Haida carved cockle. Source: Peabody.
The Peabody Museum at Harvard has a predictably great collection from the Northwest Coast. I’m more drawn to the archaeological-type artifacts vs. the masks and baskets and argillite, but fill your eyes with the charming Haida carving of a cockle, above, collected in “Massett Bay”.
One nice thing about this collection is the accession ledger is also scanned in and made available. For example, if you go the the page for the cockle above here, you can click on the cockle picture for a higher resolution, on the first ledger page for the left hand side of the ledger book, and on the second for the right hand side. It is possible in this way to do some ad hoc fact checking of their descriptions to finding additional information. For example, the cockle’s second page contains the notation “taken from the interior of R/200”. Accession number R/200 turns out to be this unusual ?argillite carved box with inlaid shell.
Some of the other objects are equally unusual – I’d say there are more “wow – never seen one of those before” moments in this collection than any other I have seen.
Northwest Coast Archaeology 