8 PERFORATED .STONES 



stones, including many different patterns in the museum of Mr. Clark, 

 of Santa Barbara, who kindly offered every facility for examination, 

 was pronounced by the Indian to belong to the class of digging weights. 

 Even some very small perforated pebbles, the minute size, of which 

 seemed to preclude the idea of any economic function, he pronounced to 

 be digging weights for children, remarking that everything used by 

 the grown folks was duplicated in miniature for the children — a sug- 

 gestion, by the way, which has occurred to more than one archaeologist, 

 on purely theoretical grounds, and which is full of significance. The 

 statements of this man were corroborated independently by his wile, of 

 about the same age, to whom the digging stick had formerly been a 

 familiar implement. 



While visiting the San Buenaventura Indians, thirty miles distant, 

 additional proof of the employment of these stones as digging weights was 

 found. Hen- an expressive pantomime was performed by an old gray- 

 haiied woman which would have been quite enough to remove all linger- 

 ing doubts as to one use, al least, of these stones. Visiting the old woman 

 one day, I found her seated on the ground, which served as a floor to 

 the hut, (dose to the fireplace. By way of introduction 1 showed her 

 one of the digging weights, putting if into her hands without a word 

 of suggestion or inquiry. Bringing it close to her eyes she scanned it 

 eagerly, then broke into a, laugh, gesticulating wildly, and with every 

 sign of surprise and interest. Being questioned as to the cause of her 

 pleasure, she said: "It is many years since 1 have seen one of these 

 stones; where did you get it?" Being told that it Mas plowed up at 

 Santa Barbara she assented to the probability of this statement, add 

 ing, "We used to bury them with the dead." In reply to the ques- 

 tion " What do you know of its use .'" she instantly seized a small stick 

 from the fireplace and slipped the ring down to its middle, precisely as 

 the Santa Barbara Indian had done, holding it there with the left hand, 

 grasping the stick just below if to show that the middle of the stick 

 was its proper position, and began to dig industriously into the dirt 

 floor. This pantomimic explanation of the use of the stone weighted 

 digging stick was almost as satisfactory as it would have been to come 

 across her at work in the field digging roots with a veritable digging 

 stick of the olden time. This woman also said that the bulblike root 

 called "ci lion" was the principal root (\u£ with the implement, this root 

 forming an important article of food as well as of barter with other 

 tribes. A second old woman living in the same village, who might have 

 been perhaps seventy years old, but who passed as much older, subse- 

 quently corroborated the account in every particular. 



An intelligent half breed of this same village, less than forty years 

 old, from whom I derived much varied information, had no knowledge 

 of the use of these disks as weights to digging sticks. This man, how- 

 ever, was too young to have personal knowledge of any but compara- 

 tively recent times, and it is probable that the stone weights had been 



