Pictographs of the North American Indians. A preliminary paper: Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882-83, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1886, pages 3-256Mallery, Garrick
History
Pictographs of the North American Indians. A preliminary paper: Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882-83, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1886, pages 3-256
Mallery, Garrick
Haida Indians; Picture-writing, Indian; Tattooing
The rock-paintings presented in Plates I and II are reduced copies of
a record found by Dr. W. J. Hoffman, of the Bureau of Ethnology, in
September, 1884, 12 miles west-northwest of the city of Santa Barbara,
California. They are one-sixteenth original size. The locality is
almost at the summit of the Santa Ynez range of mountains; the gray
sandstone rock on which they are painted is about 30 feet high and
projects from a ridge so as to form a very marked promontory extending
into a narrow mountain cañon. At the base of the western side of this
bowlder is a rounded cavity, measuring, on the inside, about 15 feet
in width and 8 feet in height. The floor ascends rapidly toward the
back of the cave, and the entrance is rather smaller in dimensions
than the above measurements of the interior. About 40 yards west of
this rock is a fine spring of water. One of the four old Indian trails
leading northward across the mountains passes by this locality, and it
is probable that this was one of the camping-places of the tribe which
came south to trade, and that some of its members were the authors of
the paintings. The three trails beside the one just mentioned cross the
mountains at various points east of this, the most distant being about
15 miles. Other trails were known, but these four were most direct
to the immediate vicinity of the Spanish settlement which sprang up
shortly after the establishment of the Santa Barbara Mission in 1786.
Pictographs (not now described) appear upon rocks found at or
near the origin of all of the above-mentioned trails at the base of
the mountains, with the exception of the one under consideration. The
appearance and position of these pictographs appear to be connected
with the several trails.
The circles figured in _b_ and _d_ of Plate I, and _c_, _r_, and
_w_ of Plate II, together with other similar circular marks bearing
cross-lines upon the interior, were at first unintelligible, as their
forms among various tribes have very different signification. The
character in Plate I, above and projecting from _d_, resembles the
human form, with curious lateral bands of black and white, alternately.
Two similar characters appear, also, in Plate II, _a_, _b_. In _a_, the
lines from the head would seem to indicate a superior rank or condition
of the person depicted.
[Illustration:
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. I
PICTOGRAPHS IN SANTA BARBARA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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