Fig. 646. (S. 1–4.) Wisconsin bowls. S. D. Mitchell’s collection, Ripon, Wisconsin.
Fig. 647. (S. 1–4.) Urn of pottery. From mound in western Ontario. Collection of Henry Montgomery.
At the great cemetery at Madisonville, Ohio, the pottery does not exhibit skill in modeling or high finish. All the pottery of this great region appears to be crudely made, of inferior materials, tempered with pulverized unio shells or sand. In Indiana and Illinois there are occasional effigies found in the mounds, but one must pass to the Cumberland and Tennessee valleys, and to the St. Francis basin of Arkansas, to southeastern Missouri, and to the region about Memphis and Nashville for the highest ceramic art of the Southern Mound-Builders. These people were peculiarly skilled in the potter’s art, and all the museums of the country are filled with their handiwork. Professor Holmes has commented on it at great length in the publication cited. The potters’ art was highly developed in regions explored by Mr. Moore, as is attested by the specimens presented in Figs. 678, 670–673. But effigy pottery in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama is rarer than in Arkansas and Missouri. On the contrary, there is more decorative pottery (with incised lines, tracings of snakes and birds) in the region explored by Mr. Moore than in the middle Mississippi Valley.
Fig. 648. (S. about 1–6.) The two central ones in the upper row and the left-hand specimen in the lower row are corrugated; from northeastern Kentucky. The others are from southern Kentucky. Collection of Bennett H. Young, Louisville, Kentucky.
Through the Great Plains there is a dearth of pottery. The buffalo hunters had little need of it. The cemeteries and mounds of the Indian Territory and Oklahoma, and of that long stretch of country flanking the Arkansas River, produce good pottery, but not comparable with that of the stone graves and mounds of the central South.
Northwestern California, the entire Rocky Mountains present an anomaly in archæology in that no pottery—save here and there a stray—is found. The Cliff-Dweller country, by which I mean the Colorado River Valley, including its tributaries, abounds in pottery of the highest type found on the American continent.
But while admitting that the Cliff-Dweller pottery was superior in finish, material, and form of bowls, bottles, and dishes, yet the effigies of the South and the middle Mississippi Valley are superior to effigies found in the Cliff-Dweller country.