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
On the north side of this peninsula, i. e., on the south shore
of the northern half of the lake, about midway between the east and
west shores, occurs one of the two sets of hieroglyphic markings.
Lying off shore at a distance of a quarter to a half a mile, and
making with it a long sheltered channel, is a chain of islands,
trending east and west. On the south side of one of these islands,
less than a mile to the west of the first locality, is to be seen
the other set of inscriptions. The first set occurs on the top of
a low, glaciated, projecting point of rock, which presents the
characters of an ordinary roche moutonnée. The rock is a very soft,
foliated, green, chloritic schist, into which the characters are
more or less deeply carved. The top of the rounded point is only a
few feet above the high-water mark of the lake, whose waters rise
and fall in different seasons through a range of ten feet. The
antiquity of the inscriptions is at once forced upon the observer
upon a careful comparison of their weathering with that of the
glacial grooves and striæ, which are very distinctly seen upon the
same rock surface. Both the ice grooves and carved inscriptions are,
so far as the eye can judge, identical in extent of weathering,
though there was doubtless a considerable lapse of time between the
disappearance of the glaciers and the date of the carving.
The island on which were found the other inscriptions is
one of the many steep rocky islands known among the Indians as
Ka-ka-ki-wa-bic min-nis, or Crow-rock island. The rock is a hard
greenstone, not easily cut, and the inscriptions are not cut into
the rock, but are painted with ochre, which is much faded in places.
The surface upon which the characters are inscribed forms an
overhanging wall protected from the rain, part of which has fallen
down.
The Indians of the present day have no traditions about these
inscriptions beyond the supposition that they must have been made by
the “old people” long ago.
The sketches published as copies of these glyphs show spirals,
concentric circles, crosses, horseshoe forms, arrow shapes, and other
characters similar to those found on rocks in the southwestern part of
the United States, and also to petroglyphs in Brazil, examples from both
of which regions are presented in this work, under their appropriate
headings.
BRITISH COLUMBIA.
Dr. Franz Boas (_a_) published an account of a petroglyph on Vancouver
island (now presented as Fig. 3) which, slightly condensed, is
translated as follows:
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Petroglyph on Vancouver island.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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