FIG. 39.—Making of pottery without wheel by
the Zuñi Indians (coiling method).
(After Cushing.)
In regard to pottery it must be noted that its manufacture is left almost exclusively to women among most of the tribes of America, while it is entrusted without distinction to men and women in Africa.
FIG. 40.—Primitive harvest, the women (Shoshones) gathering wild grain.
(After Powell.)
Grinding of Corn.—We need not dwell on the means of preparing food independently of the action of fire (milk and its products, pemmican, etc.); they vary infinitely. Let us deal briefly, however, with the method of preparing grain. Many peoples are unacquainted with flour: they eat the grain either roasted or cooked, as we do still the most anciently known perhaps of the graminaceæ, rice and millet. In the primitive state of agriculture certain tribes of North America combined in one single operation the threshing, winnowing, and roasting of grain. After being triturated between the hands, the grain is thrown into a basket-dish (Fig. [40]) in which are red-hot stones; the straw burns, the husk comes off and partly burns too, whilst the grain is being roasted.
From the time when some intelligent man perceived when crushing a grain of corn, perhaps by chance, between two stones, that flour might supply a more delicate food than roasted grain, the art of the miller was discovered. There are three ways of preparing flour: pounding in a mortar, trituration on a flat surface, and true grinding by means of a mill turned by the hand or other motor power—animals, water, wind, steam.
The mortar, used by a great number of savage or half-civilised tribes to crush not only grain but also the roots of starchy plants, cassava, yam, etc., must have been known for a very long time. Its most primitive form is met with among the Indians of North America—a block of granite or sandstone in which a cavity has been made, with a piece of porous rock, almost cylindrical, for the pestle. In Africa and Oceania the mortar and pestle are of wood. Almost everywhere the pounding is done by women. The rudest hand-mills, such as are met with among the Arabs, the Kabyles, the Bushmen, are made of a round stone pierced in the centre, turned on another stone by means of a handle passing through the hole. Incisions on the triturating surface of the millstone is not found as yet in these primitive machines.
The preservation of food is known to a great number of savage and half-civilised tribes. The Eskimo preserve their meat by means of cold, many fisher peoples resort to salting, the art of preparing true pemmican by enclosing the food in a mass of grease or honey is known to the Veddahs of Ceylon, to Negroes, etc.