The piece illustrated in Fig. 461 is from Mississippi, and in most respects is identical with the ware of the Gulf Province. The paste is silicious, fine-grained, and quite hard. The color is slightly ferruginous and clouded with fire stains from the baking. The body is ornamented with the engraved figure of a bird apparently intended for an eagle. The head, with its notched and strongly curved beak and conventionalized crest, occupies one side. The wings may be seen at the right and left, while the tail appears on the side opposite the head. The flattened base of the vessel occupies the place of the body. The lines have been scratched with a sharp point in the hardened clay. Certain spaces in the plumes, wings, and tail are filled in with reticulated lines.
Fig. 462.—Bottle: Alabama.—⅓.
The bottle presented in Fig. 462 is embellished with a rather remarkable design in color. The material is fine grained and without admixture of shell. The color of the paste is a pale, salmon gray. The surface is coated with a thick slip or enamel of whitish clay, very fine grained and smooth; upon this the design was painted, not in the thick earthy color employed farther north, but in what appears to be a dark purplish-gray stain. The design upon the body is wholly unlike anything yet described. It is developed in the light ground tint by filling in the interstices with the dark color. The peculiar character of this design inclines me to the view that it probably had an ideographic origin, although possibly treated here as pure decoration. The open hand is sometimes seen, in both the decorative and the symbolic work of the Gulf coast tribes, and is not unknown elsewhere. The figures alternating with the hands are suggestive of a highly conventionalized face, the eyes being indicated by the volutes and the mouth and teeth by the lower part of the figure, as will be seen in the fully projected design, Fig. 463. The neck has two indistinct bands of triangular dentate figures apparently painted in the dark color. The bottom is flattish and without the coating of light clay. Both paste and slip can be readily scratched with the finger nail. This vase was found in Franklin County, Alabama, near the Mississippi line.
Fig. 462.—Painted design.
RÉSUMÉ.
Attention has been called to the great numbers of pieces of earthenware recovered from the mounds and graves of the middle province of the Mississippi Valley. In certain districts—as remarked by one of our collectors—we have but to dig to fill museums. Such districts must have been occupied for a long period by a numerous people who recognized the claims of the dead upon their worldly treasures. The burial grounds of many other sections of the American continent are correspondingly rich in ceramic remains.
The vessels were not to any extent cinerary, and probably not even mortuary in the sense of having been constructed especially for inhumation with the dead. They were receptacles for food, drink, paint, and the like, placed in the grave along with other possessions of the departed in obedience to the demands of an almost universal custom.
The material employed in manufacture embraced clay in all grades of refinement, from coarse loamy earths to the refined slips used in surface finish. The tempering materials—used in greater or lesser quantity according to the character of the vessel to be made—consisted of shell, sand, and potsherds reduced to various degrees of pulverulence.