de Lapuna] ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUTAT BAY AREA, ALASKA 169 



detached squares or rectangles in two rows, flanked on each side by 

 scratches that suggest Unes with slanting spurs. 



A flat piece of limestone (fig. 21, c), (6.8) by 4.2 cm., with five 

 transverse fines scratched across one face, is from Old Town III. 

 There is also an incised pebble from a pit below the floor of House 

 Pit 1, but the scratches on one surface were probably not intended 

 to make a pattern. 



These incised stones, or perhaps only the fijst, were probably 

 rubbing amulets, like the hard cobbles used by adolescent girls, 

 widows, peace hostages, and aristocratic youths to scratch their 

 bodies, or to rub around their lips as a magical precaution against 

 uttering provocative words or gossip. Although it was implied at 

 Yakutat that such stones were plain, some incised pebbles from the 

 historic Tlingit site of Daxatkanada were tentatively identified as 

 rubbing amulets for adolescent girls by our Angoon informants (de 

 Laguna, 1960, pp. 122 S.). One informant said she had seen such a 

 rubbing stone with a picture of a bear on it, pierced for suspension 

 on a cord around the girl's neck. Such pierced pebbles with incised 

 representations of animals have been collected from the Tlingit 

 (deposited in Washington State Museum, Seattle). A stone with 

 a fairly realistic picture of a killer whale comes from the Developmental 

 Phase at Cattle Point, and is similar in spirit to the designs on these 

 ethnological Thngit amulets (King, 1950, fig. 17, 17). From a later 

 period at the same site there is a piece of stone (King, 1950, fig. 17, IS) 

 on which is incised what looks like a human face with large eyes, 

 nose, and mouth, possibly with a nose ornament and tattooed or painted 

 lines on the cheeks. These specimens may be related to the northern 

 rubbing amulets. 



The decoration of the Yakutat pebble (fig. 21, a, a') is, however, 

 completely geometric. Pebbles or roughly shaped stone plaques 

 with similar designs also were found at Daxatkanada (de Laguna, 

 1960, fig. 15, pp. 122 ff., 127 f.), at early prehistoric Chugach sites, and 

 at (late prehistoric?) sites on Kodiak (Heizer, 1956, p. 52). None was 

 found at Kachemak Bay, but this may mean only that they escaped 

 notice. 



Heizer (1947, pp. 288 f.; 1952, p. 266) has pointed out that the 

 designs on the Kodiak pebbles actually represent very convention- 

 alized anthropomorphic figures. Such features as the brows, nose, 

 mouth, labret, hair, or tattooing are merely suggested by scratches 

 confined to a small area near one end of the pebble. The rest of the 

 design, consisting of geometric patterns, evidently represents the 

 clothing, to which more attention was paid than to the face. The 



