Bentwood Bowl

Bentwood dishes were usually used for serving food, including fish oil, at feasts. They were also used as trade goods or gifts, and were symbols of wealth and prestige. This box appears to have been used for serving oil.

oil serving; status; ceremony

Designs on bentwood boxes are often ambiguous, so that various meanings could be assigned by the owner, or the imagery may be more complex than just crest representations.

Bentwood, or kerfed-corner, containers are constructed by a process unique to the Northwest Coast Aboriginal peoples. The carver begins with a single straight-grained plank of red cedar, or sometimes yellow cedar, spruce, or yew. The surface of the plank is finished with chisels, adzes, and knives; in earlier times, it was smoothed further with sandstone or dried sharkskin. Then three parallel kerfs, or grooves, are carved out at measured points across the width of the board, at right angles to the long edge. The kerfs, which will become three corners of the box, allow the board to be steamed until the wood fibres are softened, and then carefully bent to form a box with symmetrical sides. The final corner, as well as a fitted base, are joined and fastened with pegs (through drilled holes) or laced with spruce root or twisted cedar withes (branches). Storage boxes also have fitted lids of cedar, hollowed from the inside. Finally, painted compositions may be applied to the completed box and shallow carving added to bring the forms into relief. A well-made bentwood box is watertight. Historically, most boxes were used to store preserved foods and material goods; plain cooking boxes could be used to steam or boil food by adding water and heated stones.

Relatively square bentwood dish with bulging convex sides. Flat lip around top edge overhangs the concave interior sides. The lip curves upward on two sides and downward on the other two. Opposite sides have similar bilaterally symmetrical motifs. The carving is deep in some design elements. One corner is lashed with five sets of hide strips. The thick bottom is lashed with hide, now mainly worn off. Sticky oil covers most of box except lighter inside bottom, which also clearly shows parallel adze marks. Two sides have large vertically aligned ovoids in an ovoid at the bottom; the outside corners with a smaller ovoids in ovoid toward the centre, while above is a wide crosshatched split U. At the top corners, there are circles with a series of U forms above an inverted U form. The other sides have large eye-shapes at the bottom corners with a split crosshatched U within a split U at the top, and S shapes at the top corners, ovoid in ovoids next and a crosshatched U form within a U form that has a circle within it.