de Laguna] ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUTAT BAY AREA, ALASKA 87 



of wood and basketry. According to our informants, practically 

 every item of clothing was made of skins; wood or roots were of major 

 importance for household utensils, tools, and weapons. 



On the whole, the style and degree of finish of the artifacts does 

 not suggest very careful or skilled workmanship. Most of the stone 

 specunens appear to have been quickly and carelessly made, except 

 for the adz blades of greenstone or other hard rocks, and some of 

 the more carefully shaped lamps. The copper artifacts suggest 

 gi-eater skill, perhaps expended on this material because it was valuable. 

 A large proportion of the bone specimens are simply worked pieces 

 or roughly pointed splinters, but there are also some barbed weapons 

 that exhibit more careful workmanship. The decorated artifacts 

 of stone, bone, or wood fail to show any high development of the 

 traditional Northwest Coast style, probably because they are rather 

 crude. The finds of red paint suggest that some artifacts were painted, 

 but no examples of painting were found. Judging by the scanty 

 remains, wooden boxes and twined baskets were perhaps the best- 

 made objects at Old To'wn. High development of weaving techniques 

 is also illustrated in the blanket from Knight Island (see pp. 187-192). 



For the sake of brevity, detailed descriptions of the artifacts are 

 not given here, although this information was included in the six 

 copies of the original report submitted to the Arctic Institute of 

 North America. Brief designations, such as "Old Town I, II, or 

 III," are here substituted for more specific proveniences, especially 

 since the artifacts recovered from the various house and cache pits 

 have already been listed. 



In the descriptions of artifacts, measurements in parentheses indi- 

 cate that the specimen is broken and the dimensions in question are 

 incomplete. 



OBJECTS OF COPPER 



The 48 objects from Old Town made wholly or in part of copper 

 include arrowheads, blades for ulos or other knives (see fig. 10), pins, 

 hooks (see fig. 18, d, e, i,j), ornaments such as bracelets, rings, beads, 

 and coils of wire (see fig. 19, a-d, g-4), and nails and scraps. In addition, 

 a broken copper knife blade was found on Little Fort Island (site 9, 

 near Knight Island). This specimen, as well as all those from Old 

 Town, appears to be of native copper, whereas a copper scraper 

 (see fig. 11, f) and several other fragments from Diyaguna'Et on Lost 

 River seem to be of commercial sheet copper. 



Native copper is said to have been obtained in trade from the Copper 

 River and was considered so valuable that copper ornaments were 

 worn only by the rich and noble. None of our informants had seen 

 a "copper," but several described them from tradition as shield- 



