[CHAPTER VI]
CLAY WORKING
Have you ever noticed how, when it rains, one road will dry at once, and on another your footprints will hold the water like a cup for hours? Do you know the reason for it? The first road is sandy, and so the water filters through the coarse particles and soon disappears. The other is mostly of clay, which is close and fine, and after your foot made that little hollow it was doubtless half baked by the sun so that it became like natural pottery. You probably know all this, and have felt with your own fingers the difference between the sand, in which you have built forts and dug with your shovel in the summer and played with on the kindergarten sand table in winter, and the soft, smooth clay that you have formed into bird's nests, eggs and other things in kindergarten.
Years and years ago, before our great-great-great-grandfathers were even thought of, some man noticed the same thing that you do—that one part of the earth held water for hours, while it disappeared so quickly from other parts—and it set him thinking. Why not make a bowl in which he could carry water when he was travelling or hunting in dry places? This is the way, some wise men think, the making of pottery began. Cups and small vessels could easily be moulded from small lumps of clay, but large pieces—great bowls and jars—it was soon found would have to be formed in a mould. Shallow baskets, pieces of gourd or fruit rind, were the moulds in which these large pots were started.
Fig. 57
In beginning the bottom, either a small piece of clay was patted flat into a form like a cookie and fitted into the bottom of the mould, or else a strip of clay was coiled round and round into a mat shape, working the coils together with the fingers. The sides were almost always built up with coils of clay, then, with the fingers and some rude tools—smooth stones, bits of shell or pieces of gourd—they were smoothed and polished. Soon the potters began to decorate their vessels with patterns cut or pressed into the damp clay and even painted them with coloured clay, ground fine and mixed with a liquid. The clay objects you enjoyed making in kindergarten were not very strong. A bowl or cup that is moulded from such clay will not hold water for very long either. It will soon soften and fall to pieces. That is what happened to the first clay bowls and cups.
If clay is baked in the sun it becomes a little harder and more useful—but not much—so the first clay workers found that they must bake their clay pots more thoroughly if they were to be really strong. Some of the old potters—like the Catawba Indians—baked their vessels before the fire, and as the clay they used was very good they found it made them hard enough. In other tribes the potters made a bed of bark, set fire to it and baked the pot until when it came out it was red hot. At first the clay workers used the clay just as they found it, but when they began to make large pots and cauldrons to cook in they found that powdered shell or sand mixed with the clay made them stronger and less liable to crack in baking.
The cooking vessels had almost always rounded bottoms, because in those days the floors of houses were of sand or soft earth into which the rounded bottoms would set and hold the pots upright. These pots were set directly over the fire and kept in position by stones or sticks of wood. Some that had handles or flaring rims could be hung over the fire by cords or vines.
