The modifications in the figure of the bird shown in the last mentioned pictograph, and the highly conventionalized forms which the wings and other parts assume, give me confidence to venture an interpretation of a strange figure shown in [plate cxli], a. This picture I regard as a representation of a bird, and I do so for the following resemblances to figures already studied. The head of the bird, as has been shown, is often replaced by a terraced rain-cloud symbol. Such a figure occurs in the pictograph under consideration, where it occupies the position of the head. On either side of what might be regarded as a body we find, at the anterior end, two curved appendages which so closely resemble similarly placed bodies in the pictograph last discussed that they are regarded as representations of wings. These extensions at the posterior end of the body are readily comparable with prolongations in that part on which we have already commented. The tail, although different from that in figures of birds thus far discussed, has many points of resemblance to them. The two circles, one on each side of the bird figure, are important additions which are treated in following pages.[145]
From the study of the conventionalized forms of birds which I have outlined above it is possible to venture the suggestion that the star-shape figure shown in [plate clxvii], b, may be referred to the same group, but in this specimen we appear to have duplication, or a representation of the bird symbol repeated in both semicircles of the interior of the bowl. Examining one of these we readily detect the two tail-feathers in the middle, with the triangular end of the body on each side. The lateral appendages duplicated on each side correspond with the band across the middle of the bowl in other specimens, and represent highly conventionalized wings. The middle of this compound figure is decorated with a cross, and in each quadrant there is a row of the same emblems, equidistant from one another.
It would be but a short step from this figure to the ancient sun symbol with which the eagle and other raptorial birds are intimately associated. The figure represented in [plate cxxxiii], c, is a symbolic bird in which the different parts are directly comparable with the other bird pictographs already described. One may easily detect in it the two wings, the semicircular rain-cloud figures, and the three tail-feathers. As in the picture last considered, we see the two circles, each with a concentric smaller circle, one on each side of the mythic bird represented. Similar circular figures are likewise found in the zone surrounding the centrally placed bird picture.
In the food bowl illustrated in [plate cxli], b, we find the two circles shown, and between them a rectangular pictograph the meaning of which is not clear. The only suggestion which I have in regard to the significance of this object is that it is an example of substitution—the substitution of a prayer offering to the mythic bird represented in the other bowls for a figure of the bird itself. This interpretation, however, is highly speculative, and should be accepted only with limitations. I have sometimes thought that the prayer-stick or paho may originally have represented a bird, and the use of it is an instance of the substitution[146] of a symbolic effigy of a bird, a direct survival of the time when a bird was sacrificed to the deity addressed.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY—— SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. CXLI
FOOD BOWLS WITH FIGURES OF BIRDS AND FEATHERS FROM SIKYATKI
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY—— SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. CXLII
VASES, BOWL, AND LADLE, WITH FIGURES OF FEATHERS, FROM SIKYATKI