The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1903-06-27
ABORIGINAL KITCHEN.
The Purpose for Which Salt Pans
We're Intended

That the aboriginal Indians of North
America did considerable cooking in
their time has been made evident by the
discovery in various parts of the United
States of numbers of earthenware YES
sells known as salt pans" but whose
chief use was apparently the prepara~
ton of food. These VeSsels-called salt
pans by the archeOlogist because their
main purpose seemed at first to have
been the evaporation Of salt from the
salt springs near which the Indians
established so many of their villages
are the largest known specimens of ma
tive North American pottery The
largest one ever found has recently
come into the posse of the Peabody
museum at Harvard. It measures some
81 inches in diameter by II inches deep.
IN appearance, therefore, it is very
much ike big, shallow punch bowl
1t was discovered not long ago by an
archaeological expedition under the
joint auspices of the Peabody museum
and the University of California, and
is an important part of the instructive
spoil taken from what is now a farm
near the meeting of the little Maramac
ana the big Mississippi rivers in JEFF
tersOn county. Missouri once the site
of small Indian village
RMS big salt pan, in which the IN
dams not only evaporated salt from the
water OF salt lic1S which still exist in
the immediate vicinity, but doubtless
cooked their elk meat or venison, is only
one OF goodly number of similar but
smaller utensils found in the same To-
callty. The larger pans were all sunk
in the clay bottom upon which
the encampment had rested and We're
therefore as permanent as any modern
stove or oven The difference was that
fire, instead of being built under or
against the oven, was brought to it in
the shape of heated stones, some of
which, stin showing evidence of the
many heatings to which the Indians had
subjected them, still remained in the salt
pans recovered by the Harvard and
California archa biologists.
Near the salt pans, or native cooking
apparatus, still remained portions of the
ancient fireplaces in which the stones
bones of several kinds of animals which
formed part of the Indian bill of fare
OF about 200 years ago These remains
included elk, beaver, deer fox and tur-
key; but there were no traces of the
buffalo, although buffalo remains are
often found among the relics of the IN
dians who roamed the more western
prairies.
The big salt pan and its smaller. com
pan1On pieces of aboriginal kitchen and
dining room economy were. naturally
not the only evidence of early Indian
life found in the old village so long
hidden under the ploWed burrows of
modern agriculture. The excavation not
yet fully completed. has already reveal
ed cemetery as well as a village the
cemetery differing from most of the
Indian burial places already found and
opened in various parts of the United
States, in that it was very much small
er than was usually the case. Although
occasional isolated graves have been
discovered. the experience of previous
archaeological Investigations would
have led, naturally, TO the expectation
of finding either a very small group Of
graves, each containing one skeleton or
several skeletons, or a very large one
embracin hundreds of burials. In this
case only twenty-seven graves were dis
covered, although this number repre-
scented the burial of several times as
many Indians.-New Haven Register.