Decoratively, Pueblo pottery is characterized by two marked features: angular designs predominate and ornamental effect depends as much on the open or undecorated space as on the painted lines and areas in the devices. (See Fig. [542].) While this is true of recent and modern wares, it is more and more notably the case with other specimens in a ratio increasing in proportion to their antiquity.
Fig. 543.
Fig. 544.
Amazonian basket decorations.
We cannot explain these characteristics, and the conventional aspect of the higher and symbolic Pueblo ceramic decorations which grew out of them, in a better way than to suppose them, like the forms of this pottery, to be the survivals of the influence of basketry. (See, for comparison, Figs. [543], [544].) I shall be pardoned, therefore, for elaborating suggestions already made in this direction, in the paragraphs which treated of the ornamentation of spiral ware, and of the derivation of basket decorations from stitch- and splint-suggested figures. All students of early man understand his tendency to reproduce habitual forms in accustomed association. This feeling, exaggerated with savages by a belief in the actual relationship of resemblance, is shown in the reproduction of the decorations of basket vessels on the clay vessels made from them or in imitation of them.