Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, Vol. 25, No. 3 ...

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ADVANCE OF NEW ENGLAND ARCHAEOLOGY 65
recesses, within, the thought that family groups
must have attended quarry operations becomes a
conviction. If only men were present, it seems
unlikely - under a primitive way of life - that
they would have gone to the trouble of making
stone hearths and building such a well-constructed
living abode. At least this premise seems to fit the
postulation that follows concerning participation of
women in the work of quarrying.
Until this excavation and subsequent ones had
been made, the universal belief was that men alone
went to the quarries. They were presumed to have
performed all the work of cutting out and making
the stone products of their labor. If this were so,
then they must have been obliged to load their
stone products into baskets and tote them all the
way back to their home sites, whether they liked
it or not. Without a division of labor to ease the
work, such concentration of effort placed in the
hands of the men would seem almost too much to
have been expected. Then with the finding of
tailing-removal tools, usually made of impure granite
unsuitable for working steatite, attention was
attracted to the possible connection between them
and agricultural tools of the age that followed. In
this comparison, the close similarity that exists between
the planter's Triangular hoe on the one hand
and the quarry Triangular tailing-breaker on the
other, and in like manner between the Cornplanter
and the quarry Spiked tailing-breaker is
striking. Further, a connection seems to exist between
the planter's Stem spade and quarry Hand
spade. When all of these factors are taken into
consideration, a postulation that the planter's tools
were modifications emerging from their quarry
counterparts is inescapable.
Assuming now that this inspired tool development
took place, what was the force behind it that
apparently made it inevitable? To answer this
question, it should be remembered that stone bowl
quarrying had been going on for a very long time,
probably for more than a thousand years under
male domination. And at the time of the advent of
maize planting, which may have followed close
on the closing of the quarries, an industrial tradition
involving tools and work techniques had
become an impelling force of the day. Still another
important factor is the strong probability that
women became the planters, or they would not have
had the skill and knowledge that made them the
cultivators of maize in colonial times. Therefore,
seemingly what happened was that the prevailing
quarry tradition had become so much a part of their
lives that in developing new agricultural tools,
women felt impelled to copy old tool types.
From this the postulation follows that because
of the probable relation between the two different
sets of tools, correspondingly, the users of them
would have been women. That is to say, traditional
ideas tend to be perpetuated within the sex to
which they belong. Therefore, allowing that women
were the planters from the beginning, the inevitable
conclusion seems to be that women were quarry
laborers, whose job was to remove quarry tailings,
or waste from the workings, and transport the stone
products of the quarry in baskets to their home
camps.
When consideration is given to the probability
that stone bowl quarrying continued for more than
a thousand years under male supervision, it becomes
important to try to envision what may have
taken place when the quarries closed down, and the
making of stone bowls ceased. In order to evaluate
the evolving state of affairs, it is necessary to consider
the manufactured article that replaced stone
bowls as the family cooking pot. This was the
ceramic clay pot, which from the time of its
inception became the means of providing a lighter
weight and more easily produced cooking vessel
for liquid foods. Now, since women were the
potters in colonial days, they must have been from
the start in order to have acquired the skill required
in making the more elaborate pots of the
final Stage 4 development. With this probability
in mind, it seems logical to conclude that an
industrial revolution took place with the introduction
of ceramics; the industrial talents of women
replaced those of men. Women became makers of
ceramic cooking pots and no longer wanted the
former heavy stone bowls. The demand for them
came to an end, which forced the quarries to close.
Men were the losers with their skilled labor in
industry no longer required; industrial power had
passed into the hands of women.
CERAMIC DISCOVERIES
During the first site excavations, little was
known about what went on here in New England
during the Ceramic Age. Reliance was placed
quite generally upon evidence presented by C. C.
Willoughby in, Antiquities of the New England
Indians. Attention was called to certain restored
pots having pointed bases and simple design markings
as being old, since they were recovered from
the lower part of Maine shellheaps. With only a
small amount of evidence from other parts of New
England to work with, attention was focused on
research in New York State, as reported by W. A.
Ritchie in, Pre-Iroquoian Occupations of New York
State. In this book, Vinette 1 pottery was described