The marine shells applied industrially comprise the prevailing local genera, Cardium, Mactra, Arca, Chama, and others. They are used ordinarily as drinking-cups, dishes, dippers, receptacles for fats and face-paints, and as small utensils generally; and they are used nearly as commonly for scraping skins, severing animal and plant tissues, digging graves and waterholes, propelling balsas, and especially for scraping reeds and sticks and okatilla stems in the manufacture of arrows, harpoons, bows, balsas, and jacal-frames—indeed, the seashell is the Seri familiar, the ever-present handmate and helper, the homologue of the Anglo-Saxon Jack with his hundred word-compounds, a half-personified reflex of habitual action and thought. Ordinarily—always, so far as is known—the shells are used in the natural state, i. e., either in the condition of capture and opening for the removal of the animal, or in the condition of finding on the beach. For certain purposes the fresh and sharp-edged shell is doubtless preferable, and for others the well-worn specimen (like the paint-cup illustrated in plate XXVII) is chosen; but everything indicates that the need for smoothed shells is met by selecting wave-worn specimens, and nothing indicates that the value of the appliance is deemed to be enhanced by wear of use—in fact, the abundance of abandoned shells about the rancherias and camp sites, and over all Seriland for that matter, indicates that the objects are discarded as easily as they are found along the prolific shores.
Next to the shells, the most abundant industrial appliances of the Seri are beach pebbles or cobbles. They are used for crushing shell and bone, for rending the skins of larger animals, for severing tendons and splintering bones, as well as for grinding or crushing seeds, uprooting canes, chopping trees and branches, driving stakes, and for the multifarious minor purposes connected with the manufacture of arrows and balsas and jacales; they are also the favorite women’s weapons in warfare and the chase, and are sometimes used in similar wise by the warriors. The material for these appliances paves half the shores of Seriland, and is available in shiploads; and its use not only illustrates Seri handicraft in several significant aspects, but illumines one of the more obscure stages in the technologic development of mankind.
The cobble-stone implements of the Seri range from pebbles to bowlders, and there is a corresponding range in function from light hand-implements at one end of the series to unwieldy anvils and metates at the other end. The intermediate sizes are not infrequently utilized, and are customarily used interchangeably, the smaller of any two used in conjunction serving as the hand implement and the larger as the anvil or metate; yet there is a fairly definite clustering of the objects about two types, a larger and more stationary class, and a smaller and more portable one.
The Seri designation for the larger stone implement is that applied to rock generally, viz., ahst (the vowel broad, as in “father”); and it seems probable that the term is onomatopoetic, or mimetic of the sound produced in the use of the implement as a metate, and that its application to rocks generally is secondary. The designation applied to the smaller implement is hupf or kupf (the initial sound explosive, combining the phonetic values of h and k; the vowel nearly as in “put”, or like “oo” in “took”); the term is clearly an onomatope, imitating the sound of the blow delivered on flesh, on a mass of partially crushed mesquite beans, etc.—indeed, both the word and the sound of the blow seem to connote food or eating, while regular pounding with the implement (either in ordinary use or by special design) is a gathering signal. So far as ascertained, the term is not extended to other objects save potential implements in the form of suitable pebbles; but it is significant that there is no distinction in speech—nor in thought, so far as could be ascertained—between the natural pebble and the wear-shaped implement.[294] The local terms ahst and hupf are explicit and specific, and without precise equivalents in other known tongues; moreover, the objects designated are too inchoate in development and hence too protean in function to be appropriately denoted by the designations of implements pertaining to more differentiated culture (mortar, metate, pestle, muller, mano, etc.). Accordingly it seems desirable to retain the Seri designations.[295]
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XXXIV
THE HELIOTYPE PRINTING CO., BOSTON
DOMESTIC ANVIL, SIDE
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XXXV