VI. WOOD. 



Among the materials composing North American aboriginal relics we assign 

 the last place to wood, considering that the occurrence of wooden manufact 

 ures of early date is extremely limited. A substance so much subject to decay 

 as wood cannot be expected to resist physical influences for a considerable 

 length of time, unless peculiar circumstances retard its destruction. Thus the 

 ancient Swiss lake-villages have yielded an abundance of wooden articles, 

 owing to the preservative qualities of the peat enclosing them, which had 

 accumulated along the lake-shores. The National Museum contains but a 

 small number of wooden objects which can be included in the archaeological 

 series, and these were almost exclusively obtained from graves of the Califor- 

 nian Santa Barbara Islands. 1 The articles apparently consist of cedar wood, 

 which has become very light, almost as light as the wood of the utensils ex 

 tracted from the sites of lacustrine settlements in Switzerland. Among these 

 California!! relics are rotten wooden handles, some, indeed, still holding arrow 

 head-shaped knife-blades of flint, cemented into the wood by means of asphal- 

 tum. They resemble the Pai-Ute knives mentioned in the beginning of this 

 account (page 2). There is further to be noticed a wooden bailing-vessel 

 with a short handle, fitting in a rectangular hole cut into the vessel (Fig. 314, 

 Santa Cruz Island). A number of well-made toy canoes, the smallest of 

 which measures seven inches in length, bears witness to the maritime propen- 



315 



OBJECTS OF WOOD. 



sities of those islanders (Fig. 315, Santa Cruz Island) . These specimens are 

 very interesting, as they undoubtedly represent the shape of the &quot; dug-outs &quot; 

 used by the Southern Californians. It is known, however, that they also em- 



1 The writer is at this moment unable to state whether these relics were fouiul associated with manufact 

 ures of Caucasian origin or not. 

 (.88) 



