Ethnological results of the Point Barrow expedition: Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887-1888, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1892, pages 3-442Murdoch, John
History
Ethnological results of the Point Barrow expedition: Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887-1888, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1892, pages 3-442
Murdoch, John
Eskimos -- Alaska -- Barrow, Point, Region
Ten of these knives of flint were purchased within a fortnight before
we detected the deceit. Fig. 117_b_, No. 89636 [1212] is one of the
best of these counterfeits, made by wedging a freshly flaked flint
blade into the haft of an old savigrón, which has been somewhat
trimmed to receive the blade and soiled and charred to make it look
old. Other more carelessly made ones had clumsily carved handles of
whale’s bone, with roughly flaked flints stuck into them and glued in
with oil dregs. All of these came from Utkiavwĭñ. Another suspicious
circumstance is that a few days previously two slate-bladed crooked
knives had been brought down from Nuwŭk and accepted without question
as ancient. On examining the specimens since our return, I find that
while the hafts are certainly old, the blades, which are of soft slate
easily worked, are as certainly new. Fig. 118_a_, 118_b_, represent
these two knives (89580 [1062], 89586 [1061]), which have the blades
lashed on with deer sinew. It is worthy of note in this connection
that there are no stone knives of this pattern in the museum from any
other locality.
[Illustration: FIG. 118.--Slate-bladed crooked knives. 1/2]
The women employ for all purposes for which a knife or scissors could
be used a semicircular knife of the same general type as those
described by every writer from the days of Egede, who has had to deal
with the Eskimo. The knives at the present day are made of steel,
usually, and perhaps always, of a piece of a saw blade, which gives a
sheet of steel of the proper breadth and thickness, and are
manufactured by the natives themselves. Dr. Simpson says[N277] that in
his time they were brought from Kotzebue Sound by the Nunatañmiun, who
obtained them from the Siberian Eskimo. There are in the collection
three of these steel knives, all of the small size generally called
ulúrɐ (“little úlu”). No. 56546 [14] has been picked out for
description (Fig. 119). The blade is wedged into a handle of walrus
ivory. The ornamentation on the handle is of incised lines and dots
blackened. The cutting edge of the blade is beveled on one face only.
This knife represents the general shape of knives of this sort, but is
rather smaller than most of them. I have seen some knives with blades
fully 5 or 6 inches long and deep in proportion. The handle is almost
always of walrus ivory and of the shape figured. I do not remember
ever seeing an úlu blade secured otherwise than by fitting it tightly
into a narrow slit in the handle, except in one case, when the handle
was part of the original handle of the saw of which the knife was
made, left still riveted on.
[Footnote N277: Op. cit., p. 266.]
[Illustration: FIG. 119.--Woman’s knife, steel blade. 1/3]
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