MUMMIFIED HEADS FROM ALASKA By FREDERICA DE LAGUNA N ARCHAEOLOGICAL discovery of considerable interest was re- A cently made by Mr. I. Myhre Hofstad and his sons, of Petersberg, southeastern Alaska. In a cave on a small island about thirty miles south of Petersberg, they discovered three human heads, two of which were mummified and well preserved. The Hofstads were cruising past the island when they noticed a deer caught in a trap. One member of the party was landed to release the animal, and after having done so, he was obliged to cross to the other side of the island in order to board the boat in its lee. In climbing through the woods, he discovered a cave, or rather a crack in the rocks, barely large enough to admit a man s body (pl. 28a), about seventy feet above the sea, but invisible from the water. In this cave were two complete boxes, wrapped in matting and corded, and the remains of four more. Two planks, about four feet long, which had apparently been shaped by stone adzes, covered the two complete boxes (pl. 28a). The three most decayed boxes were evidently the oldest, and were in the further end of the crevice. The fourth had decayed except for the lid (pl. 28c) which was inlaid with small rounded studs, reported to be of stone. Under the lid were a human skull and lower jaw (pls. 28 a and c), and the remains of the matting in which the box had been wrapped. The rotted fragments of the box showed traces of paint, or rather of stain, through which the grain of the wood was visible. The fifth box, next on the right, was intact (pl. 28b). It was wrapped in matting and corded with a double-strand rope of cedar bark. The matting was decayed and fell apart when unwrapped. The box itself was made of red cedar, the sides being formed of a single plank, bent on three corners and sewed at the fourth corner. The top and the bottom were each cut from a single piece of wood, the bottom mortised to fit inside, and the top to fit over the box. The top and bottom are slightly flaring. The sides of the box are somewhat bulging and are covered with elaborate carving, stained red and green. Inside the box, packed in shredded cedar bark, was a human head, well preserved. The hair was long and appeared to have been colored reddish by the cedar shavings. The inside of the skull had been cleaned out, and the head had been smoked, or at least dried. Inside the mouth, wooden sticks had been placed crosswise to hold out the cheeks. The most interesting feature of this head is the labret, made of a long strip of skin or hide, about three quarters of an inch wide, which had been rolled tightly to form a disk two and a half inches in diameter. The labret was set in a long slit in the lower lip, but somewhat to the right side. The presence of this lip ornament shows the 742
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, N. S., VOL. 35 [DE LAGUNA] PLATE 28 b C d a, Entrance to cave; 6, carved box and woman s mummified head with labret; c, studded lid and skull; d, painted box and mummified head.
DE LAGUNA] ALASKAN MUMMIFIED HEADS 743 head to be that of a woman of the upper class. The material of which the labret is made and its slightly lateral position are unusual. The sixth box (pl. 28d), was wrapped in a mat and corded in the same fashion as the other box. The mat was well preserved. It is composed of fine rounded fibers (cedar bark or spruce root?), stained black and tan, and woven with a diagonal weave into three-inch strips; at intervals of a foot is woven a strand of heavier material. The mat is so well made that it can hold water and was undoubtedly intended to keep the contents of the box dry. This box is made like the other, except that the bottom fits inside, the sides are taller, and the top more flaring. The design is painted, not carved, the colors being brown and red and the natural color of the wood. Inside the box was a mummified human head, with long hair, wrapped in a soft woolen cloth, probably made of mountain sheep wool, and packed in cedar bark shavings. This box was evidently the last to be placed in the cave, as the degree of preservation and its position would indicate. Inside the woolen wrappings, next to the head, was a piece of wood about five inches long, shaped like a handle, to one end of which a piece of iron had been lashed, the iron having rusted away (pl. 286 on the lid). Under the box were found about two hundred beads, some of them sections of hollow bird bone, the others common glass beads. The head in this box was the best preserved. The skull had been cleaned out inside, but no wooden sticks were found in the mouth. It is evident that the cave has been used as a storage place over a period of years. Of the first three boxes to be deposited, only fragments remain, and it is impossible to say whether they originally contained heads. The sixth and youngest box was evidently deposited since the Indians came in contact with white men and were able to obtain iron; in other words it must be later than 1750 and belongs probably to the nineteenth century. The other boxes are older, but it is impossible to date them. No other human remains were found in the cave. The boxes and the matting are typical products of the Northwest Coast Indians. The cache of heads, being found in Tlingit territory, is undoubtedly Tlingit, and though the discovery of such a cache is very unusual, it is not without precedent. When Dixon was in Alaska in 1787, one of his officers found, in a cave near Sitka, a square wooden box, beautifully decorated with small shells, and containing a human head.' However, the preservation of human heads does not belong to ordinary Tlingit burial practice. The Tlingit dead, with the exception of slaves and shamans, were burned. Mum- Albert P. Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia, USNM-R; 351, Washington, 1890.
144 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 35, 1933 mification, such as was practiced by the Aleut and the Eskimo of Kodiak island and Prince William sound, was foreign to the Tlingit. Though the head of a Tlingit warrior, slain in battle, was cut off and placed in a box on poles above the box containing the ashes of his body: this practice does not explain the finding of human heads in a cave, without any other trace of human remains, especially when one of the heads is that of a woman. It seems more probable that these heads are trophies of war. When I was in Alaska in the summer of 1931, a young Indian woman of Juneau told me that after the massacre of the Wrangell natives by the Kagwantan, or Wolf People, of Sitka, the victors cut off the heads of the most important persons and carefully preserved them. These heads were displayed on the triumphal return to Sitka and were later redeemed by relatives of the victims. Some of the heads, however, are said to remain to this day in the hands of the Sitka natives. This massacre took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Dr. Young first came to Alaska, and the formal treaty of peace was signed by the natives of Wrangell and Sitka the day before the United States entered the World War. Krause has also mentioned that the Tlingit used to cut off the heads of their slain enemies, either to throw away, or to save as trophie~.~ It is possible that the latest of the three heads found by Mr. Hofstad may be a trophy of the Wrangell massacre; the location of the cave seems to be more in the territory of the Wrangell natives than that of the Sitka Kagwantan, suggesting that if so, this head was one which had been redeemed. THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM PHILADELPHIA * Hubert H. Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States, I, p. 113. * Aurel Krause, Die Tlingit-Indianer, p. 250, Jena, 1885.