Greetings;

I've been following this list for some time now, and have always found it
to be a great resource, and so now, with this first posting to the list,
I'd like to know if anyone out there has any ideas as to a good venue for
a paper of mine.  It's a pretty interesting paper, I think, and deals
with the role played by iron in the social history of the Pacific NW of
North America.

As some of you may know,iron implements  (in particular large dagger-like
knives)
were present in the Pacific Northwest prior to the time of European
contact, and there is good evidence to believe that some iron implements
were part of native material culture perhaps centuries before contact.

In my paper, I focus on iron knives, and I look at the way in which iron and
iron daggers are
described in the historical literature, from the earliest explorers (Juan
de la Bodega and Capt. Cook) to the accounts of anthropologists
collecting for museums (Alfred Kroeber).  I also look at the way in which
iron daggers figure into the social relations between the Euro-Americans
from the time of contact, through the fur trade, and into the beginning
of the present century.  Accounts examined cover a geographical area from
Trinidad Bay in North California to Vancouver Island in Canada.

The subject is interesting and little known, and I would welcome some
feedback, so if anyone has any ideas about publication or some other
forum, I'd be curious to hear.

If there are any questions, drop me a line.

(by the way, Tchalisch is the name for a kind of large (to 60cm) iron
knife in the language of the Yurok, a Californian people who native to
the Humboldt County region)

John Perry