Fig. 21.—Small stone pot.
No. 89883 [1097] (Fig. 21) is a small pot of a quite different shape, best understood from the figure. Round the edge are eight holes for strings nearly equidistant. The outside is rough, especially on the bottom. One of the sides is much gapped, and the acute tip has been broken off obliquely and mended with a stitch of whalebone. The care used in mending these vessels shows that they were valuable and not easily replaced. I can find no previous mention of the use of stone vessels for cooking on the western coast, and there are no specimens in the National Museum collections. The only Eskimo stone vessels are a couple of small stone bowls from Bristol Bay. These are very much the shape of the wooden bowls above described, and appear to have been used as oil dishes and not for cooking, as the inside is crusted with grease, while the outside is not blackened. On the other hand, stone cooking pots are very generally employed even now by the eastern Eskimos, and have been frequently described.[183] The close resemblance of the pots from Point Barrow to those described by Capt. Parry, taken in connection with Dr. Simpson’s statement[184] that the stone lamps were brought from the east, renders it very probable that the kettles were obtained in the same way. The absence of this utensil among the southern Eskimo of Alaska is probably due to the fact that being inhabitants of a well wooded district they would have no need of contrivances for cooking over a lamp.
I obtained three fragments of pottery, which had every appearance of great age and were said to be pieces of a kind of cooking-pot which they used to make “long ago, when there were no iron kettles.” The material was said to be earth (nu´na), bear’s blood, and feathers,[185] and appears to have been baked. They are irregular fragments (No. 89697 [1589], Fig. 22) of perhaps more than one vessel, which appears to have been tall and cylindrical, perhaps shaped like a bean-pot, pretty smooth inside, and coated with dried oil or blood, black from age. The outside is rather rough, and marked with faint rounded transverse ridges, as if a large cord had been wound round the vessel while still soft. The largest shard has been broken obliquely across and mended with two stitches of sinew, and all are very old and black.
Fig. 22.—Fragments of pottery.
Beechey (Voyage, p. 295) speaks of “earthen jars for cooking” at Hotham Inlet in 1826 and 1827, and Mr. E. W. Nelson has collected a few jars from the Norton Sound region, very like what those used at Point Barrow must have been. Choris figures a similar vessel in his Voyage Pittoresque, Pl. III (2d), Fig. 2, from Kotzebue Sound. Metal kettles of various sorts are now exclusively used for cooking, and are called by the same name as the old soapstone vessels, which it will be observed corresponds to the name used by the eastern Eskimo. Light sheet-iron camp-kettles are eagerly purchased and they are very glad to get any kind of small tin cans, such as preserved meat tins, which they use for holding water, etc., and sometimes fit with bails of string or wire, so as to use them for cooking porridge, etc., over the lamp. They had learned the value of these as early as Maguire’s time,[186] as had the people of Plover Bay in 1849.[187]