Occurrences of the Motive South of St. Lawrence River. 
PRIMARY AREA. GROUP I: PENOBSCOT, 
MALECITE, PASSAMAQUODDY, 
AND MICMAC, 
Penobscot, 
The Penobscot Indians of Maine are about at the southern 
boundary of the area of distribution. The double-curve with 
them is the unit of design, embracing practically all their patterns 
except a few realistic floral and a few geometrical ones. Tig. 4 
shows a selected set fairly typical for this tribe. Here the field 
of decoration includes clothing, birch bark articles, and handles 
of utensils. The technique was formerly in moose hair embroidery 
and painting, which were later replaced by beadwork. Etching 
on the surface of birch bark and incising in wood and bone also 
display the same designs. Gently rounding curves characterize 
the Penobscot examples, which range from comparatively simple 
forms to the most elaborate. Taken as a whole they show little 
uniformity. 
They term the decorations in general beskwasawek “flower 
or blossom,” but do not attach any particular identity to form, 
except to class the ovate leaves as willow leaves, and the spirals as 
fern shoots and tendrils in the most haphazard way. There seems, 
however, to have been in the past, if not now, Judging from sur- 
viving ideas, a slight tendency for the women to connect the 
figures with medicinal plants, as though there might have been 
some feeling of protective magic underlying their use as decora- 
tions upon personal property. This feature, however, is not 
by any means an emphatic one. 
Realistic floral figures, leaves, buds, blossoms, merge with 
the curve types, as augments, and also appear separately as 
design elements, though they remain secondary in importance 
to the double-curve motive. 
The primary significance of the double-curve and scroll 
figures among the Penobscot was a sort of political symbolism. 
The double curves represented the bonds uniting the different 
