In advanced culture tools are finished products, made and used in
accordance with preconceived designs or established arts for the
production of commodities; in primal life (as well exemplified
by Seri handicraft) tools are mere by-products incidental to the
largely instinctive activities directed toward the maintenance of
life. Accordingly, the tools of advanced culture form the nucleus of
industries, while the designless tools of the prime cluster about the
outskirts of industrial activities; i. e., in developed industries
the tool is a primary factor, while in nascent industries it is but a
collateral.
The tools of any primitive tribe may be defined as appliances
used primarily in the production of implements and utensils, and
incidentally in preparing food, making habitations, manufacturing
apparel, building vehicles or vessels, etc.—in short, the appliances
used in producing devices for the maintenance of active life. The
definition emphasizes both the dearth and the undifferentiated
character of Seri tools; for the appliances used in the production
of devices are exceedingly few, and are commonly employed also in
food-getting or in other vital industries.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most conspicuous general fact in connection with Seri tools
and their uses is the prevalence of natural objects employed either (1)
in ways suggested by natural functions or (2) in ways determined by the
convenience of users; the former grading into artificial devices shaped
in similitude of natural objects and employed in ways suggested by
natural functions.
Prominent among the natural objects employed in natural ways are
mandibles of birds, used in piercing pelts and fabrics; fish spines
and bones, also used as piercers; thorns of cacti and mimosas,
used in similar ways: teeth and horns of game animals, used in
rending their own tissues, and afterward in miscellaneous industrial
processes; together with cane splints, used for incising. Frequently
the employment of such objects is mere improvisation; yet, so far as
could be ascertained through direct observation at Costa Rica, through
Mashém’s incomplete accounts, and through inquiries from residents
on the frontier, even the improvisations are made in accordance with
regular custom firmly fixed by associations—quite in the way, indeed,
of primitive life generally, and of the physiologic and psychic
processes from which primitive custom is so largely borrowed. With
these objects may be grouped the turtle-shells and pelican-pelts used
as shields against alien and animal enemies or as protectors against
the elements; and the Seri sages would class with them, the deer-head
masks and deer-hoof rattles worn in the dance to at once symbolize
and invoke strength and swiftness. One of the most striking among the
artificial devices of symbolic motive is the piercer, or awl, of wood
or bone, shaped in imitation of the avian mandible; yet still more
significant in a vestigial way (provided the most probable inference as
to genesis be valid) is the hard-wood foreshaft of arrow and harpoon,
shaped and used in trenchant symbolism of the deadly tooth.
There are two conspicuous classes of natural objects employed in ways
determined largely by the convenience of the users, viz., (_a_) marine
shells and (_b_) beach pebbles.
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.
The Seri designation for the larger stone implement is that applied
to rock generally, viz., _ahst_ (the vowel broad, as in “father”); and
it seems probable that the term is onomatopoetic, or mimetic of the
sound produced in the use of the implement as a metate, and that its
application to rocks generally is secondary. The designation applied
to the smaller implement is _hupf_ or _kupf_ (the initial sound
explosive, combining the phonetic values of _h_ and _k_; the vowel
nearly as in “put”, or like “oo” in “took”); the term is clearly an
onomatope, imitating the sound of the blow delivered on flesh, on a
mass of partially crushed mesquite beans, etc.—indeed, both the word and
the sound of the blow seem to connote food or eating, while regular
pounding with the implement (either in ordinary use or by special
design) is a gathering signal. So far as ascertained, the term is not
extended to other objects save potential implements in the form of
suitable pebbles; but it is significant that there is no distinction
in speech—nor in thought, so far as could be ascertained—between the
natural pebble and the wear-shaped implement.[294] The local terms ahst
and hupf are explicit and specific, and without precise equivalents in
other known tongues; moreover, the objects designated are too inchoate
in development and hence too protean in function to be appropriately
denoted by the designations of implements pertaining to more
differentiated culture (mortar, metate, pestle, muller, mano, etc.).
Accordingly it seems desirable to retain the Seri designations.[295]
[294] The failure to discriminate natural objects from artificialized
implements produced from such objects by wear of use is a noteworthy
trait of primitive folk. It is conspicuous among the acorn Indians
of California, who fail to apperceive the manufacture of their own
mills and who conceive that their bowlder mortars and creek-pebble
pestles, even when completely artificialized by a generation’s use, are
merely found and appropriated; and a similar state of mind persists
among the well-advanced Papago, who have no conception of making
their well-finished mortars and pestles, or even the stone tomahawks
occasionally surviving, but regard the implements as fruits of
discovery or treasures-trove only.
[295] It should be noted that the terms used in the titles of the
accompanying plates are not denotive, but merely descriptive.
[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY