The dwellings of the ancient Indians of the North Atlantic area probably varied in no respect from those of early historic times. Stone as a building material was almost unknown, con struction being of wattlework, bark, and mats, and the Iroquois villages were often protected with stockades. Cache pits for storage were used in the central part of the area, centring in New Jersey. Some of the houses, as those of the Iroquois, the Mohican, and of Virginia and North Carolina tribes, were of the community type, those of the Iroquois (the well-known "long-houses") being so to i oo feet long and 16 to 18 feet wide. Burial customs varied more or less with locality, but interment was the usual practice; sometimes the corpse, fully clothed, was placed in the grave in a sitting posture. The custom of the Algonkin and Iroquois tribes from the St. Lawrence to the Delaware was to wrap the corpse and to bind the legs against the trunk, and sometimes, except among the early Algonkins who rarely practised the custom, the implements, utensils, and ornaments of the departed were buried with his remains. Inter ment of dogs, sometimes with the human dead, was common. In the Iroquois area especially the bones of the dead were periodi cally gathered from their graves and deposited in ossuaries lined with furs and covered with brush and earth, but this was not an Algonkin custom. Among the Powhatan tribes of Virginia two methods of disposal were practised in prehistoric times as well as at the beginning of the Colonial period—the bodies of im portant men were wrapped and placed on platforms in the "temples," and probably afterward gathered and buried while those of ordinary people were at once inhumed.
In the lower Penobscot valley, in Maine, it was an ancient custom to place quantities of red hematite paint in the graves and to deposit with the dead certain exceptional stone objects only—long slender celts, gouge-adzes, and slate points of bayonet shape, resembling those of the Eskimo and even those of northern Europe and Asia. In the abundant shell-heaps of the region such slate points are unknown, and the other implements are either scarce or entirely lacking, whereas bone and shell objects so common to the shell-heaps are not found in the graves. These conditions have given rise to the designation "Red-paint people" to distinguish the earlier from the later inhabitants, not alone because the graves of the ancients contain the hematite deposits, for a similar custom was practised elsewhere in New England as late as Colonial times. There are certain indications that point to relationship with the extinct Beothuk of Newfoundland, as well as with the Algonkin culture of York.
The ceramic art of the North Atlantic area was somewhat rudimentary in comparison with that of other cultures, yet the cooking utensils and the trumpet-like smoking pipes of the Iro quois display considerable taste, and the pipes especially were often elaborately decorated with modelled life forms or miniature jars. The typical Virginian pipe with long stem and upturned bowl, taken to England by early colonists along with the first tobacco, gave form to the common clay pipe of the present time.
The chief distinguishing features of the ancient earthenware vessels of the Iroquois of New York and Pennsylvania are a conical base, constricted neck, and flaring squarish collar usually embellished with an incised rectilinear pattern and sometimes with modelled heads and figures in relief. In the marginal regions, —New York bay, Long Island, the lower Hudson valley, Con necticut, and Rhode Island,—the Algonkin pottery, otherwise usually plain in form and simply decorated by incising or with fabric- or cord-marked impressions, often shows Iroquois influence. Stone objects consisted of the pecked and polished celt-hatchet, grooved axe, chisel, pick, gouge-adze, mortar, long cylindrical pestle, knife and spearhead of slate, and hammer-stone; of these the gouge-adze is of exceptional excellence. Chipped stone imple ments of all the ordinary types (knives, projectile points, drills, etc.) were plentiful; objects of the same material used as orna ments or in ceremony were banner-stones, bird-shape stones, "plummets," tubes, pierced gorgets, etc. Not all of these objects are found throughout the area, their distribution depending on the varying sub-cultures of the former tribes and their chron ological sequence. Human effigies of stone are rare. Soapstone (steatite) abounds, and owing to its suitability and the ease with which it may by fashioned, it was extensively quarried with stone pickaxes and chisels for manufacturing cooking-pots, smoking pipes and ornaments. Objects of bone, especially in the Iroquois area, are rich in form and variety. Mica was mined in Virginia and North Carolina for use especially in making ornaments and mirrors, and it became an important medium of trade over a wide area, great quantities having been recovered from Ohio mounds. Argillite, jasper, and rhyolite were quarried in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, and quartz and quartzite boulder deposits in the District of Columbia and else where for chipping into prodigious numbers of implements and weapons, especially arrow-points and celt-hatchets (tomahawks). Engraved conch-shell gorgets of Virginia and the Carolinas suggest culture intrusion from the west. Water transportation was by dugout and bark canoes. Petroglyphs, or rock-writings, are rather common, the most noted being Dighton Rock in Taunton river, Mass.
II. Georgia-Florida Area.—The southern part of Georgia and northern Florida were occupied by tribes of the Muskogin family, and the peninsula by the extinct Timucua and Calusa, with evidences on the west coast of early Arawakan intrusion from the West Indies, all of which have left their impress on the archaeology of the region. The antiquities are somewhat distinct from those of the North Atlantic area, but grade im perceptibly into those of the Gulf states to the west and the Mississippi valley area to the northwest. Agriculture was prac tised in suitable localities, but the waters of the extensive coast and of the streams afforded the principal food supply, and the refuse of feasts over long periods is still seen in the hundreds of shell-mounds along the coast and on some of the river banks.