Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/666

 American Anthropologist

��NEW SERIES

��Vol. i October, 1899 No. 4

��PROPERTY MARKS OF ALASKAN ESKIMO

By FRANZ BOAS

Lubbock, I believe, was the first to call attention to the occurrence of a property mark on an arrow collected among the Eskimo of Alaska.1 An examination of the collections in the United States National Museum at Washington, in the American Museum of Natural History of New York, and in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, shows that property marks are used very frequently by the Eskimo tribes of Alaska. They occur almost exclusively on weapons used in hunting, which, after being dispatched, remain in the bodies of large game. These are, particularly, whaling harpoons, walrus harpoons, sealskin buoys which are attached to harpoons, lance-heads used for killing whales, and detachable arrowheads. I found also two throwing-sticks provided with property marks. I did not discover any property marks on tools. It appears, therefore, that the object of the property mark is to secure property-right in the animal in which the weapon bearing the mark is found. This agrees with Kittlitz's report,* quoted by Andree in his essay on property

1 Prehistoric Times, 1869, p. 10.

2 R. Andree, Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche, Neue Folge, p. 84.

601

�� �