The Seri Indians. (1898 N 17 / 1895-1896 (pages 1-344*))McGee, W J
History
The Seri Indians. (1898 N 17 / 1895-1896 (pages 1-344*))
McGee, W J
Seri Indians; Seri language; Yuman languages
The marine shells applied industrially comprise the prevailing local
genera, _Cardium_, _Mactra_, _Arca_, _Chama_, and others. They are
used ordinarily as drinking-cups, dishes, dippers, receptacles for
fats and face-paints, and as small utensils generally; and they
are used nearly as commonly for scraping skins, severing animal and
plant tissues, digging graves and waterholes, propelling balsas, and
especially for scraping reeds and sticks and okatilla stems in the
manufacture of arrows, harpoons, bows, balsas, and jacal-frames—indeed,
the seashell is the Seri familiar, the ever-present handmate and
helper, the homologue of the Anglo-Saxon Jack with his hundred
word-compounds, a half-personified reflex of habitual action and
thought. Ordinarily—always, so far as is known—the shells are used
in the natural state, i. e., either in the condition of capture and
opening for the removal of the animal, or in the condition of finding
on the beach. For certain purposes the fresh and sharp-edged shell
is doubtless preferable, and for others the well-worn specimen (like
the paint-cup illustrated in plate XXVII) is chosen; but everything
indicates that the need for smoothed shells is met by selecting
wave-worn specimens, and nothing indicates that the value of the
appliance is deemed to be enhanced by wear of use—in fact, the
abundance of abandoned shells about the rancherias and camp sites,
and over all Seriland for that matter, indicates that the objects are
discarded as easily as they are found along the prolific shores.
Next to the shells, the most abundant industrial appliances of the Seri
are beach pebbles or cobbles. They are used for crushing shell and
bone, for rending the skins of larger animals, for severing tendons
and splintering bones, as well as for grinding or crushing seeds,
uprooting canes, chopping trees and branches, driving stakes, and
for the multifarious minor purposes connected with the manufacture
of arrows and balsas and jacales; they are also the favorite women’s
weapons in warfare and the chase, and are sometimes used in similar
wise by the warriors. The material for these appliances paves half the
shores of Seriland, and is available in shiploads; and its use not
only illustrates Seri handicraft in several significant aspects, but
illumines one of the more obscure stages in the technologic development
of mankind.
* * * * *
The cobble-stone implements of the Seri range from pebbles to
bowlders, and there is a corresponding range in function from light
hand-implements at one end of the series to unwieldy anvils and
metates at the other end. The intermediate sizes are not infrequently
utilized, and are customarily used interchangeably, the smaller of any
two used in conjunction serving as the hand implement and the larger
as the anvil or metate; yet there is a fairly definite clustering of
the objects about two types, a larger and more stationary class, and a
smaller and more portable one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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