90 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 192 



five tiny scraps of what was perhaps a single object, now unrecogniza- 

 ble, were found just above the floor of the Storage House in Old 

 Town II. 



The fact that all but the adz blade, the pin, and two fragmentary 

 knife blades were found in house pits (House Pit 1, Houses 8 and 9), 

 and the Storage House, or in a cache pit (Subsurface Pit 32), suggests 

 that iron was too precious to be thrown away in the midden. No 

 iron was found in the oldest part of the site (Mounds C and D and 

 House Pit 7), where three pieces of copper were recovered, and this 

 tends to confirm native tradition that while drift iron was known in 

 precontact times, it was not available as early as copper. 



ADZES, AXES, AND SMALL WOODWORKING TOOLS 



The Yakutat woodworker is said to have used adzes and axes, 

 chisels, wooden wedges and wooden mauls, drills, straight-bladed 

 drawknives, and crooked knives. Only the wooden wedges and mauls 

 are completely unrepresented in the archeological collections. 



SPLITTING ADZES 



Three complete and eleven broken spHtting adzes were found (pi. 5, 

 «^> f>7 d,J, 9, ^)- These are all of greenstone, except for one of hard 

 green schist and another of fine-grained metamorphic rock. Ten 

 specimens are from Old Town III, three (plus two uncertain fragments) 

 from Old Town IT, but only one from Old Town I. In addition, a 

 resident of Yakutat has two sphtting adz blades that are said to have 

 been found at Diyaguna'Et. This sample, though small, suggests 

 that the sphtting adz was gaining in popularity during the period 

 of occupation of Old Town. 



This type of adz was intended for heavy work, especially for cutting 

 down trees by spHtting out pieces of the trunk, and it was appro- 

 priately called "stone wedge" in THngit, to distinguish it from the 

 planing adz or "chopper" used to finish planks, to shape canoes, and 

 for other fight work. Keithahn (1962, pp. 66 ff., fig. 1, d, J, g) dis- 

 tinguishes, on the basis of experiments, three varieties of what I have 

 termed sphtting adz: "char adz," "feUing adz," and "sphtting adz," 

 but there is no evidence that the Thngit themselves made such 

 distinctions. 



Complete specimens range in length from 18 to 30 cm., in height 

 (thickness) from 4 to about 7.8 cm., and in width from 3.2 to 5 cm. 

 They were shaped by pecking and grinding; some seem to have been 

 pohshed over the entire surface, while others are roughly finished. 

 These blades were obviously intended to be lashed to a T-shaped 

 handle (cf. Niblack, 1890, pi. xiii, figs. 87, 90, 91), since all but the 

 most fragmentary exhibit lashing grooves across the rear half of the 



