192 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL. 65 
common practice, it may account for the extraordinarily abundant 
“use of human hair in the various arts of the Basket Makers. 
PROBLEMATICAL OBJECT 
Figure 95 illustrates a pointed stick; 14 inches from its broken-off 
end there are tied with yucca-leaf wrappings the dried hind feet and. 
middle leg bones of a small animal. From the stained appearance 
of the pointed end it would seem that the animal’s body had been 
impaled on the stick and held thus by tying the 
hind legs in the position they now occupy. 
BALL 
The specimen (A-2377, Cave I) is an oval ball, 
54 inches long, made by winding cedar bark about 
a flat piece of sandstone and covering the whole 
with prairie-dog hide, skin side out. There is no 
definite evidence for placing this object, or the 
one previously described, among the ceremonial 
material; we are unable, however, to assign to 
either of them any utilitarian purpose. 
D. PICTOGRAPHS 
In the Southwest the development of pictographic 
art is always dependent on the presence or absence 
Fig. anormal of rock faces suitable for the reception of the fig- 
é ures. Thus, in the upper Pecos Valley of New 
Mexico, where there are few cliffs and those of coarse and uneven 
texture, drawings are rare, while in the Galisteo Basin, only a few 
miles to the west, the many smooth exposures of rock have led to the 
production of a wealth of graphic representations. The San Juan 
drainage in general, with its even, vertical, sandstone cliffs, was a 
singularly favorable region for the growth of the art, and in the 
Marsh Pass-Monuments district, in particular, the abundance of 
pictographs is very striking. They occur for the greater part in the 
immediate vicinity of the archeological sites, usually at the entrances 
to caves or at the mouths of canyons that contain dwelling places, 
occasionally on side or back walls of inhabited caves; conversely, they 
are seldom found at any great distance from ruins. 
It is idle to speculate on the purpose or meaning of the pictographs. 
Whether they were made for religious reasons, as records of war or 
the chase, or whether they were done merely for amusement, can 
not be told without further material and a study of the motives which 
