The descriptions thus furnished of the traces of aboriginal art in the State of New York closely correspond to the remains recovered on the sites of ancient Indian villages in Canada. A finely modelled clay-pipe, with a serpent twined round it, and holding a human head in its jaws, now in my possession, was dug up, along with numerous other clay-pipes, bone pins, and other relics, in Norfolk County, on the north shore of Lake Erie. I also possess casts of some ingeniously modelled clay-pipes found a few years since in an ossuary at Lake Medad, near Watertown, about ten miles west from Hamilton, Ontario. This no doubt marks the site of an ancient town of the Attiwendaronks, or Neuter Nation, who were finally conquered and driven out by the Iroquois in 1635, when the little remnant that survived was adopted into the Seneca nation. Mr. B. E. Charlton, who explored the Lake Medad ossuaries, after describing the human remains, along with large tropical shells, shell-beads and other relics, adds: “With these were found antique pipes of stone and clay, many of them bearing extraordinary devices, figures of animals, and of human heads wearing the conical cap noticed on similar relics in Mexico and Peru.”[97] Similar discoveries rewarded the researches of Dr. Taché in the Huron ossuaries on the Georgian Bay, examples of which are now in the museum of Laval University.
On the site of the famous Indian town of Hochelaga, the precursor of the city of Montreal, detached fragments, in well-burnt clay, including modellings of the human head and neck, had been repeatedly found, before the recovery of larger portions of the Hochelaga pottery showed that projections modelled in this form within the mouths of their earthern pots or kettles were designed to admit of their suspension over the fire. Any projection within the mouth of the pot would have answered the purpose of protecting the cord or withe from the risk of burning; so that the moulding of it into the human form furnishes an illustration of the play of the imitative faculty under circumstances little calculated to call it forth.
