Fig. 22—Vessels of Burned Clay.
The Mound-builders and some of the Indians made their pots and pans out of clay, of which there is a great abundance in the river valleys of Ohio. They tempered or hardened the clay by mixing it with ground-up rock or shells, molded it into the desired shape, and baked the vessel in an open fire.
Many of these ancient pots have designs like “B” and “C,” which were made with small sticks, or perhaps with pieces of flint or bone, before burning.
In size, pottery vessels range all the way from that of a thimble to a bushel basket. They were used for the most part for cooking, storing and preserving food, but many of the highly decorated pots found in the mounds were probably made purposely as tributes to the dead.
SPINNING AND WEAVING
Fig. 23—Mound-builder Cloth.
The Mound-builders wove serviceable cloth from the tough fibers of plants and the inner bark of certain trees. The sample shown as “A” resembles the homespun linen of the days of our pioneer grandmothers, and in “B” a piece of the same sample is magnified to show the weave. Cloth, as well as the skins of animals, was used for clothing by the Mound-builders, and they probably knew how to weave thick blankets to protect them from the cold in winter. There are many samples of Mound-builder Cloth, as well as of woven bark matting, in the Ohio State Museum. These show half a dozen or more different weaving patterns, of which the weave shown in the above picture is but one. Copper implements found in the mounds were very often wrapped in Cloth, which was preserved throughout the centuries by the chemical action of the Copper.
Some of the prehistoric Indians also wove cloth, but none of them was as skilled as the Mound-builders.