s birth. Until that time
the mother was not permitted to eat meat or to leave her bed of ashes.
However, one of my informants who had borne eight children claimed never
to have spent more than two weeks in her lying-in bed. She did insist that
"in the old days" women adhered to the traditional thirty-day period.

A pregnant woman was not permitted to eat eggs with double yolks, or
double fruit, lest she have twins. No special action was taken if twins
were born, however.

During her confinement a woman was not supposed to rub the sweat from her
face. She might dab the sweat off, but to rub it would cause her to be
wrinkled in her old age. One informant assured me that this was the truth
and pointed to her own relatively unwrinkled face as proof.

When a child loses a milk tooth, it is taken up and thrown into the brush.
At that time an admonition is shouted to "some little animal with sharp
teeth," that it should exchange the milk tooth for a good permanent one
(2295a-2301)

Puberty: Girls (2305-2352)

Aside from the "big times" which will be described later, the girls'
puberty dance was the most important ceremonial gathering among the Washo.
This custom has survived with tenacity and it is still considered a matter
of real concern if for some reason a girl does not have "her dance."

Although much of the activity at a girls' dance is clearly social
throughout the occasion, there is a series of ritual actions which must be
carried out. The following account is an idealized version of the "old
way." Other accounts will describe variations which have developed in the
past years.

Certain statements which I make will appear to be at variance with
Stewart's Culture Element Distribution Lists. However, I am inclined to
think that the absence of traits in the memory of my own informants
represents a pattern of change rather than inaccuracies on the part of
earlier investigators. With minor exceptions, differences between
statements made today and Stewart's lists take the form of traits marked
present in the lists which are unknown to my own informants. Moreover,
most of these differences are to be found in the hair-combing and
scratching complex and suggest that the taboos on hair combing were
abandoned some time between the childhood of his informants, who were in
their seventies in 1936, and that of my own informants, who are in their
seventies today (1959).

The parents of my informants must not have know