Of next greatest abundance after basketry, among the Indians of the present day, are articles of stone, especially the metate and the mortar, and the corresponding mano or muller and pestle. These are still in frequent use. The metate is nothing but a flat stone, oval or somewhat rectangular in shape. It is made of granitic or metamorphic rock, not of a sandstone slab. It is very slightly hollowed. Some pieces show hollowing only in that part of their area which is actually rubbed in use. Occasionally a large lava metate on three legs, of the familiar Mexican type, is seen. These are always declared to have been obtained from Mexicans. A considerable number of such pieces must have been brought into California from Mexico. One has been obtained among the Yokuts north of Fresno river, and a fragment from the Emeryville Shellmound near Berkeley is in the University collections. It is curious that these heavy implements of the stone age should have been brought over a thousand miles by a civilized people in colonizing a new territory.
The rubber or mull stone is of much more varied shape than the metate. Sometimes it is oval in outline, thin and flat. Other pieces of the same length are narrower and twice as thick. Still others are much longer, of equal breadth and thickness, and well squared, so that they present the shape of a short length of dressed timber. Still others are natural shaped stones or boulders, the bottom of which has been rubbed flat.
Pl. 15) is used in the region where mesquite is unimportant or wanting. The block or boulder of stone is large compared with the size of the rather shallow cavity. The pestle used with this mortar (Pl. 8, left) is naturally much shorter than the pestle accompanying the deep mortar of the desert (Pl. 8, right) . It is also much more rudely shaped. In most cases it appears to be only a convenient cobble or boulder, one end of which has been dressed to fit the surface of the mortar cavity.
This rude type of pestle, practically unshaped except at the pounding end, or sometimes flattened on one side, is found also in the Sierra Nevada and perhaps in other parts of the state. Among the Yokuts and Miwok this is the only form of pestle for ordinary purposes. Cylindrically shaped pestles occur only in small sizes, for use with small portable stone mortars for crushing tobacco, medicine, or meat. Associated with the rough pestle among the Yokuts and Miwok, is the bedrock mortar, consisting of a hole in an exposed surface of granite. Most frequently a number of these holes, varying in depth, are found close together. Such assemblages, which have been a number of times described and illustrated, 17 are a conspicuous feature of past and present native life in the Sierra region. The basket mortar is unknown among these tribes, but is used by all the
52:17 Holmes, Anthropological Studies in California, Rep. U. S. Nat. Mus. for 1900, 178, pl. 29, and Handbook of American Indians, Bull. 30 Bur. Am. Ethn., I, 944.