Note 97 — Chapter II

From the immense heaps distributed over an area of 150 miles between Pilatka and Salt Creek Dr. Wyman made some collections of interest. The banks were composed mostly of the Ampullaria Depressa, the Paludina Multilineata and Unio Buckleyi. The bank at King Phillip’s Town, 450 feet long by 120 feet wide, and in some places eight feet thick, yielded fragments of pottery and decayed animal bones. At Black Hammock, on the St. Johns, a mound 900 feet long and from 100 to 150 in width, yielded the following: such marine shells as the strombus-gigos, pyrula carica and P. perversa. These had been shaped into hatchets, gouges and chisels. Scarcely any stone implements were found in any of the mounds examined. A chisel and twenty-five arrow-heads were collected in the vicinity of the above shell-bank. The following animal remains were found: bear, deer, raccoon, opossum, terrapin, turtle, alligator, cat-fish and garpike. But few bones of birds were found. Prof. Wyman can only explain the presence of so many of the now scarce species, the Ampullarius and Paludinas, on the supposition that they were much more plentiful and are now becoming extinct, or that the heaps where so abundantly found were made by slow accumulation, through the lapse of an indefinitely long period.—American Naturalist, vol. ii, Nos. 8 and 9, and Fifth Annual Report of Peabody Museum, pp. 22–25. Also First Report of Peabody Museum, pp. 11, 18.