Tikchik village: a nineteenth century riverine community in ... - Cluster

VANSTONE: TIKCHIK VILLAGE 321century a surprisingly large number of trade goods of all kinds wereavailable to the people of that area. These included a wide variety— of dry goods, clothing including boots, shoes and rubber goods,notions, hardware, dried and canned foods, arms and ammunition,paints, patent medicines, candy, and even furniture. There is noreason to think that the store at Nushagak was not, to some extentat least, similarly stocked. Of course, the supply of trade goods atthis time was doubtless much greater than it was throughout most ofthe period when Tikchik was occupied, but the fact still remains thatthe archaeological record would seem to give only a partial indicationof the number of exotic objects potentially available to the villagers.Much, of course, has been lost through the poor preservation at thesite. A strong conservatism on the part of these inland dwellers whoprobably saw Nushagak no more than once a year may also havebeen a factor.The second source of innovation is of particular interest and significancebecause it concerns the introduction of new raw materialsand their effect on the manufacture of traditional artifact types.Here we see clearly the persistence of old ideas in new mediums. Themost notable examples are discussed below.1) The use of a spent cartridge case to form the end of a bluntarrowhead represents only a slight modification of a traditionalartifact. This change, which probably increased the durabilityand perhaps the efficiency of the point, has been noted from historiclevels at Hooper Bay Village (Oswalt, 1952a, p. 53) and isrepresented in the Crow Village collection (Oswalt and VanStone,1967, p. 76).2) Ulu and end bladed knife blades made from can metal weredoubtless easier to make and could be manufactured more quicklyand in larger sizes than those made of slate. As has been pointedout for similar artifacts from Crow Village, however, these bladesmust have been far less functional than their stone counterpartsdue to the flexibility of the metal and its inability to hold a sharpcutting edge (Oswalt and VanStone, 1967, p. 75) This would also.be true for a skin scraper blade of the same material, but in thiscase it was possible to strengthen the implement by folding themetal double.3) Can metal folded into shallow dish-like containers was extremelycommon at Crow Village where they were thought to illustrate amarked conservatism with regard to the use of the new materialbecause the containers were folded at the ends in the same manner