22 CAVE RELICS Of THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS. 



kyaks. It had been smeared with black paint, and an oval pattern, bordered 

 with two lines, had been scratched through the black paint into the white wood. 



5. (17464.) A fine and carefully made basket about six inches deep and twelve 

 inches across, made exactly like the modern ones. It had three red stripes 

 around the upper border, to which was sewed a strip of fur-seal skin. It was 

 laced up with a thin strip of baleen, and had a short piece of square sennit, 

 rudely knotted, attached to it. 



6. (17461.) A little coarse grass basket, with the straws at the upper edge 

 turned and woven in so as to form a selvage border. It was about three inches 

 high and two in diameter. It contained some shreds of dry sinew; a dried 

 orchis root, such as the natives still eat ; a piece of bird skin, with a strip of fur- 

 seal skin sewed to it, and a bracelet of rings made of bird's claws, (17264.) 

 This last is exactly similar to one seen by me among the Magemiit Eskimo of 

 the north end of Nunivak Island, in 1874. I purchased a little carved box, and 

 in it were several of these rings, as well as the yellow granulated portion of the 

 bill of Mormon corniculata, the horned puffin. I could not then imagine what 

 they were for, nor do I yet know the use of the pieces of the bill. Doubtless 

 they are used in some way for purposes of ornament. The rings are made by 

 pulling oif the horny portion of the sharply curved claw, and inserting the point 

 of one into the core of another, until a ring is formed ; as children are wont to 

 make rings of honeysuckle and larkspur flowers. When a sufficient number of 

 these rings are collected, they ai*e strung into a bracelet. 



7. A number of loose articles which had formerly been in one of the baskets. 

 These included several loose pieces of red pine bark, (17267,) some of them with 

 resin adherent to them. This may have been used in lieu of wax on their 

 threads. The bark had been whittled, and I found by wetting it and rubbing it 

 on a clean piece of pine Avood that it communicated a red stain to the wood. It 

 may have been used for this purpose also, and perhaps as tinder besides, as one 

 of the pieces was burnt in several places. It is almost needless to say, as no 

 timber exists on the islands, that this must have been derived from drift-Avood, 

 carried from the coast about Sitka. The Yukon and Kuskoquim regions possess 

 only spruce trees which have not this kind of bark. 



A small roll of birch bark, (17268,) also derived from drift-wood, but probably 

 from the Yukon region. What they did with birch bark I am unable to fully 

 explain, but they preserved it very carefully. It is almost indestructible by 

 decay, on account of a resinous principle which it contains. I found a little case 

 made of this bark containing metallic pigments, red clay-ironstone, and 

 graphite, in a very old pre-historic deposit in the Amaknak cave. This deposit 

 is not considered in the present paper, as it belongs to another, and much older 

 era ; but in this case also, the birch was in close proximity to a lot of awls and 

 women's sewing tools which lay by a female skeleton. 



