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

VANSTONE: TIKCHIK VILLAGE 283be noted that the check-stamped pottery of both types is predominantlyfiber tempered, while coarse, inorganic temper is generallycharacteristic of the Yukon Line Dot and plain pottery.To determine the thickness of the ware, all the unexfoliated sherdswere measured. The thickest was 1.5 cm., the thinnest 5 mm., andthe average 8 mm. Nearly all the sherds are black or grey-black incolor but the range is from black to buff with a few sherds that arereddish brown. The fiber-tempered sherds are uniformly lighter incolor, most often a brown or buff, than those with inorganic temper.Lamps in the Tikchik collection of clay artifacts are representedby one complete specimen, another that is virtually complete, a halfof a lamp, and five sherds. The complete lamp is small, probablyfor use by a hunter, and has three circular lines near the center ofthe bowl with a central knob surrounded by a series of dots. Barelyvisible is a row of dots around the outside ring (PI. 6,3). The virtuallycomplete lamp has one encircling line outside the rim, five linesjust inside the bowl, and a spoke-like design of three lines each ofwhich divides the center of the bowl into quarters (PI. 11, c). Thiscentral cross motif seems to have made its appearance in southwesternAlaska after 1830 (Oswalt, 1953, p. 22). The lamp half has twoencircling lines outside the rim and five lines just inside the bowl.The five sherds all have either one or two encircling lines outside therim and a number of lines just inside the bowl. All the lamps andfragments are tempered with gravel.Bark and RootIt might be expected that at an interior site like Tikchik Village,birch bark would have been a basic and important material in themanufacture of artifacts, particularly baskets. The fact that so littlepreserved birch bark was collected can doubtless be explained by thegenerally poor preservation at the site, a situation that resulted inthe complete absence of artifacts made of wood, and the recovery ofonly a single fragment of worked birch bark. The importance of thismaterial in house construction has already been mentioned, and ithas also been noted that the bench burial in house 5 was coveredwith spruce bark. The only object that can be described as a birchbark artifact, however, is a large fragment, possibly part of a basket,with widely spaced and fairly sizeable holes, probably for sewing withspruce root.The only other bark artifacts in the collection are net floats madeof Cottonwood bark. Two specimens, neither complete, are roughly