Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822Mallery, Garrick
History
Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822
Mallery, Garrick
Picture-writing, Indian
So far as appears on ancient pictographic works the kind of instruments
and materials with which they were made can be inferred only from its
aspect, though microscopic examination and chemical analysis have
sometimes been successfully applied. A few examples relating to the
topic are given as follows, though other descriptions appear elsewhere
in this treatise.
SECTION 1.
INSTRUMENTS FOR CARVING.
This title, as here used, is intended to include cutting, pecking,
scratching, and rubbing. The Hidatsa, when scratching upon stone
or rocks, as well as upon pieces of wood, employ a sharply pointed
piece of hard stone, usually a fragment of quartz. The present writer
successfully imitated the Micmac scratchings at Kejimkoojik lake, Nova
Scotia, by using a stone arrow point upon the slate rocks.
The bow-drill was largely used by the Innuit of Alaska in carving bone
and ivory. Their present method of cutting figures and other characters
is by a small steel blade, thick, though sharply pointed, resembling a
graver.
Many petroglyphs, e. g., those at Conowingo, Maryland, at Machiasport,
Maine, and in Owens valley, California, present every evidence of having
been deepened if not altogether fashioned by rubbing, either with a
piece of wood and sand or with pointed stone.
To incise or indent lines upon birch bark the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and other
Algonquian tribes used a sharply pointed piece of bone, though they now
prefer an iron nail. Examples of scratching upon the outer surface of
bark are mentioned elsewhere.
Several examples of producing characters on stone by pecking with
another stone are mentioned in this paper, and Mr. J. D. McGuire (_a_),
of Ellicott City, Maryland, has been remarkably successful in forming
petroglyphs with the ordinary Indian stone hammer. Some of the results
established by him are published in The American Anthropologist.
SECTION 2.
INSTRUMENTS FOR DRAWING.
Drawings upon small slabs of wood, found among the Ojibwa, were made
with a piece of red-hot wire or thin iron rod hammered to a point. Such
figures are blackened by being burned in.
When in haste or when better materials are not at hand, the Hidatsa
sometimes drew upon a piece of wood or the shoulder-blade of a buffalo
with a piece of charcoal from the fire or with a piece of red chalk or
red ocher, with which nearly every warrior is at all times supplied.
Mr. A. W. Howitt, in Manuscript Notes on Australian Pictographs, says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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