The long and difficult processes of obtaining fire compel savage tribes to preserve it as one of the most precious things. Almost everywhere it is to women that the care is committed. Among the Australians, women who let the fire go out are punished almost as severely as were the Roman vestals of old. The Papuans of Astrolabe Bay (New Guinea) prefer to go several leagues in search of fire to a neighbouring tribe than to light another (Miklukho-Maclay). The preparation of “new fire” among a great number of tribes, especially in America and Oceania, is celebrated with festivals and religious ceremonies.[184]
Cooking.—Fire, once discovered, heat, light, and at the same time the means of rendering a great variety of foods more digestible, were artificially assured to man. But it is somewhat difficult to roast a piece of meat in the fire, especially when there is not a metal skewer at hand, as was the case with primitive man. So, at an early stage, he tried to find some method of cooking his food, especially fruits. He heated stones in the open fire, and with these stones he cooked his meat and vegetables. The process is still in use to-day among tribes unacquainted with pottery. Thus the Polynesians before their “civilisation” by Europeans proceeded in the following way to cook their food. Stones heated in the fire were put at the bottom of a hole dug in the ground; upon these stones was spread a layer of leaves, on which were placed the fruit of the bread-tree, then a fresh layer of leaves and other heated stones; care being taken to cover the whole with leaves and earth. In half-an-hour a delicious dish was drawn out of the hole.[185]
Among most savage Indonesians food is cooked in bamboo vessels filled with water, in which heated stones have been previously plunged. This method of cooking with stones is also in use at the two extreme points of America, among the Indians of Alaska and the Fuegians. It is even used in Europe among the Serbian and Albanian mountaineers.
Pottery.—But real cooking, even of the simplest sort, is only possible with the existence of pottery, the manufacture of which must have followed closely on the discovery of a method of obtaining fire, for no example is known of unbaked pottery.
There are still peoples unacquainted with this art, such as the Australians and the Fuegians, but the absence of it is not always the sign of an inferior degree of civilisation, as we may see in the Polynesians before the arrival of Europeans, and also the present Mongols, whose cooking utensils consist of iron, wooden, and leather vessels, for pottery which easily breaks would be an encumbrance in nomadic life.
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FIG. 37.—Bark vessel, used by Iroquois Indians. (After Cushing.) |
FIG. 38.—Type of Iroquois earthen vessel, moulded on the bark vase of Fig. [37]. (After Cushing.) |
The most primitive pottery is made without the potter’s wheel. In its manufacture we may admit, with Otis Mason,[186] three special methods of working. Modelling by hand; moulding to an exterior or interior mould, usually a basket or other object of wicker-work, which burns away afterwards in the baking (Figs. [37] and [38]); and lastly, a method of proceeding which may be called coiling in clay. Long strings of clay are taken and rolled so as to form a cone or a cylinder, or any other form of the future pot, then the sides are made even.
The Zuñi Indians of New Mexico begin this work in a little basket-dish (Fig. [39]), which shows the connection of this method with that of moulding, whilst the Wolofs, whom I have seen working in the same way, as well as the Kafirs (Fig. [135], to the left), have only as a base to work upon a clay disc or a wooden porringer, moulding being unknown to them. But in both cases this mode of manufacture is already a step towards pottery formed by the wheel, only instead of the clay it is the hand of the workman which turns, naturally much more slowly. Besides, the primitive wheel, that is to say, a disc or a board set in motion by the hand, sometimes without a pivot, as still seen in China, does not revolve with the dizzy speed of the true wheel, the construction of which is an adaptation of the general processes of the transmission of forces by means of levers and wheels.