As no metal tools have ever been found in the mounds, ruins or cliff dwellings, the hieroglyphics were probably picked into the rock with a sharp-pointed stone much harder than the rock upon which the work was done.  It is a singular fact that, although iron, copper, gold and silver abound in the mountains in Arizona, no tools, utensils or ornaments of these metals are found in the mounds or ruins.  Yet furnace-like structures of ancient origin have been found, which appear to have been used for reducing ores, and in and around which can be found great quantities of an unknown kind of slag.

In many instances the hieroglyphic boulders have been found in great heaps, of several hundred in number, as if many different persons had contributed a piece of this strange writing to the collection.  These etched boulders have been found buried in the ground with ollas containing the charred bones of human beings, and could the writings on the boulders be deciphered, we would undoubtedly learn of the virtues of the prehistoric deceased, just as we do of a person who dies in the present day, when we read the epitaph on a tombstone of the one who is buried beneath.

In opening some of the mounds, the investigator finds they are made of the fallen walls of great adobe buildings, and as he digs deeper he finds rooms of various dimensions, and which, in many instances, have cemented walls and floors.  In one instance there were found the impressions of a baby’s feet and hands, made, presumably, as the child had crawled over the newly laid soft cement.  In another mound the cemented walls of a room were found covered with hieroglyphics and rude drawings, which were thought to represent stellar constellations.

To a certain extent, some of the pictured rocks tell us of part of the daily life of this ancient race, for in a number of instances the pictures picked into the rocks, although rudely formed, are self-explanatory, and the ancient artist tells plainly by his work what is meant.  On the edge of a little valley in the Superstition Mountains, there was found a great rock on which had been etched many small animals, apparently representing sheep, and at one side was the figure of a man, as if watching them.  It may be the ancient herder himself, sitting in the shadow of the great rock, while his sheep were grazing in the valley below, has passed away the time in making this rock picture.  The hardy wild sheep still found in the mountains of Arizona may be the remnants of great bands formerly domesticated by these people.

The skeleton of the prehistoric man dug from beneath the stalagmites in the cave of Mentone, France, and which set all the scientific men of the world talking and thinking, gives proof of no greater age than many of the skeletons, relics or bones of some of these ancient mound and canal builders.