56. An Unusual Antler Zooform Club

From Northwestern California

R. F. Heizer

Distinctive polished slate monolithic zooform clubs sometimes refer-
red to as "slavekillers" have been recovered in some numbers from the

archaeological site on Gunther Island in Humboldt Bay, Humboldt County.
These stone obJects were discussed at some length by L. L. Loud (1918),
and it was Loud who assigned the label "1slavekiller" to the type.

On the British Columbia coast slaves were sometimes killed by their
owners with a special club, and Loud seems to have assumed that this club
was similar to those which he had excavated on Gunther Island.  There is
no evidence that the British Columbia coast slave-dispatching tool was

like the arimal-form stone clubs of northwestern California, and the im-
plied function of the club is therefore almost certainly erroneous.

For reasons which will not be gone into here, it seems probable that
the slate clubs of northwestern California were wealth items of the same
general category as large obsidian blades and that such items were not
used as everyday, casual tools.

The uniqueness of the present specimen is that it is the only known
example made of elk (Cervus roosveltii) antler. The handle has been
shaped and the two legs are artificially flattened and pointed. The

animalls head could not, apparently, be fashioned from the main tine and
this was simply cut off. (See Fig. 3c.)

It is clear that this specimen is a copy in a new material of the

standard slate zooform club. Limitations in the natural form of the ant-
ler prevented a faithful reproduction, and this accounts for the absence
of the head on the antler piece.

Such copying in different materials9 while apparently a simple mat-
ter of technological transference, is nevertheless rare in California.

From northwesterm California we have one antler curved adze handle which
obviously imitates the more common stone form, and from Central Califor-
nia there is the serrated arrow ground out of stone and the beautifully
fashioned antler spearpoint described elsewhere in this Report.

On the whole one feels that there was a relatively unbending con-
sistency or rigidity in prehistoric California Indian material culture

which was the result of tradition, and which probably served to preserve
the formal (and functional) aspects of material culture in conventional
moulds,

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The specimen now resides in the State Indian Museum, Sacramento. It
bears the catalogue number WSW-3367. Its provenience is Gunther Island.

Bibliography

Loud, h6. L.

1918

Ethnogeography and Archaeology of the Wiyot Territory.
Calif. Publs. Amer. Arch. Ethnol., Vol. 14, No. 3, pp.
202-422.

Univ.

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