Maidu hopper, pounding, or milling basket of twined construction on rock mortar slab. Diameter about eighteen inches (after Dixon).
Atsugewi general utility basket of twined construction with lizard foot design. Underside shown to reveal dark (actually tan-colored) area of bare split pine root weft without bear-grass or maiden hair overlay.
Coiled type Atsugewi hopper basket with flying geese design. View shows pounding hole in bottom of basket, in this case bound with buckskin.
Dixon noted that “mussel’s tongue” (the fresh water mussel) is one of the unique and peculiar basketry designs used by the Atsugewi. Representation of intestines and deer excrement are also worthy of special mention for this tribe. Other common Atsugewi designs in basketry decoration are lizard, deer rib, owl’s claw, and flying geese, as well as arrow-point. Two or more different designs are often combined on a single basket. Among Atsugewi and Achomawi there seems to be no restriction of certain patterns to baskets intended for special uses. Like mountain Maidu, zigzag and spiral arrangements are preferred, horizontal bands being rare. Curiously an Atsugewi design is often given different meaning by different individual Indians. This is in contrast to the uniformity of interpretation of a given design by all the Maidu individuals, normally.
Maidu open twined “tray” or plate-like basket about ten inches long (after Dixon)
Yana tribes frequently substituted another material for willow ribs. The identity of this warp is not certain. Reliable students believe it to be hazelnut twigs, but to my knowledge that plant is scarce indeed even in the foothill territory. Yana and Yahi had some other peculiarities in their basketry. Designs were sometimes wrought in a negative way, that is by merely leaving off overlay so that the design was thereby defined in exposed pine root weft. Sapir and Spier found that these tribes also used alder bark for dying basketry decoration materials a red-brown. A reddish color was produced on peeled shield fern stems by passing them through the mouth while chewing dogwood bark. They dyed pine roots, too, on occasion with a red soil or with the powdery filling of spores from the inside of a fungus obtained from certain coniferous trees. These variations of basketry decoration do not seem to have been used by the Atsugewi and mountain Maidu.
