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SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS 



VOL. 8l 



from a hard wood and are slightly oval in cross-section. The sides 

 are fairly flat but the edges are well rounded. The long way of the 

 stick is not straight. They are either slightly crescentic like a boom- 

 erang or tend towards an S-shape (fig. 8). Down the center on each 

 side, running from end to end. are four deep parallel grooves. These 

 are not always continuous and may be broken at one or two places. 

 Possibly this is due to the fact that at intervals of varying distance 

 most of the clubs have, or did have, encircling wrappings of sinew, 

 probably so placed to prevent the object from cracking. The makers 

 occasionally went so far as to make a groove around the stick where 

 these wrappings were placed. Some have a deeper groove or notch at 

 one end which may have been for the purpose of attaching a wrist 

 cord. Practically all show traces of a pitch bumper at the opposite 

 end from the cord notch. 



Fig. 8. — Two forms of grooved clubs found in the caves. (About f natural size.) 



Such clubs are frequently referred to as rabbit sticks, because of 

 their apparent likeness to clubs used by some of the modern south- 

 western Indians in hunting rabbits, but in certain specific features they 

 are not comparable to them. Inasmuch as this subject has been dis- 

 cussed at some length elsewhere,' it will not be necessary to consider 

 it in detail here. Guernsey and Kidder have pointed out the relation 

 between clubs of this sort and the atlatl in the Basket Maker cultures, 

 and also as noted in some of the sculptures of Yucatan, in which 

 figures are depicted holding such an implement as well as bundles of 

 spears and spear-throwers. It is in this connection that the suggestion 

 was made that they may have been used as a weapon of defense in 

 warding off spears. They would also have made a fairly good offensive 

 weapon at close quarters for delivering a bruising or crushing blow. 



Clubs of the same kind have been found at other localities in the 

 El Paso area. An almost identical one was recovered from a cave 

 near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in 1924 by Dr. Willis T. Lee and is at 



^ Guernsey and Kidder, loc. cit., pp. 88-89. 



