de Lagunal ARCHEOLOGY, YAKUTAT BAY AREA, ALASKA 185 



covering of moose or caribou hide, not of sealskin (Drucker, 1950, 

 Trait 390, p. 254), and was probably, therefore, of Athabaskan type; 

 it was paddled, not rowed. The Chilkat tradition that they once had 

 only skin boats, "before they knew there were other people living to 

 the south and west on the coast," is also suggestive of an interior 

 origin. 



While the Yakutat themselves made or purchased from their 

 southern neighbors several well-known Northwest Coast types of 

 dugout, they made two distinctive types of their own. The forked- 

 prow canoe for the open sea or swift currents was made only by the 

 Eyak-speaking Gulf of Alaska Indians, from Yakutat to the mouth 

 of the Copper River; the canoe with spoon-shaped bow and ram for 

 sealing in the ice floes was made only at Yakutat and Icy Bay. We are 

 inclined to consider dugouts as peculiar to the Northwest Coast, so 

 it is important to remember that they were made by the Chugach, 

 Tanaina (the latter possibly in imitation of the Kenai Peninsula 

 Eskimo), and even by some of the northern Koniag, although among 

 these peoples the dugout was never as common as boats of other kinds 

 (de Laguna, 1956, pp. 241 ff.). 



While the dugout is the modern type of craft on all the Northwest 

 Coast, Borden (1951, pp. 46 ff.) had argued that the ancient inhabi- 

 tants of WTialen Farm I and Locarno Beach I and II must have hunted 

 seal and porpoise from skin canoes because they lacked antler wedges, 

 pestle-shaped hand mauls, and large adz blades — tools which he 

 believed were essential to making dugouts. Although the presence 

 of such implements does indicate a well-developed woodworking 

 industry, their absence cannot prove that boats were made of skin, 

 not of wood, since the modern Coast Salish fell trees by burning or 

 chiseHng with a relatively small adz (Barnett, 1939, Traits 571, 572), 

 and the Tlingit, at any rate, shape their dugouts with a small planing 

 adz and crooked knife. This question has been further discussed by 

 Osborne, Caldwell, and Crabtree (1956, p. 121). However, we 

 should also note that Borden (personal communication) believes 

 that the dugout was made in the Marpole Phase, which was in large 

 part contemporaneous with that of Locarno Beach. Probably the 

 question of boat types on the southern Northwest Coast in the most 

 ancient days is not yet ready for solution. 



