Ohio Archaeologist
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
OHIO ARCHAEOLOGIST £M}$L'i~ VOL.3 NUfllBER 3 MEUI SERIES JULY 1953 OHIO INDIAN RELIC COLLECTORS SOCIETY COLUMBUS.OHIO Vol. 3 - No. 3, July 53 THE PRESIDENT'S PAGE The best measure of the vitality of any organization, is its rate of growth. We are getting in a lot of new members. The problem is to hold them year after year. The best way to do that is to provide them with something they can not find elsewhere. A chance to meet with people of like interests. In fact the OIRCS is getting large enough to be unwieldy. If every member should attend a meeting it would be hard to find a hall large enough to hold all of us. But I would like the chance to attend such a complete meeting. Ohio is rather a large state. To drive from its far corners to Columbus entails four or five hours steady driving for a lot of us. Some just can not do that and so they miss all the fun. Your president has given this subject a lot of thought, and he has discussed the matter with the heads of other similar state organizations. They have all advised that we do something on this order to increase interest and active participation by a greater proportion of our membership. Form a number of local chapters inside the ORICS. These would be informal with no officers except a chairman-secretary to handle correspondence between the various chapters and the parent organization. The formalities of a meeting could be dispensed with entirely. Meetings could be held in members homes, or in small public halls where available free. Meetings could be held as often as wished, and such chapters could initiate digs in their own area, keeping records but with each member keeping his personal finds. The Massachusetts society has been working an early hunters site for several years and their finds were important enough to be one of the main features of the last meeting of the Society for American Archeology. Such local chapters would enable us to bring in members in parts of the state where we have very few although there are plenty of collectors. We are fortunate in having a few enthusiastic members in these areas who could form chapters drawing on the type of collector who is not interested enough to travel to Columbus for meetings. However, once he was in it would not be long before he would want to attend all meetings possible. The chairman-secretary could drop a card to the other secretaries telling of a meeting and so invite anyone who wished to drop in from other chapters. Think over this proposition and lets act on it. The picnic was for your president at least, a huge success. The OIRCS is very fortunate to have Virgil Schaeffer for a member. The public is interested in Indian lore and in Indian relics. Judging by the comparitive size of the groups before exhibits of fine pioneer antiques and before a display of very ordinary Indian artifacts laid out to tell the story of our red predecessors. They would glance in the windows at antiques but stop and read every word on the cards explaining the Indian display. This might be a hint to some people who believe the opposite to be true. Lets have a good turn-out for the September meeting of the Warren County Serpent Mound. Your president is going to do a little surface hunting on that day if there is any well washed cornfields nearby. -1- EDITORIAL PAGE This is and has been a very busy year so far as our hobby is concerned. Quite a lot of meetings have been held in many sections and, in fact, I wonder if these haven't been too close together, which would have some effect on attendance. The Ohio Indian Relic Collectors Society met in Columbus, Ohio, May 17th at Ohio State Museum which was our annual meeting and election of officers. Election results were Arthur George Smith of Norwalk, Ohio, for president for second term; Mr. Lawrence Hicks of Columbus, Ohio, as vice president; H. C. Wachtel as Secretary and Treasurer and two directors, Mr. Mooney of Mt. Sterling and George Collins of Springfield, Ohio. Two weeks later, May 23 and 24th, a meeting was held at Dr. T. Hugh Youngs at Nashville, Tennessee, and on June 2lst the Ohio Indian Relic Collectors Society held their annual picnic at Virgil Schaeffer^'s cabin west of Dayton, Ohio. Two weeks later Earl C. Townsend, Jr. of Indianapolis, President of the Q I. R. C. S. held a meeting at his home in Indianapolis. As you see the dates are fairly close together which works somewhat of a hardship on members who have quite a distance to go. Lets hope that next year sees a more favorable arrangement of meeting dates, to spread this out and also change locations for more accessibility to different sections. Your secretary has been putting on a rather concerted membership drive. All members sending in their dues payments for current year of June 1, 195 3 to June I, 1954 have each been answered immediately by a personal letter enclosing a blank membership applications form in hopes that each member can interest at least one new member. We would also like to see our membership grow sufficiently that the printing expenditures for (4) magazines a year could be more easily met. At present time we barely scrimp through and have to watch pennies, when we should be improving our publications. When ideas are mentioned, everyone agrees they would be fine, but there it seems to end. No cooperation. Your editor was hoping to build up a nice section on questions and answers. Don't let him down. Send in your question, and also anyone who thinks they have a plausible answer, send it in also. The more ideas the better. You will notice on page 32 some excerpts from a few letters received by the editor. They may be of interest to the membership, and maybe enthuse other members to make a success of our questions and answers section. There is and has been talk of carrying a selling and trading section open to members. Lets hear your ideas on the above. NOTICE: There are quite a few members who haven't paid their 1954 dues as yet. The secretary-treasurer hopes the promise of some (4) interesting issues of Ohio Archaeologist will be the inducement to influence a quick remittance. Your dues are what makes our magazine possible. We have some fine articles coming. You will like them. -2- H. C. W. COMMENTS ON KNIVES WITH TANGS FOR OFF-SET HAFTING by M. W. Hill, Alexandria, Va. The word "tang", Webster defines as a projection or shand used to fasten an article to a handle. Every stemmed knife is therefore a tang-knife and so our use of the word tang-knives for those stone knives with a tang or stem out of line with the axis of the knife is not a proper classification of these tools prepared for an off-set haft. We should have a better name for this type of tools and it might be more descriptive to call them offset stemmed blades. I have been wondering for ten years what was the reason behind these de signs and after hafting about a dozen and trying them out in actual use I think we can conclude the offsetting of the haft was to obtain better visibility for the user when he needed to follow a definite pattern in the cutting and shaping of his mater ial. This idea was further strengthened when a few years ago I obtained a beauti ful Tang-knife from Calvert City, Ky. which was unique in one feature, namely, the tang was placed on the sharp edge of the knife and not as usual upon the back. The use of this knife would have been with the hand and knife edge below the mat erial and not above as usual. Here in use, only the point of the knife protrudes thru the material and the pattern is in no way covered by the hand of the user. This seems to me that experiments were undertaken by the knife designers to obtain better visibility and more accurate cutting to the line. It is probable that during the operation several pairs of hands were needed to keep the material stretched or that it was fastened to a frame-work of suitable size so as to re main in position during the cutting-out work. The utility knife as distinct from the weapons like two edged dirks or dag gers is* designed with a cutting edge and a back normally a strengthening member but not sharpened. So in flaked knife form while both edges are thinned, one is usually kept sharper than the other, also the sharp edge is curved for all or part of its length for better efficiency. Normally we would consider the curved edge the down or cutting edge and the other the back of the knife and this back edge is normally the edge equipped with the stem or tang. The best treatise I have read is a bulletin No. 3618 of date 5-8-36 pub lished by the Univ. of Texas and written by Dr. J. T. Patterson, covering 533 Tang-knives mostly from Texas. Dr. Patterson says tang-knives were used for skinning and fleshing knives with perhaps scalping and fighting on the side. It would seem in combat nothing but a straight line haft would survive so I think the use as weapons was excep tional.