PREHISTORIC ART. 561 



the instrument like a ladder. The sound is made by the bones being 

 rasped one or both ways with another bone or piece of shell. Length, 

 4^ inches; width, 5 inches. 



NoETH America. 



The United States National Museum possesses several primitive, if 

 not entirely prehistoric, musical instruments, gathered by divers per- 

 sons, most of them operating in the line of ethnology or prehistoric 

 archteology, not a few of whom have been ofiBcers of the United States 

 Government who have turned over their col- 

 lections to the Museum on returning to 

 Washington. 



Pursuing a plan of description by geo- 

 graphic distribution, we begin at the ex- 

 treme north. 



ALASKA. 



Point Barroiv. — Mr. John Murdoch, in his 

 paper on the Point Barrow Eskimo,' says : 



The only musical instrument among these people 

 is the universal drnni or tambomine (Aelyau), con- 

 sisting of a membrane stretched over a hoop with a 

 handle on one side. It is used from Greenland to 

 Siberia. It is always accompanied by the voice, 

 singing or chanting. It produced a loud, resonant, 

 and somewhat musical note. There appears to be 

 no system of tuning these drums, the pitch of the ^'*' ^^^' 



note depending entirely upon accident. eskimo drum. 



-i«r-nTjij2 ^j.1 1 Point Barrow, Alaska. 



Mr. Murdoch figures one oi these, here 



* ' Cat. No. .-^eui, U.S.N.M. J.-, natural size. 



reproduced as fig. 200, which is simply a 



hoop like that of a tambourine, oval, 22 by 19 inches, with a short 

 handle attached. The membrane is a sheet of the peritoneum of a seal 

 stretched over a hoop after the style of a tambourine. The United 

 States National Museum possesses four of these drums, of which Mr. 

 Murdoch says that "every Eskimo household possesses at least one." 

 The expedition brought home eight handles for these drums which 

 exhibit but slight variations. The commonest material for the handle 

 is walrus ivory; only two out of twelve are of antler. Their length is 

 from 4.(3 to 5.4 inches. Fig. 201 a-d represents a series of these drum 

 handles taken from Mr. Murdoch's paper. With one exception, all 

 these handles have the large end more or less rudely carved into a 

 human face with the mouth open as if singing. The one exception is 

 fig. c, which is the butt end of a small walrus tusk carved to repre- 

 sent a walrus. It has small oval bits of wood inlaid for eyes. The 

 notches by which these handles are fitted into the rim of the tam- 



' Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1887-88, p. 385. 

 NAT MUS 90 36 



