FABRICS PRESERVED BY CONTACT WITH COPPER. 243 



sists of a large copper dipper, 8 inches in diameter, with its contents and 

 attachments, which have been preserved by the action of the copper.* At- 

 tached to a portion of the bottom of the dipper, on the outside, is a fragment 

 of the skin of some animal with long light hair ; over this, in patches, are 

 fragments of a thick coarsel) r -woven woollen cloth. This woollen cloth, 

 which may or may not be of native make, was probably wrapped about 

 the body of the person buried, and also over the dipper, which was placed 

 on the head over the basket-cap. With the cloth is a fragment of a net 

 with meshes nearly an inch in width, made with a mesh-knot which is 

 identical with that in the pieces of nets from the Swiss Lakes. This is 

 evidently of native workmanship, and the material is probably the fibre 

 of the Yucca made into a tightly-twisted cord of two strands. Inside 

 the dipper, about its edge, is a piece of stoitt linen (!) cloth, and under 

 this cloth, in the bottom of the dipper, is a small basket of native work, 

 identical in material, shape, and method of manufacture with the small 

 baskets of the present Indians of some parts of California. (A piece of 

 similar basket-work is shown on Plate XIV, Fig. 3.)- Inside of the basket, 

 which was unquestionably placed on the head as a cap, are fragments of 

 the human scalp with well-preserved straight black hair. In the clipper, 

 and in some places still attached to its sides, are the remains of a long 

 string of small shell beads like those figured on Plate XII, Figs. 4-6. 

 There are about 50 inches of this string still intact ; and as twenty beads 

 occupy 1 inch in length, there are at least 1,000 of them now with the 

 dipper, and many more were taken from the same grave. In addition to 

 the articles already mentioned are three fragments of twine, of two strands 

 and about one-eighth of an inch thick, probably made of twisted bark-fibre. 

 In other graves at the same place copper articles have preserved frag- 

 ments of similar fabrics, and, in addition, on one copper platter was a hand- 

 ful of the long stems of a species of Juncus, such as were split for the basket- 

 work. Other fabrics (P. M. 13135) of interest, from these graves at the 

 isthmus, are a small coil of fibre made from the inner bark of some tree, a 

 mass of twine of two strands, made of the same kind of fibre, well twisted 



* See page 38, where Dr. Yarrow mentions that a similar copper vessel was found over a skull at 

 La Patera. 



