234* THE SERI INDIANS [eth.axn.17 



paiuts, and as small utensils generally; and tliey are used nearly as com- 

 monly for scraping skins, severing animal and plant tissues, digging 

 graves and waterboles, propelling balsas, and especially for scraping 

 reeds and sticks and okatilla stems in the manufacture of arrows, har- 

 poons, bows, balsas, and jacal-frames — indeed, the seashell is the Seri 

 familiar, the ever-present haudmate and helper, the homologue of the 

 Anglo-Saxon Jack with his hundred word-compounds, a half-personitied 

 reflex of habitual action and thought. Ordinarily — always, so far as is 

 known — the shells are used in the natural state, i. e., either in the con- 

 dition of capture and opening for the removal of the animal, or in the 

 condition of finding on the beach. For certain purposes the fresh and 

 sharp-edged shell is doubtless preferable, and for others the well-woi-u 

 specimen (like the paint cup illustrated in plate xxvii) is chosen; but 

 everything indicates that the need for smoothed shells is met by 

 selecting wave-worn specimens, and nothing indicates that the value 

 of the appliance is deemed to be enhanced by wear of use — in fact, the 

 abundance of abandoned shells about the raucherias and ('amp sites, 

 and over all Seriland for that matter, indicates that the objects are 

 discarded as easily as they are found along the prolific shores. 



Next to the shells, the most abundant industrial appliances of the 

 Seri are beach jiebbles or cobbles. They are used for crushing shell and 

 bone, for rending the skins of larger animals, for severing tendons and 

 splintering bones, as well as for grinding or crushing seeds, uprooting 

 canes, chopping trees and branches, driving stakes, and for the multi- 

 farious minor purposes connected with the manufacture of arrows and 

 balsas and jacales; they are also the favorite women's weapons in war- 

 fare and the chase, and are sometimes used in similar wise by the war- 

 riors. The material for these appliances paves half the shores of Seri- 

 land, and is available in shiploads; and its use not only illustrates Seri 

 handicraft in several significant aspects, but illumines one of the more 

 obscure stages in the technologic development of mankind. 



The cobble-stone implements of the Seri range from pebbles to bowl- 

 ders, and there is a corresponding range in function from light hand- 

 implements at one end of the series to unwieldy anvils and metates at 

 the other end. The intermediate sizes are not infrequently utilized, 

 and are customarily used interchangeably, the smaller of any two used 

 in conjunction serving as the hand implement and the larger as the 

 anvil or metate; yet there is a fairly definite clustering of the oljjects 

 about two types, a larger and more stationary class, and a smaller and 

 more portable one. 



The Seri designation for the larger stone implement is that applied 

 to rock generally, viz, ahsf (the vowel broad, as in "father"); and it 

 seems probable that the term is ouomatopoetic, or mimetic of the sound 

 produced in the use of the implement as a metate, and that its applica- 

 tion to rocks generally is secondary. The designation applied to the 



