examined by us. Later the village cemetery also came to light. Probably from fifty to one hundred pits were exposed in all, during the years 1903-7, and the contents of most of these were lost. These pits were bowl-shaped and, like those at the site at Arlington station, averaged from four to six feet in width; the average depth was from three to six feet. In some cases, the pits had the appearance of having been used for some time, probably as garbage dumps. A layer of fresh clean sand having been thrown over them when they became offensive, a new deposit of refuse was started, a practice which now may be observed sometimes among both Whites and Indians. In one case, the complete skeleton ...« less