Page:The Pima Indians.pdf/115

110 cylinder weighing 20 pounds that requires both hands to wield it. Many of these are obtained from the ruins, but some are shaped by pecking. This is not all done at once, but, a suitable stone having been selected, it is shaped little by little, day by day, as the owner has leisure for the work. This suggests that much of the stonework of primitive peoples which excites our admiration for their patience has been done in this manner, the implement being in use continually and the task of pecking it into more convenient or more pleasing shape being taken up from time to time as "knitting work."

The stone axes of the Pimas were obtained from the ruins that are far more extensive than the Pima villages in the Gila and Salt River valleys. Most of these axes have each a single blade, many are double-bitted, and some are of the adz form. Others are so large and finely polished as to render plausible the supposition that they were intended for ceremonial use. All are of hard, fine-grained igneous rock called hatovĭk by the Pimas, some of whom assert that the material comes from near the Gulf of California, where they have seen it when on journeys after salt. Others declare that there is no such stone on the surface of the earth, and that all the axes we find now were made from material that was brought from the underworld when Elder Brother led the netherworld people up to conquer those then living above. However, no particular religious significance is attached to the axes, as might be expected, considering their origin. They are sold readily enough, though when a suitable ax is kept for sharpening the metate of the household it is sometimes difficult for a collector to secure it. There is an abundance of suitable stones along the Salt river below where it breaks through the Superstition mountains, and it is probable that all the axes in the valley were obtained from that immediate locality. The few that were seen hafted were fastened with sinew in the fork of a limb of suitable size.