About Bone

It began as a three-day festival in Southern and Central Mexico and has spread around the world. Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations now take place throughout Central and South America, the Philippines, and locales as far away from Mexico as Massachusetts, New Zealand, and the Czech Republic.

Pre-Columbian cultures have held rituals celebrating their ancestors for perhaps 2500 years. On the Aztec calendar, the festival that morphed into the modern Day of the Dead celebration fell during the summer and lasted a month. After Spanish colonization of the New World in the 16^th century, the festival became associated on the Christian calendar with Allhallowtide (All Saints’ Eve, aka Halloween), All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. It is now a national holiday in Mexico, designed to be a unifying tradition among the nation’s various cultures.

The point is to celebrate deceased friends and family members and support their spiritual journey as they awaken temporarily to enjoy the festivities along with the living. Bones abound.

Colorful and elaborate skeletal displays, especially skulls, are evident in parades, costumes, shrines, and tomb decorations. Pan de muerto (bread of the dead) is embellished with twisted bones made from white frosting. Calaveras (sugar skull candies) are decorated to represent the unique personalities of the departed. A box can be on your doorstep tomorrow when you order from Amazon Prime.

Mexico City was a late comer to the idea of a Día de Muertos parade, starting with a staged one in 2015. It formed the opening scene for the James Bond movie Spectre. The heart-pounding opening scene lasts about eight minutes and shows Daniel Craig destroying a custom-tailored suit amidst gunfire and collapsing buildings; but if you want to focus on dancing bones and skeletons, watch between minutes three and five.

Following that publicity, Mexicans were so taken with the idea of a Day of the Dead parade that they held a bona fide one the next year, which 250,000 people attended. Atlantic magazine just this week posted an array of stunning photographs taken in anticipation of Mexico City’s 2019 merrymaking.

The Los Angeles offerings are centered at Olvera Street and include art exhibits, elaborate altars, and parades extending over nine days. Several cemeteries host elaborate altar-making contests with the winners walking away with $5000 prizes. See seventeen of the region’s top festivities here.

Day of the Dead celebrations are opportunities to celebrate life and remember those who did so previously. And for Angelenos, it’s another chance to get in costume. I joined the festivities last year and absorbed the culture on Olvera Street. Afterwards I rode the Metro home. Nobody on the train batted an eye.

Wednesday, October 16, is Fossil Day. The National Park Service proclaims it so, now for the tenth year. Its stated mission is “to highlight the scientific and educational value of paleontology and the importance of preserving fossils for future generations.”

As far as I know, there are no parades, costumes, holiday cards, or festive foods, just a day to appreciate stone bones. Special events are taking place at natural history and science museums in at least 34 states; but at this late date, you may have already made other plans, so at least you should know what paleontology is as well as what fossil are and a little bit about how they form.

Paleontology, a blending of geology and biology, is the study of ancient life on Earth, based on fossils, which are stone replicas of plants and animals.

An animal may die and get silted over before its skeleton either weathers away or gets scavenged. When conditions are just so, water permeating through those bones’ porous surfaces and leaches out calcium-containing molecules, which are then immediately replaced by another mineral dissolved in the water. The bone turns to stone, one molecule at a time, over tens of thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—of years. The mud surrounding the bone also turns to stone, but its constitution is different because it did not start out as bone. If the fossilized bone weathers away a little more slowly than the sedimentary rock within which it is embedded, then later—even millions of years later—when a sea, lake, or riverbank dries up, a passerby might spot a partially exposed fossil.

I get brain freeze when I consider two probabilities. First, only a tiny fraction of animals from millions of years ago were successfully transformed into fossils. Second, most of those that did turn to stone are either still buried or have already become exposed and have weathered away. The fossils that we do have, therefore, constitute only a minuscule glimpse of ancient life, yet they provide fortuitous and miraculous insights into Earth’s history. It is worth a day of reflection.

The public’s interest in fossils had a distinct beginning date–1868. Before that, large stone bones, which as you can imagine are heavy, collected dust in university and museum storerooms.

British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was a prolific and well-known natural-history illustrator for Darwin and other mid-century biologists. Hawkins was commissioned to develop an extensive “Paleozoic Museum” in New York City’s Central Park. The intention was to dynamically display dinosaurs that had recently been discovered in America.

Because New York neither possessed the necessary fossils nor the paleontological expertise for the project, Hawkins ventured to Philadelphia. There he received support from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences to assemble the skeleton of a thirty-foot dinosaur, most of the bones of which were in the Academy’s collection. He made plaster reproductions of missing bones and creatively supported them all with a metal framework such that the reconstructed skeleton assumed a lifelike, standing posture. Hawkins was the first to display fossilized dinosaur bones in this manner.   

The public clamored to see this assembled dinosaur skeleton. Attendance at the Academy doubled over the next year. The display piqued the public’s interest in dinosaurs, an interest that remains strong over 150 years later.

If you need some other juicy facts to spice up your Fossil Day conversations, here are several previous About Bone posts that will help.

Genuine Hate Produced the Bone Wars

T rex Rocks

Fossil Fraud Foisted, then Fossil Fraud Foiled

And finally, a little paleontology humor. We wouldn’t understand if we didn’t have fossils. Happy Fossil Day.

In my April 29, 2019 post, Big Bone Business on eBay, I noted that the fossilized skeleton of a baby Tyrannosaurus rex was for sale on eBay for $2.95 million. The seller recently ended the auction–apparently no takers. Should they repost the offering please do humankind and science a favor: buy it and have it shipped directly to a natural history museum. On the eBay posting, the seller hyped the auction with some cock and bull about not wanting this treasure to fall into the hands of a museum, which “has limited opening hours and might be prohibitively expensive for some to visit”. Rather, the seller stated, “Once put ONLINE, the entire World can enjoy it 24/7/365.” OK, give it to a museum while stipulating that the museum posts the images online. Then everybody can enjoy the photos, and interested paleontologists can access the real deal for close study.

Only 20 relatively intact sets of T rex stone bones exist overall, and there is recent good news about several Tyrannosaurus specimens that are safely ensconced for scientific study and public awe.

Sue, the most intact specimen found to date, is about 90% complete and continues to terrify and delight museum goers at the Field Museum in Chicago. Since December she resides in the Museum’s new Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet and is now positioned in a less crouched and more aggressive position than before. Because her supporting armature allows temporary removal of any of her bones individually for intense study, a generation of paleontologists has learned much about T rex’s posture and movement and has even estimated her body weight.

Opening with much anticipation and fanfare on June 8, the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, displays “The Nation’s T Rex“. It is posed to soon devour a hapless Triceratops. This T rex is on 50-year lease from the Army Corps of Engineers, which owns it since the fossils were discovered on federal land in Montana.

A few months earlier came a full scientific description of Scotty, a T rex originally discovered in 1991, the year after Sue surfaced. Full-scale excavation of Scotty began in 1994 and proceeded slowly because of the extremely dense rock encasing the specimen. This and other difficulties delayed the publication of a complete analysis until now. Investigators estimate that Scotty lived into his early 30’s (extremely long for a dinosaur) and, based on the length and girth of his bones, stretched 40 feet from snout to tail tip and might have slightly outweighed Sue. I doubt, however, that either one obsessed much over their weight. A full-scale replica of Scotty recently went on display at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, near its discovery site.

In addition to nicknames such as Sue and Scotty, other T rex specimens sport monikers such as Stan, Bucky, Tristan, and Trix, although the sex of any dinosaur has yet to be determined. Supposing Sue was actually male, I wonder if his name predisposed him to bar fights a la Shel Silverstein and Johnny Cash? If so, what do you think the bar bullies had been drinking? Who do you think would have won?

In my quest to learn everything about bone, over the past three years I have visited at least 100 museums on four continents as well as scoured additional museums’ on-line collections and untold numbers of books and journal articles. Recently I spent a day in Oxford, England, visiting two anthropology museums, a natural history museum, and a history of science museum. In each, I found interesting bone objects but really nothing I had not seen before. Therefore with low expectations, I stopped by the Museum of Oxford.

The museum was undergoing renovation (“refreshments” in British parlance), but they had set up a temporary micro-museum in a large room at the Oxford Town Hall. It had no ticket counter or guard and just two or three other visitors. One case displayed several bone needles and an ice skate made from a horse or cow cannon bone, examples of which I had seen before.

Then I saw a surprise–a three-foot square slab laid flat on a waist-high display case. The shapes of the pieces creating this large mosaic immediately revealed their source—the ends of cannon bones from large animals. (For a description of it, see my previous post, The versatile cannon bone. What is it?)

The bones had been cut in half, placed vertically, and mortared in place to form a pavement of, well, cobblebones. Archaeologists had unearthed the surface at nearby Park End Street and dated it to the 1700’s. At that time the area was a shambles, now an obsolete word for an open-air slaughter house and meat market.

It all fits. Butchers would have little use for cannon bones because they have virtually no meat outside and no marrow inside. So, possibly to get relief from the muddy street, some enterprising soul cut the otherwise useless, readily available, and extremely hard cannon bones in half and paved away.

No one seems to know what fraction of the entire pavement the museum’s section constitutes, so more cobblebone may be resting under adjacent modern buildings. Since returning home, I have discovered that archaeologists have recorded 16 similar examples from Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, nearly all of them from the Oxford area and many from private dwellings, so it seems like cobblebone underfoot was a unique local tradition.

Imagine growing up in the 1950s in the Soviet Union and not being able to hear Bill Haley and the Comets sing Rock Around the Clock or to dance to Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The authorities feared that such subversive Western influences would turn youthful passion away from love for the Motherland, and they therefore banned them along with recordings of both tango and saxophone. 

An ingenious workaround, variously known as Bone Music, Jazz on Bones, and Ribs, came about. Bootleggers would play a smuggled, commercially produced record next to a transcription lathe armed with a sharp needle. This would scratch the music’s audible vibrations into a long spiral groove on a spinning disc of discarded vinyl X-ray film. The vinyl was soft enough to accept the groove and hard enough to preserve it.

The task was tedious because a bootlegger had to cut the x-ray films one by one into crude circles, record each one, and burn a center hole with a lit cigarette. The product, however, was cheap and also easy to conceal and sell using the standard methods for distributing urban contraband. 

The audio quality of Ribs has been variously described as “sounding like sand” or as if listening to Ella Fitzgerald “from across the street while being pummeled by torrential rain.” Furthermore, the grooves wore out quickly, sometimes after only five to ten playings. The demand for Bone Music dried up after 1964, when tape recorders became legal.

Curiously, the banned music itself had nothing to do with bones or ribs. Why then, the names? At that time in the Soviet Union, vinyl was scarce and tuberculosis was common. Strangely, there is a connection. Bootleggers repurposed old vinyl X-ray films that hospitals discarded in bulk. Many of these were chest X-rays that had been taken to diagnose lung infections. Listen to a rendition of St. Louis Blues recorded on a skull film, to Ella Fitzgerald singing Lullaby of Birdland, and to Elvis crooning Heartbreak Hotel. The latter two were both recorded on chest X-rays with easily identifiable ribs.

Consider the irony if a bootlegger had recorded one of Mr. Presley’s hits on a pelvic X-ray. Subversive indeed.

During life, a goat’s knucklebones allow for ankle motion, which the goat finds useful but probably not fascinating. In their afterlife, however, knucklebones from goats and sheep have fascinated humans for thousands of years, probably beginning in ancient Egypt or in what is now western Turkey. Roughly rectangular, each bone is about the size of a hard candy. Four or five fit easily in the palm, and it is almost impossible not to jiggle them momentarily and roll them out—a thrill of touch, sight, sound, and … anticipation.

Although the ends are too small and rounded for them to stand straight up, the knucklebones’ four long sides are uniquely shaped, so the odds vary for one coming to rest on any given side. Without concern for how they landed, children played jacks with them or tossed them up and tried to catch them on the backs of their hands. By attributing different values for each landing surface, adults used them for gambling, hence the expression, “Roll the bones.” Fortune tellers attributed meaning to the landing positions both of the individual bones and their relationships to one another.

Kuncklebones’ ageless popularity for gaming and forecasting is apparent from their frequent presence in archaeological discoveries, with the objects both in their original osseous forms as well as reproductions made from metal or clay. Through the ages, sculptors, potters, and painters have recorded people’s fascination with knucklebones. 

Cubic dice evolved from knucklebones and standardized the odds of a gaming piece landing on a given side. Other shapes ensued, from four sides to twenty sides and nearly every sidedness in between.

Goats and sheep are not the sole original possessors of knucklebones. Any hoofed animal with cannon bones (the topic of a previous blog post) has knucklebones. This includes horses and cattle. These, however, would be too large to jiggle and roll more than one, which would have made a game of Monopoly tediously slow.

Bones are structural and aesthetic wonders. They epitomize the melding of form and function.Each one is beautiful. What then accounts for the current chatter on social media regarding the “beauty bone”? Is this one really more stunning than the others? 

To look at the collar bone in isolation, it has a gentle S-shape with flattened ends, one connecting to the breast bone and the other to the shoulder blade. The collar bone is the only bony connection between our upper limb and the chest skeleton, which accounts for its proclivity to fracture when reaching out to stop a fall. It also provides attachment for a number of large and important shoulder muscles. Absence of the collar bones, a rare birth anomaly, allows the owner to draw the shoulders together in front such that they nearly touch–definitely not beautiful.

What then, in life, makes the collar bones, draped closely with skin, alluring? To some owners and observers, prominent collar bones signal “skinny” and “fit” even if the rest of the torso is loosely tented. The beauty bones become an easy and noncontroversial expression of sex appeal–perfection without apparent effort.

Ah, but the effort required to fulfill this obsession. Websites encourage wannabes to regularly perform pushups, abdominal crunches, shoulder shrugs, yoga exercises including bridge position, and local massage. How these help I am not certain. Weight loss through aerobic exercise and diet is paramount, and I suppose it is in the eyes of the beholder where allure stops and emaciation starts. For those less committed, makeup helps, and Youtube videos can show you the tips. To date, it seems that surgical enhancement has not been tried. Liposuction, anyone?

One can demonstrate the magnitude of the depression above the beauty bone by placing a stack of quarters in the hollow. (I’ve seen the photos.) It might also work with golf balls, but they would probably roll out during your backswing. For me, I noticed that the depression becomes more pronounced when I shrug my shoulders; so if you see me in a tank top walking with a Frankenstein posture, you will know that I am styling my beauty bones, but not obsessing over them, because the other bones are equally functional and aesthetic.

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Fish, frogs, snakes, birds, and humans all have spines, which consist of individual vertebral segments that protect our spinal cord while allowing neck and trunk movements. The vertebral column distinguishes “vertebrates” from spineless creatures such as squid, worms, snails, and beetles. Not that we should feel particularly smug about possessing a spine, because the spineless animals don’t have to concern themselves with lumbago, pinched nerves, and chiropractic adjustments.  

Excluding sharks, skates, and rays, whose spines are made of cartilage, all other vertebrates have bony spines. Most mammals, giraffes and humans included, have seven vertebrae in their necks, while birds may have more. For instance, owls have 14, which allows them to turn their heads 270 degrees; and those contortionist flamingos have 19. Lower in the spine, the number of vertebrae is even more variable from species to species; and depending on the need for stability over flexibility, multiple segments may be fused together. The human sacrum, for example, consists of five fused segments, and the coccyx has four. Conversely, in snakes, with as many as 500 vertebrae, none of them are fused together. In short, vertebrae are versatile.

The bony ones are also hard, dense, and have complex shapes. The first two features mean that these bones endure a long time after the original owner is finished with them. Their complex shapes fascinate various people, who have re-purposed them in many ways, hence versatile and venerable.

For function, the Inuits hollowed out the cylindrical portion of whale vertebrae to make flues for their rib bone/tundra/hide dwellings. Other cultures have use scooped out vertebral bodies of smaller animals to serve as drinking cups.

Perhaps functional but of questionable esthetic value, vertebra have also morphed into chairs.

Solely for beauty, vertebrae have found second lives in necklaces, bracelets, and brooches.

They have also been crafted into likenesses of John Wesley (1703-1791), a British religious leader and founder of Methodism. It is unclear whether the folk artists were devout Methodists or were detractors who placed the effigies in pubs and soused them in beer to protest Wesley’s call for temperance.

The highest artistic achievement inspired by vertebrae belongs to British sculptor Henry Moore (1889-1986). He is well known for his semi-abstract bronze forms of reclining women, which grace sculpture parks worldwide. These monumental sculptures often have hollow spaces and openings, which some viewers compare to the undulating landscape of Moore’s native Yorkshire; but those observers should look more closely at bone. In 1940 Moore was bombed out of his London home and moved to a farmhouse appropriately named Hoglands because it was situated on a former pig farm. On walks, Moore would pick up scattered bones and take them into his studio. He commented that his primary interest was the human figure but that he paid great attention to natural forms, including bones, pebbles, and shells. It is apparent that he studied vertebrae closely and was taken by their rounded openings and curved, merging surfaces. They inspired him to create his shapes, iconic in their own right, and referencing beautiful, timeless bone.  

Probably primitive man’s curiosity markedly increased soon after he stood up and started walking on just his feet. He could both peek into caves and drop back onto all fours to peer down badger holes. Looking into his family’s mouths and ears soon followed. Many generations later his progeny developed metal tubes and glimpsed human interiors through all of our natural orifices. Lighting, however, was always an issue, and the torch that satisfactorily illuminated the cave was poorly accepted by early patients in the proctology clinic.

This changed in 1879 with Edison’s invention of the incandescent light bulb. Just seven years later, two German doctors were lighting up bladders with a tiny bulb on the end of a steel tube through which they squinted. Heat from the bulb and risk of breakage, however, posed problems. Nonetheless, enterprising doctors began poking holes in the skin and exploring the bladder, abdomen, and chest with lighted tubes. In 1912, Severin Nordentoft, a Danish doctor, extended this concept to the knee and coined the word “arthroscopy” (joint-view). Multiple investigators from the world around then refined and continue to refine the technique.

Prior to antibiotics, tuberculosis, especially in the knee, occupied much of orthopedists’ time. This was particularly so in Japan, where squatting and kneeling have long been cultural imperatives. In 1918 Doctor Kenji Takagi began using a bladder scope to examine tuberculous knees. His idea was to develop early treatment that would preclude the awkward outcome of an entirely stiff knee. Over the next 20 years he designed and tested 12 versions of arthroscopes that were progressively smaller in diameter and that incorporated better optical systems. None of them, however, were entirely practical.

In my April 29, 2019 post, Big Bone Business on eBay, I noted that the fossilized skeleton of a baby Tyrannosaurus rex were for sale on eBay for $2.95 million. It is still up for auction; and remember, the seller accepts credit cards and includes shipping. Do humankind and science a favor. Buy it now and give it to a natural history museum. On the eBay posting, the seller counters with some cock and bull about not letting this treasure fall into the hands of a museum, which has limited opening hours and might be prohibitively expensive for some to visit. Rather, the seller states, “Once put ONLINE, the entire World can enjoy it 24/7/365.” OK, give it to a museum while stipulating that the museum posts the images online. Then everybody can enjoy the photos, and interested paleontologists can access the real deal for close study.

Only 20 relatively intact T rex specimens exist overall, and there is recent good news about several sets of T rex‘s stone bones that are safely ensconced for scientific study and public awe. Sue, the most intact specimen found to date, is about 90% complete and continues to terrify and delight museum goers at the Field Museum in Chicago. Since December she resides in the museum’s new Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet and is now positioned in a more crouched and threatening position than before. Because her supporting armature allows temporary removal of any of her bones individually for intense study, a generation of paleontologists has learned much about T rex’s posture and movement and has even estimated her body weight.

Opening with much anticipation and fanfare on June 8, the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, displays “The Nation’s T Rex“, which is posed to devour a hapless Triceratops. The T rex is on 50-year lease from the Army Corps of Engineers, which owns it since it was discovered on federal land in Montana.

A few months earlier came a full scientific description of Scotty, a T rex originally discovered in 1991, the year after Sue surfaced. Full-scale excavation of Scotty began in 1994 and proceeded slowly because of the dense stone encasing the specimen. This and other difficulties delayed the publication of a complete analysis until now. Investigators estimate that Scotty lived into his early 30’s (extremely long for a dinosaur) and, based on the length and girth of his bones, stretched 40 feet from snout to tail tip. They estimate that he weighted about 10 tons, slightly more than Sue. A full-scale replica of Scotty recently went on display at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, near his discovery site.

In addition to nicknames such as Sue and Scotty, other T rex specimens sport monikers such as Stan, Bucky, Tristan, and Trix, although the sex of any dinosaur has yet to be determined. Supposing Sue was actually male, I wonder if his name predisposed him to bar fights? If so, what do you think his assailants had been drinking? Who do you think would win?

After World War II, Takagi’s student, Masaki Watanabe, took up the banner and continued to make design improvements. In 1957, Watanabe presented a color movie describing his work, first to an international orthopedic meeting in Spain and then to major European and North American orthopedic groups on his way home to Japan. The response was tepid at best.

Undaunted, Watanabe pressed on. The twenty-first version finally provided an adequate view and good focus even though it necessitated grinding each lens by hand. By 1958 this version became the world’s first production arthroscope, but breakage of the incandescent bulb on the end of the tube continued to be problematic. Watanabe began to receive international visitors interested in learning his technique, but when they returned home, began using it, and reported their results, collegial criticism, even ridicule, prevailed.

In 1967 the twenty-second version, for the first time, incorporated a novel fiber optic cable. Now the hot, fragile light bulb could be 6 – 10 feet away from the operative field and transmit “cold light” into the knee joint via thousands of bundled glass threads.

Watanabe developed at least three more versions to further address the conflicting goals of better illumination and visualization vs. smaller diameter scopes that could probe the deepest recesses of small joints. His final version was less than 1/12^th of an inch in diameter—about the diameter of a coat hanger wire.  Later came miniaturized television cameras that could be attached to the arthroscope. A video monitor in the operating room displayed the images. Now residents, nurses, and students no longer had to stare at the back of the surgeon’s head as he squinted into an eyepiece attached to a narrow tube. Patients, when awake, could watch too, and a video recording of the event later allowed their families untold hours of viewing pleasure. Well, maybe minutes.

Along with further advances in arthroscopic instrument and in scope design, international interest began to grow. At first, every procedure was merely diagnostic and was followed immediately by a large incision and exploration of the joint under direct vision to treat whatever pathology the arthroscope had revealed.

Tiny nippers and shavers, first manual and then also powered, began to allow for arthroscopic treatment as well as diagnosis. Current techniques and instruments even allow the surgeon to place and tie sutures inside a joint. Such minimally invasive surgery allows for faster and more complete rehabilitation. Because the knee joint is large, the innovations started there, but now orthopedists also routinely apply these techniques to the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, and ankle joints. Undoubtedly our caveman ancestors, torches and clubs in hand, would be pleased to know where their curiosity for peering into holes has led.

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In my never-ending search for objects made of bone in museums and on the web, I have found some finely crafted items with similar decorations. These are small circles that surround central dots. The objects come from far-flung regions of the world and span thousands of years. Is there an overarching meaning? Was the motif designed anew in various cultures or did it originate in one place and then go viral? Why this motif and not stars or hearts?

To find an answer, I queried several art historians, decorative art historians, as well as curators and collection managers at the museums where I found these objects. I received a number of thoughtful replies. These included leads to several books and journal articles on primitive art. Here is a synopsis of what I have learned.

RL Anderson writes in his book, Art in Primitive Societies: Are there universal symbols? Freudian iconography? [Carl] Yung felt that all human beings, no matter what their cultural background, held in their minds a share of the “collective unconsciousness”. … Circle: a symbol of Self. It expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the relationship between man and the whole of nature.

Another reference noted that the circle is a universal symbol with extensive meanings. These include the concepts of totality, wholeness, original perfection, self, infinity, eternity, timelessness, all cyclic movement, God.

Those explanations are rather encompassing, but neither says anything about the dot. Other sources have addressed both:

Shamans have the ability to see into other worlds. Thus the circle and dot, both an eye and a hole, equate physical and spiritual movement between worlds.

Images and hunting fetishes marked with the circle and dot were supposed to watch for game, and by clairvoyant powers, sight it at a great distance.

For succinctness and mastery of English, I particularly like the British Museum’s Marcel Marée’s observation: The circle and dot motif is so common because it is so easy to create, to great ornamental effect, simply by applying a drill.

How was the circle and dot motif inscribed? Anthropologists think that a thin strip of flint, filed to a V shape at its tip with one point slightly longer than the other, would suffice when spun by rubbing it between the artisan’s palms. Metal drills would be more efficient, and the Shuswap tribe in British Columbia made such drills from handles of kettles procured from the Hudson Bay Company. (The author does not explain what they did with the handleless containers.)

So the conclusions run the gamut from mystical “collective unconsciousness” to simple aesthetic practicality. Maybe there is a middle ground, at least for the Inuit, where the motif appears on many hunting charms and everyday objects. In one Inuit language the circle-dot motif is designated as “the eye of awareness” and marks joints on the skeleton. William Thalbitzer in 1908 wrote, “According to Eskimo notions, in every part of the human body (particularly every joint, as for instance in every finger joint) there resides a little soul. How nice. Certainly, across time and space, the soul of each person crafting the circle and dot motif reaches out to us.