de Laguna] ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUT AT BAY AREA, ALASKA 167 



similar in the "veil" or nape ornament of beads aud dentalia worn 

 by the daughter of a Chugach chief (Birket-Smith, 1953, p. 68). 

 According to I\jause, the Tlingit "ornament made of dentalium and 

 beads . . . covers the braid in a broad band and hangs almost to 

 the gromid" (Kj-ause, 1956, p. 102), The purpose of hair orna- 

 ments worn by adolescent girls among the Tlingit, Haida, 

 Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, and Nootka was to make the hair 

 groNv, as our Yakutat informant implied. "The weights were usually 

 bunches of dentaha, pieces of copper, etc." (Drucker, 1950, Trait 

 1182, p. 276). Some of these were metal strips bent into a U that 

 ended in a pair of spirals (Niblack, 1890, pi. vi, fig. 11, p. 261), but 

 that worn by Nootka girls was evidently similar to the dentalia bead 

 ornament of the Tlingit and Yakutat, and the magical association 

 with growth is similar. Although on the central Northwest Coast 

 this ornament was specifically associated with the first menses, among 

 the Tlingit, Yakutat, and Chugach it was not so restricted. It 

 should not be confused with the beaded hood worn by pubescent girls 

 among so many northwestern American tribes (Birket-Smith and de 

 Laguna, 1938, p. 157; Drucker, 1950, Trait 1191). We should note 

 that all of the Northwest Coast, interior Athabaskan, plateau, and 

 Gulf of Alaska Indians treated the girl's adolescence as the most 

 important crisis of her life, affecting her whole future and that of her 

 family, although the particular rites varied. Apparently the Aleut 

 and Chugach, unlike the northern Eskimo, shared this concern, and 

 many of their specific practices were identical with or very similar 

 to those of the Thngit (Birket-Smith, 1953, pp. 87 ff.; Laughlin and 

 Marsh, 1951, pp. 84 ff.; Laughlin, 1952, pp. 34, 40). 



BIRD BONE TUBES 



There are two tubes of bird bone (swan femur?), 10.4 and 17.1 cm. 

 long, from Old Town II, the first coming from the floor of the Storage 

 House which yielded a number of presumed ritual or ceremonial 

 objects. An incised fragment of bird bone, from Old Town III, may 

 be a fragment of a similar tube. 



Our informants could only hazard that these tubes were part of a 

 shaman's outfit, either pieces of his rattling bone necklace, or, more 

 probably, the tube through which he sucked out disease from a 

 patient's body. The statement that among the Tlingit: "The wing 

 bones [of the eagle], particularly the radius and ulna, are used in 

 illness as tubes for sucking up fluids" (Niblack, 1890, p. 350, quoting 

 von Langsdorff), suggests another possible connection with shamanistic 

 cures. 



