Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/95

 76 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [w. s., I, 1899

and drying of fish, mollusks, and flesh, require considerable care, labor, and ingenuity. The forming of store-house6, storage pits, and caches, in which a supply of meat is laid up for the future, was an industry practiced to a large extent in both Americas.

All the tribes of the United States and of British America were known to have dried and smoked both fish and flesh. The Nootka Indians procure the oil of the whale by placing the blub- ber in boxes and melting it with hot stones. The Alaskan British Columbia tribes dug circular pits both at their homes and around their fishing places, lined them with dry bark, and filled them with salmon, covering the hole with bark and earth. The In- dians of Puget sound dry large quantities of clams and fish eggs. The Virginia Indians practiced the same art.

The hides of animals were not less the means of developing the inventive faculty. Leaving out the machinery for harnessing power, modern tanning involves no new processes of unhairing, fleshing, tawing, and manipulating hides. (See plate II,^.)

In the mechanical processes, the bones, sinews, skins, teeth, horns, hair, intestines, shells, and spines of animals supply ham- mers, knives, wedges, levers, saws, awls, drills, scrapers, files, clamps, thread, string, rope, thongs, vessels, boxes, and bags. The knife is the beaver tooth or shark tooth ; the gimlet is the spine of the ray fish ; the saw is the jawbone of some rodent ; the sandpaper is the skin of the shark, the palate bone of fish, or mollusk shells; the skin scraper is the leg-bone of one of the large ruminants. So all tools for all purposes may be derived, in some way, from the bodies of animals. Von den Steinen was so impressed with the absence of stone in the Mato Grosso and the universality of animal substances for the materials and tools of industrial operations, that he suggests for culture epochs the terms Bone age and Shell age.

IV. PRODUCTS

Zo6techny concerns itself with the productions of its processes and the way in which they enter into the arts of consumption

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