de Lagunu] ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUT AT BAY AREA, ALASKA 97 



perhaps very thin burinlike blades for small knives. They are about 

 5 to 6 cm. long, 1.2 to 1.9 cm. wide, and 0.3 to 0.4 cm. thick. One 

 (fig. 14, a) was found with basketry fragments (pi. 18, a) just above 

 the floor of the Storage House in Old Town II. Another is from Old 

 Town III, and two are from Old Town I. 



These small implements came preponderantly from the youngest 

 portions of the site. Excluding the 4 leaf-shaped flakes and 3 other 

 specimens of uncertain provenience, 45 of the remaining 69 imple- 

 ments, or 65.3 percent, come from Old Town III, a section which 

 yielded 53.4 percent of the total number of stone artifacts of known 

 proveniences. 



While some of the adzlike tools with grooves or constrictions were 

 undoubtedly hafted to L-shaped handles and used for chopping, 

 many of the more delicate specimens were probably held in the 

 hand to serve as burins for cutting gi'ooves in bone and wood. In 

 fact, several pieces of bone appear to have been cut with such tools. 

 Other specimens may have been hafted in short wooden handles and 

 used as chisels, and the battered butts on a few others suggest that 

 they had served as chisels without hafts. Drucker (1943, pp. 46 ff.) 

 includes both hafted and unhafted chisels under the designation of 

 "celts." A hafted chisel with a celt for a blade is illustrated by 

 Niblack (1890, fig. 78) mth no other provenience than the North- 

 west Coast. Two "primitive Tlingit stone knives, %vith horn 

 handles . . . [and] blades of jade" (Niblack, 1890, fig. 98, a, b, p. 

 280), apparently for whittling and splitting, suggest another form 

 that some of our specimens may have taken. One informant identi- 

 fied some of the tools as "chisels," or in Tlingit as "something with 

 which to patch," implying that they were used to cut pieces of wood 

 that were intended to fit snugly, and he pointed out that one specimen 

 was broken as if it had been struck on the butt with a wooden hammer. 

 He also said that these implements might have been used to cut copper, 

 a suggestion which is supported by the appearance of some of the 

 copper artifacts. Another informant suggested that these tools 

 were for gouging holes. We may surmise that they were used for 

 many kinds of delicate and exact carving. 



The closest paraUels to these Yakutat tools are undoubtedly the 

 stone chiseUike implements from Prince WiUiam Sound. Some of 

 the latter are like miniature splitting adzes, occasionally grooved; 

 others are like tiny planing adzes with knifelike blades. There is 

 also a larger stone chisel with battered butt, and several small blades 

 of slate and schist for adzes or scrapers. All of these tools seem to 

 appear only in late prehistoric Chugach sites (de Laguna, 1956, pp. 

 118, 121 f.). Somewhat sunilar adzHke scraper(?) blades are known 

 from all periods on Kachemak Bay. They also occur on Kodiak, as 



