Fig. 649. (S. 1–2.) Perfect pottery found with a skeleton, Gartner Mound, Ohio. W. C. Mills’s collection, Columbus, Ohio.
The uses of pottery are primarily domestic. Whether bowls, jars, and other forms were used as receptacles in which to boil or stew or bake matters not. Man invented pottery because it was more convenient for him to make a receptacle out of clay and bake the clay than to hollow a bowl out of stone. He moved in the line of least resistance, and it was easier to make a bowl or a dish from clay than to carve such a utensil from stone. While Indians roasted much of their meat on the end of sticks, or baked the food in the ashes, yet they preferred to boil and stew their foods. This is especially true of the established villages where a profusion of pottery fragments abounds. It is natural to suppose that as the ceramic art developed, to the variety of forms in clay, man added the dish, the waterbottle, the effigy, and more or less complicated forms of the jar or the bowl. And because nothing but true cooking-pots are found in the Lake Superior region, New England, the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys, I claim that the pottery art was not developed in those regions beyond the manufacture of rough utensils to be used about the fire. And although there is some mound pottery in Ohio of such finish and character as to designate it as above, and pottery was made use of in the culinary arts, yet these examples are rare and denote rather a high culture in a certain locality than proficiency in ceramic art. It is only in the central and southern portions of the Mississippi Valley and in the Cliff-Dweller country that pottery-making became an art.
Fig. 650. (S. about 1–10.)
Various jars, bottles, and bowls, from graves and mounds in southeastern Missouri. Collection of F. P. Graves, Doe Run, Missouri.
Fig. 651. (S. about 1–5.) The small vessel is just the size of a teacup. The restored vessel has a diameter of eleven inches at the top. Found at Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Collection of H. P. Hamilton, Two Rivers, Wisconsin.
Fig. 652. (S. about 1–5.) This pottery has been carefully restored. It was found in Warehouse Point, Connecticut, and is thirty-eight and one half inches in circumference and fifteen inches high. Collection of A. E. Kilbourne, East Hartford, Connecticut.
Indeed in the Tennessee stone graves, and at the village at the mouth of the Wabash River in Indiana, there have been found numerous clay rattles and clay toys. The latter take the form of small bowls and dishes. With them are frequently small clay pebbles. These little clay toys are buried with skeletons of children ranging from two to six years of age. It is remarkable that these people, whom we have considered as in the middle stage of barbarism, should have invented the toy. It is quite probable that the women who made these clay dishes were not influenced by knowledge of similar things in use among Europeans, for the Tennessee graves and the Wabash cemetery appear to be prehistoric. Such discoveries as the presence of these dishes alongside of little children suggest that we should go slowly in our statements that most of the time of the aborigines was given up to warfare and barbaric ceremonies. We know not the whole story of their daily life, but every year there are additions to the sum of human knowledge, and such finds as I have enumerated emphasize the human side of these people.