BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY—— SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. CLXX
CORN GRINDER FROM SIKYATKI
There were found many disk-shape stones, pecked on the periphery as if used in grinding pigment or in bruising seeds, and spheroidal stones with a facet worn at one pole as if used for the same or a similar purpose ([plate clxxi], b, c). A few stone axes and hatchets were also taken from the graves; most of these are rude specimens of stone working, although one of them can hardly be excelled in any other collection. Many arrowpoints were found, but these are in no respect peculiar. They are made of many different kinds of stone, but those of obsidian are the most numerous. They were generally found in numbers, sometimes in bowls. Evidently they had not been attached to shafts when buried, for no sign of the reeds remained. Arrowheads sewed into a bandoleer are still worn as insignia of rank by warriors, and it is probable that such was also true in the past, so that on interment these arrowpoints might have been placed in the mortuary basin deposited by the side of the warrior, as indicative of his standing or rank, and the bandoleer or leather strap to which they were attached decayed during its long burial in the earth. Spearpoints of much coarser make and larger in size than the arrowheads were also found in the graves, and a rare knife, made of chalcedony, showed that the ancient, like the modern Hopi, prized a sharp cutting instrument.
Among the many large stones picked up on the mounds of Sikyatki there was one the use of which has long puzzled me. This is a rough stone, not worked save in an equatorial groove. The object is too heavy to have been carried about, except with the utmost difficulty, and the probability of the former existence of a handle is out of the question. It has been suggested that this and similar but larger grooved stones might have been used as tethers for some domesticated animal, as the eagle or the turkey, which is about the only explanation I can suggest. Both of these creatures, and (if we may trust early accounts) a quadruped about the size of a dog, were domesticated by the ancient Pueblo people, but I have found no survival of tethering in use today. Eagles, however, are tied by the legs and not confined in corrals as at Zuñi, while sheep are kept in stone inclosures. It is probable that this latter custom came with the introduction of sheep, and that these stones were weights to which the Sikyatki people tied by the legs the eagles and turkeys, the feathers of which play an important part in their sacred observances.
Certain small rectangular slabs of stone have been found, with a groove extending across one surface diagonally from one angle to another ([plate clxix], a, b.) These are generally called arrowshaft polishers, and were used to rub down the surface of arrowshafts or prayer-sticks. Several of these polishers were taken from Sikyatki graves, and one or two were of such regular form that considerable care must have been used in their manufacture. A specimen from Awatobi is decorated with a bow and an arrow scratched on one side, and one of dark basaltic rock evidently came from a distance. A number of metates and mullers were found in the graves at Sikyatki. One of the best of the latter is shown in [plate clxx]. These stones are of different degrees of fineness, and vary from simple triangular slabs of fine sandstone to very coarse lava. The specimen figured has depressions on the sides to facilitate handling.[157]
Perhaps the most significant of all the worked stones found in the Sikyatki cemeteries were the flat slabs the edges of which near the surface of the soil marked the presence of the graves. These slabs may be termed headstones, but they have a far different meaning from those that bear the name of the deceased with which we are most familiar, for when they have any marking on their faces, it is not a totem of the dead, but a symbol of the rain-cloud, which is connected with ancestor worship.
One of the best of these mortuary slabs has its edge cut in such a way as to give it a terraced outline, and on one face a similar terrace is drawn in black pigment. These figures are symbols of rain-clouds, and the interpretation of the use of this design in graves is as follows:
The dead, according to current Tusayan thought, become rain-cloud gods, or powerful intercessors with those deities which cause or send the rains. Hence, the religious society to which the deceased belonged, and the members of the clan who survive, place in the mortuary bowls, or in the left hand of their friend, the paho or prayer emblem for rain; hence, also, in prayers at interment they address the breath body of the dead as a katcina, or rain god. These katcinas, as divinized ancestors, are supposed to return to the villages and receive prayers for rain. In strict accord with this conception the rain-cloud symbol is placed, in some instances, on the slab of rock in the graves of the dead at Sikyatki. It proves to me that the cult of ancestor worship, and the conception that the dead have power to bring needed rain, were recognized in Sikyatki when the pueblo was in its prime. One of these slabs is perforated by a small hole, an important fact, but one for which I have only a fanciful explanation, namely, to allow the escape of the breath body. Elsewhere I have found many instances of perforated mortuary stone slabs, which will be considered in a report of my excavations in 1896.