deer skin, lightly smoked; porcupine quills, natural and dyed red, black, yellow, and blue (faded); metal cones; moose-hair, dyed red; linen thread; sinew

The sheath's body and small thong loop are made of lightly smoked deer skin. The sheath is decorated with porcupine quills and a single line of metal cones containing tufts of red dyed moose-hair. The porcupine quills have been applied to the sheath in various ways, including wrapped quillwork and the saw-tooth technique, an unusual stitch. Linen thread and sinew were used to sew the sheath together.

Geometric shapes and wavy lines are found on the sheath. The quillwork found on the sheath's outer edge is done in an alternating black and white/red and white pattern.

CW wondered if there may be numerically significant parts to this piece.

The GRASAC research team noted the prominence of the saw tooth quillwork technique.

A similar double knife sheath, held at the Milwaukee Public Museum (cat. no. 59147/19851) is attributed to the Menominee.

The sheath was made between 1700-1810.

Donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1954 by Irene Marguerite Beasley. The wife of British brewer and avid collector Harry Geoffrey Beasley, Mrs. Beasley oversaw the transfer of several items in her husband's collection to various museums upon his death. In 1931 this sheath entered Harry Beasley's own collection, held at his Cranmore Musuem in Kent. It was one of several items subsequently transferred to the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury, before reaching the Pitt Rivers Museum. The original catalogue entry labelled this item as Plains Cree. It was subsequently identified as problaly Great Lakes by Dr. Norman Feder of the Denver Art Museum (May 7, 1970).

Illustrated and discussed in Christian F. Feest, and Sylvia S. Kasprycki, "Comparative Evidence, Critical Reasoning, and the Identification of Styles: A (Knife)Case in Point," Studies in American Indian Art: A Memorial Tribute to Norman Feder, ed. Christian Feest (Altenstadt, Germany: European Review of Native American Studies, 2001): 120, 199-200.

This record was created as part of a Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) research trip to the Pitt Rivers Museum and British Museum, December 8-22 2007, funded by a grant from the International Opportunities fund of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

researchers present: Heidi Bohaker (HB), Al Corbiere (AC), Stacey Loyer (SL), Janis Monture (JM), Laura Peers (LP), Ruth Phillips (RP), Anne De Stecher (AS), Cory Willmott (CW).