Builders’ tools
For Excavating
At the present day they are very glad to use white men’s picks and shovels when they want to dig in the gravel or clean out the ice from their houses. They, however, have mattocks and pickaxes (síkla) of their own manufacture, which are still in use. These are always single-pointed and have a bone or ivory head, mounted like an adz head on a rather short haft. The haft, like those of the mauls and adzes already described, is never fitted into the head, but always applied to the under surface of the latter and held on by a lashing of thong.
The only complete implement of the kind which we obtained is No. 73574 [297], Fig. 303. The head is of whale’s rib, 17¾ inches long. The butt is shouldered on the under surface to receive the haft and roughened with crosscuts to prevent slipping, with two shallow rough transverse notches on the upper surface for the lashings. The haft is of pine, 24½ inches long. The lashing is of stout thong of bearded seal hide, in two pieces, one of four turns passing through the hole, round the front edge of the haft, over the lower notch in the head, and back across the haft to the hole again. The ends are knotted together on top of the head by becket-hitching one end into an eye in the other, made by slitting it close to the tip and passing a bight of the standing part through this slit. The other part is of seven turns, put on in the same way, but crossing back of the haft, and started by looping one end round the head and through the eye by means of an eye at the end made as before. It is finished off by winding the end three or four times round these turns, so as to tighten them up, and hitching it round two of them on one side. This method of hafting differs in no essential respect from that used on the mauls and adzes above described.
We have also two heads for such mattocks, which hardly differ from the one described, except the No. 56494 [285] has the notches for the lashings on the side of the head instead of on the upper surface. It is 16 inches long. The other, No. 89843 [1043], Fig. 304a, is a very rude head made of an almost cylindrical piece of rib. This is a very old tool, which from its oily condition has evidently been long laid away in some blubber room at Utkiavwĭñ. It is 15.2 inches long.
These blunt-pointed mattocks are not so much used at present as picks with a sharp point mounted in the same way, and specially adapted for working in ice or hard frozen soil. I have, however, never seen them used for cutting holes in the ice for fishing, which some authors have supposed to be what they were meant for. Their shape makes them very inconvenient for any such a purpose, except when the ice is very thin.
The ice pick, like those carried on the butt of the spear, is under any circumstances a more serviceable tool. These sharp pickax heads are generally made of a walrus tusk, the natural shape of which requires very little alteration to fit it for the purpose. We collected three of these ivory heads, all very nearly alike, of which No. 56539b [96], Fig. 304b, will serve as the type. This is the tip of a good-sized walrus tusk, 14.2 inches long, preserving very nearly the natural outline of the tusk except at the point, where it is rounded off rather more abruptly above. It is keeled along the upper edge and on the lower edge at the point, so that the latter is four-sided, and the sides of the butt are flattened. On the under side the butt is cut off flat for about 3½ inches, leaving a low flange or ridge, and roughened with crosscuts to fit the end of the haft, and the butt is perforated with two large transverse eyes for the lashing. The other two heads are almost exactly like this and very nearly the same size.
Sharp-pointed pick heads of whale’s bone appear also to have been used, probably at an earlier date than the neatly finished ivory ones, as we collected three such heads, all very old and roughly made, and having notches or grooves for the lashings instead of eyes. Fig. 304c is one of these, No. 89844 [1315], from Utkiavwĭñ, very rudely cut from a piece of whale’s rib, 12 inches long.
I do not recollect seeing any of these bone-headed picks in use, while the ivory-headed one was one of the commonest tools. This Eskimo tool is in use at Pitlekaj, a village supposed to be wholly inhabited by sedentary Chukches.415