Alaska -- Antiquities; Eskimos; Eskimos -- Anthropometry; Indians of North America -- Alaska; Indians of North America -- Yukon
"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 irregular 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 cutting edges; fragmentary perforators of
stone; re-chipped, flaked knives shaped by grinding; roughly worked,
multiple-grooved hammers or mauls; and many stone objects unformed and
unworked 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 of the
sectional diameter. Both buff and gray wares show evidence of better
firing than in modern Eskimo pottery. Tempering is of coarse fragments
of steatite, which is much more durable than tempering materials such
as blood, feathers, and ashes formerly employed by the primitive Eskimo
potter.
"The pottery from Bonasila is utilitarian and consists of shallow
spherical lamps, globose bowls, and cooking pots without feet or
bases. The ware is coarse, side walls and bottom varying from 1 to 2
centimeters in sectional thickness. This type of pottery is practically
duplicated in shards recovered by Doctor Hrdlička from what is now
Eskimo territory in the Yukon Valley near the Russian Mission. It
is probable that further search would bring to light an extensive
region yielding this type of ancient pottery of distinctive design and
unrelated either to Tinné or Eskimo ware.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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