146 ANTHROPOLOGICAL SURVEY IN ALASKA [eth. ANN. 46 



single object fashioned from slate or jadeite and but few points of 

 fossilized ivory were recovered at any of the sites characterized by 

 the primitive stone culture and pottery of the Bonasila type. 



" The most characteristic finds at Bonasila are the crudely flaked 

 implements of stone, some of which show incipient chipping and 

 grinding. The coarse type of pottery is unlike that of the modern 

 Eskimo in tempering, firing, and decorative design. 



" The stone culture of the site, although rich in forms, is deficient 

 in technical development and is scarcely worthy of being classed as 

 neolithic. There were found in numbers the following types of 

 artifacts: Circular, discoidal stone pebbles with rim fractures due 

 to use; river wash pebbles of irregulaf form used as improvised 

 scrapers and hammerstones; basaltic, discoidal hammerstones with 

 abraded edges and pitted at the center; large flake saws of trachyte 

 (trap rock) triangular in section but provided with sharply 

 fractured cutting edges; slender flaked fragments of trap rock 

 tapered to the form of wedges with intentionally worked end sections 

 and cutting edges; crudely flaked stone knives with evidence of 

 secondary chipping at cutting edges; other knives of thin slabs of 

 trap rock with flaked and bilaterally ground beveled cutting edges; 

 oblong axes of flaked sandstone with hafting notches struck off at 

 the edges midway from the base; abrading tools of sandstone; celts 

 of sandstone with ground and beveled working edge and notched 

 for hafting as an ax; stone scrapers with ground and beveled cut- 

 ting edges; fragmentary perforators of stone; rechipped, flaked 

 knives shaped by grinding; roughly worked, multiple-grooved 

 hammers or mauls ; and many stone objects unformed and un worked 

 but classified generally as hammerstones. 



THE POTTERY 



"About a hundred pottery shards and smaller pottery vessels were 

 recovered from the site at Bonasila. Pottery vessels representative 

 of the Bonasila culture were shaped out of the solid and show no 

 trace of coiling. In this respect they conform to the generalized 

 north Asiatic and Eskimo ware. There is, however, no check stamp 

 decorative design that is applied with a paddle by the Eskimo nor 

 evidence that pottery vessels had been built up about a basketry base. 

 The paste is light buff or gray in color, the buff ware being better 

 fired and of the same color on the inside, while the gray ware is either 

 gray or black on the inner surface. A well-defined unfired area covers 

 one-half o'f the sectional diameter. Both buff and gray wares show 

 evidence of better firing than in modern Eskimo pottery. Tempering 



