BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XLVI
THE HELIOTYPE PRINTING CO., BOSTON
NATURAL PEBBLE SLIGHTLY USED AS GRINDER
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XLVII
THE HELIOTYPE PRINTING CO., BOSTON
NATURAL PEBBLE SLIGHTLY USED AS DOMESTIC IMPLEMENT
There is a final category of Seri artifacts which would be classed as distinctive by Caucasians on the basis of material, though they are combined with the stone artifacts by the tribesmen; it comprises arrowpoints of hoop-iron or other metal, harpoon-points of nails, spikes, or wire, awls of like materials, and other metallic adjuncts to ordinary implements. The use of iron is of course post-Columbian, and its ordinary sources are wreckage and stealage. The date of introduction is unknown, and probably goes back to the days of Cortés and Mendoza; certainly the value of metal was so well understood in 1709 that when Padre Salvatierra’s bilander was beached in Seriland the tribesmen at once began to break her up for the nails (ante, page 67); yet the metal is wrought cold and only with hupf and ahst like the local materials, and is habitually regarded and designated as a stone. By reason of the primitive methods of working, the metals are of course available only when in small pieces or slender shapes. There is a tradition among the vaqueros of the frontier that a quantity of hoop-iron designed for use in making casks was carried away from a rancheria in the vicinity of Bacuachito during a raid in the seventies, and that this stock has ever since served to supply the Seri with material for their arrowpoints; but it is probable that the chief supply is derived from the flotsam swept into the natural drift trap of Bahia Kunkaak by prevailing winds and tidal currents, and cast up on the long sandspit of Punta Tormenta after every storm. A surprising quantity and variety of wreckage was found on this point, and thence down the coast to Punta Narragansett, by the 1895 expedition: staves and heads of casks broken up after beaching, a telegraph pole crossbar which had evidently brought in a cargo of large wire, and a piece of door-frame with heavy strap-iron hinges attached with screws, were among the troves of the tribesmen within a few weeks; and it was noted that while even the hinge screws and the tacks attaching tags to the cask-heads had been extracted by breaking up the wood, the roughly forged hinges of 2 by ⅜-inch wrought iron had been abandoned after a tentative battering with cobbles, and lay among the refuse stones about the jacales.