Part 2 RECORD OF EXCAVATIONS AT RIPLEY A foreword It is not designed in this account to present an exhaustive treatise on the Eries or of the various classes of objects discovered. Our purpose is merely to set forth an account of the work as it was done and briefly describe the specimens found in the course of exploration, adding such supplementary matter as may be of immediate importance for a proper understanding of the operations and the results. The record of this expedition with those which have preceded it and those which follow in the Erie region will form the base of a special work on the Eries and in that work the various Erie sites in New York and Erie artifacts will be fully discussed. This account, therefore, is to be regarded as a report of progress. rather than as a complete and final treatise. General region Along the southern shore of Lake Erie between Westfield and State Line, and extending east and west from these points, is a high bluff of Chemung shale rising almost sheer from the water. In various places it is from 15 to 65 feet above the lake fevel. It forms a most effectual barrier to those who might wish to reach the land from the water or the water from the land. The soil above the shale in general is a loose water-washed sand and gravel beneath which is a substratum of Erie clay which outcrops at denuded places. In this lake border region are numerous springs and brooks. Two miles back from the lake rise the steep Chautauqua hills which form the watershed that sends the streams on the south into the Allegheny and its tributaries and finally into the Gulf of Mexico and those on the north into Lake Erie and finally into the Gulf of St Lawrence. This region by reason of its physical features afforded an ideal retreat for the tribes of men who found their way there after the subsidence of the great glacial lakes, which receding left their shore lines far inland as terraces and hills and their beds as fertile undulating plains. Traces of early occupancy are found here. On the sites of ancient marshes are found the bones of the mastodon and with them fire-cracked stones and charcoal, evidence, it may be, of man contemporaneous with the American elephant. There are sites which yield the monitor pipe, others that yield the polished slates called banner stones, gorgets and bird-shaped stones and the notched flints far different from the flints shaped by later comers. That the people who made these things were of the American race is evident, but of what tribe or stock is a question yet to answer. Neither is there yet any way of discovering who their descendants of today are, if perchance their blood yet flows in human veins at all. At a later period a new stock of people invaded the region but whether they found it inhabited or whether there was a struggle in which the old race was expelled is merely a matter of conjecture now. Evidences of the wide distribution of these old people seem to preclude the theory of their utter extermination and it seems more probable that they became absorbed by their conquerors or became expelled to regions where their environment changed their culture. The later invaders who displaced the builders of the mounds and makers of polished slate implements seem to have been some early branch of the Huron-Iroquois family. Their territory is characterized by the earth walls and inclosures which they left and by the pottery and triangular arrow points which are never found on earlier sites untouched by other occupations. The early Iroquoian sites are still further differentiated by the ossuaries which are found upon many of them. Later this territory came into the possession of a people whom we recognize as the Eries, a branch of the HuronIroquois, but a people whose culture differed from the earlier Iroquoian peoples of whom they are without doubt the descendants. After the expulsion of the Eries in 1654 the region remained uninhabited save by wanderers and hunters and not until after the Revolutionary War did it become the hunting grounds of the Senecas who had trails through it, one of which passed close to the Erie site at Ripley. Over this trail the Senecas for years traveled on their way to the settlements on the Sandusky in Ohio. Another great trail extended down what was once the Portage road to Chautauqua lake. It began at Barcelona harbor. There have been noted numbers of sites of aboriginal occupation east of a meridian line drawn through Chautauqua lake and touching Lake Erie on the north and the Pennsylvania line on the south. West of this line, from the archeologist's standpoint, lies a practically untouched region, a strange fact since it presents an exceptionally inviting field for investigation, being as it is, the borderland between the territory of the tribes of Iroquoian stock and the culture region of that mysterious people for the sake of convenience termed "mound builders." RIPLEY SITE For a number of years the writer had known of a site in this locality, one on the lake shore 2 miles northwest of Ripley, but until this season had not had occasion to visit it. In 1900 it was reported to Mr. M. R. Harrington and the writer by Prof. John Fenton, when we were assistants on the archeological staff of the American Museum of Natural History. Mr Harrington did some work on the site in 1904 for the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, but, because of various obstacles, left the major portion untouched. The excavations which he made during his short stay revealed the fact that the site was a most prolific one. In view of the fact that the State Museum of New York had few or no specimens of the Erie culture, and, indeed, as very little was known of this culture, the site was chosen as the field for the season's operations and a leasehold obtained. The Ripley site is situated on the William and Mary Young farm in lot 27, Ripley, Chautauqua county. It covers an elevation locally known as "Dewey knoll " situated on the cliffs of Lake Erie. On the east a stream has cut through the shale and eaten down the bluffs to the lake level so that a landing is easily effected from the water. This landing is one of the few between Barcelona harbor and the mouth of Twentymile creek in Pennsyivania where there is easy access to the land on the bluffs above. The stream has cut the east side of the knoll so that for several hundred feet south from the lake the bank rises steep and in places almost sheer from the creek bed. The place is one, therefore, naturally adapted for a fortified refuge and must have been an attractive spot indeed for the aborigines who built upon it a village, a circular earthwork and who found in the soft sand a most suitable place for the burial of their dead. Surface features of the site The site was found to be mainly on the level top of the knoll although a number of graves were found on the south and west slopes. The" unoccupied soil" began at the lake bank and ran back inland to the southern slope. The soil bordering the bank line was a light sandy loam heavily intermixed with carbonaceous substances, animal phosphates, vegetable mold and particles of animal bone. Back to the south it was generally a light shifting sand which rested upon a more compact stratum. At places, especially a few feet |