For this week’s ‪Artifact of the Week we bring you CHM-786, a large Wintu cooking bowl called “Tel’-lek”. The striking design on this basket is referred to as “luk-um-lil-ly”, meaning flying geese and is woven using a double-sided overlay technique of beargrass and red-dyed woodwardia over the primary split pine root wefts. This basket was sold to C. Hart Merriam by a Wintu woman on the McCloud River near Baird, Shasta County, California, July 22, 1903.

This basket is also featured on the cover of the newly released Indian Baskets of Northern California and Oregon by Ralph Shanks, the third volume in the Indian Baskets of California and Oregon series.

Shanks, Ralph and Lisa Woo Shanks, editor
2015 Indian Baskets of Northern California and Oregon. Published by Costano Books in association with Miwok Archeological Preserve of Marin (MAPOM). MAPOM Publication Number 10, Distributed by the University of Washington Press.

For more information on C. Hart Merriam, visit his biography on our site or read some of his original journal entries.