Page:The American Indian.djvu/164

120 The other most important group of tools is that passing under the name of knife. From the Eskimo, particularly in Alaska, we have a knife for carving formed by setting a small flake in the lower edge of a bone handle. Similar knives have been found along the Upper Missouri, the significance of which is not clear. Among the Eskimo on the North Pacific Coast, and in the northern part of the eastern maize area, we find knives of slate, a material which takes a very keen edge, but does not wear well. The semilunar knife of the Eskimo is usually of slate and is found in the St. Lawrence Valley as well. In Peru, we find the same form in copper and bronze. Chipped blades were used as knives in all parts of both continents. The large, fine, obsidian blades of Mexico are the most famous.

An implement of unique character is the pitted hammerstone, the precise distribution of which cannot be stated. The stone pestle is essentially a hand hammer, and is found in all parts of the northern continent, except possibly in the heart of the bison and caribou areas. Detached stone mortars are a feature of the Pacific Coast, though in California they are usually mere holes in large boulders. In the interior and the east stone mortars are rare. Both in the Plains and in California, we find flat stones with skin and basketry hoppers, respectively. In the eastern maize area the mortars were usually of wood, as also in eastern South America.

A particularly characteristic object in the culture of the New World is the stone pipe, the forms and distributions of which have been extensively treated by McGuire. In the main, there are two types of stone pipe, the common or elbow form, and the tubular pipe. The former has a wide distribution over the eastern half of the United States, extending into Canada and northwestward to the Pacific. It does not occur with any frequency in the West Indies and northern South America, but is fairly abundant in eastern Brazil and Argentina. The tubular stone pipe, on the other hand, is found in the western part of the United States and is the exclusive form in the highland region from British Columbia to the Rio Grande; it is even occasionally met with in the Mississippi Valley. However, in Arizona and New Mexico, it begins to give way to the