Tour the Castle's Top Floor After its First Fifty Years

The Archaeological Collection illustrates the customs of early man, as shown by implements and other objects of stone, metal, bone, and earthenware, exhumed from graves, mounds, and village-sites.

The arrangement is by Professor Charles Rau, in charge of the collection. First are the objects of chopped stone, displaying various degrees of skill, and including,

• the roughly prepared fragments of rock, and those rudely blocked out, either presenting no definite form or representing rude tools and designed to be wrought into more regular forms,
• irregular flakes
• arrow-heads of multiform design,
• spear-heads and similar implements probably fastened to wooden handles to serve as cutting tools,
• perforators, scrapers, and sawing tools, for preparing articles of hide, bone, wood, &c.,
• dagger-shaped implements,
• broad and leaf-shaped implements-probably attached to wooden handles, and used as scrapers, hoes, and spades.

Next are the objects of ground and poltshed stone, produced by more laborious processes than the preceding class, and including,

• celts, or wedges and chisels, used for splitting and cutting, and perhaps inserted in handles for axes,
• gouges and adzes operated with and without handles in the manufacture of wooden can(Ses, and mortars which the aborigines hollowed out by the assistance of fire,
• grooved axes, which were fastened by withes to handles, and doubtless used to girdle trees and to remove charred wood, in cutting them down, as well as in the manufacture of various articles,
• hammer heads and hammer stones,
• drilled ceremonial weapons, supposed to have been fastened in handles, and worn as insignia of rank by the chief men of the tribes,
• cutting tools,
• scraper and spade-like implements,
• sinkers for fishing lines and nets,
• discoidal stones for games of chance, &c.,
• pierced tablets and boat-shaped articles of uncertain use, but perhaps employed in making twine and bow strings,
• stones for grinding and polishing,
• stone vessels, chiefly for cooking purposes,
• stone mortars for grinding paints, corn, &c.,
• pestles,
• tubes, thought to have been in part the implements of the medicine men,
• pipes, of which there is a series ornamented with elaborate carvings from the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, constituting the most artistic productions of the former inhabitants, and,
• ornaments and sculptures. .

Return to start of the Top Floor of the Castle's Main Hall in 1886