76 ARTS AND CRAFTS OF GUIANA INDIANS (ETH. ANN. 38 
for their use. With these instruments they finish all their work, 
not only canoes, but tables, cupboards, seats, and other household 
goods, as completely as if they had the best joiners’ tools that are in 
use among us (AC, 90). There are references to such tortoise-shell 
axes in the folklore of the present-day Guiana Indians (e. g., WER, 
VI, sec. 22). 
11. In the Georgetown Museum are three engraved celts that came 
from around the Demerara River (pl. 5 A, B). Except for size—one 
is 353 mm. long and the smallest somewhat more than 200—they are 
practically identical. Below the head, with its mouth and ears 
bearing a resemblance to an acouri, though its likeness to that of a 
four-eyed fish has been suggested, are two pecked grooves, the anterior 
covering half the nape of the neck, the posterior completely encir- 
cling it. Below these rings is the median convex dorsal ridge leading 
to the rounded adze-like extremity of the implement. The ventral 
surface of the body, which is concave, shows no ridging. 
12. Besides the possibility of having been employed as wedging, 
cutting, or scraping implements, many of the celts already noted may 
have been used both as axes and adzes by the simple device of shifting 
the handle fixation from a vertical to a horizontal plane. I have both 
observed and recorded (op. cit.) this manner of arrangement, according 
to the purpose for which the celt is required, from among the North 
Queensland savages. In the Georgetown Museum is a_ beautiful 
green stone specimen of what seems to be either a specialized type of 
double-edge chisel (pl. 5 C, D), though I admit ignorance of any such 
analogous implement elsewhere, or more probably a sort of sculptor’s 
tool for smoothing, modeling, or stamping the designs on the effigy 
vessels and pot figurines (e. g., pls. 31 A; 32 A). Asa matter of fact, up 
to the present time, Indians use a pebble stone for such purposes in 
pottery manufacture (sec. 91). 
13. Celts were employed also as knives and scrapers, the cutting 
edge, though irregular and discontinuous, being obtained by flaking, 
from both sides, the section of the margin where it had been broken 
away from its original matrix. No particular care seems to have 
been taken to secure any special contour or to grind away irregulari- 
ties. Such stone knives have been seen in use by the Waiwai as 
late as 1906; the specimens, which were 5 to 6 inches long, were 
employed in cutting up cassava root (JO). Iam told that an exactly 
similar specimen was found among the heaps of fragments strewn 
around the quarry, a small outcrop of rock about 6 miles southeast 
of Dadanawa on the upper Rupununi. Two other stone knives 
which I found, weatherworn, in the neighborhood of the same stream, 
show a further development in that they have been given a distinctly 
rounded contour by skillful and careful chipping (pl. 6 G). Again, 
in a shell mound between the upper Pomeroon and the head of 
