Page:Indian Basketry.djvu/23

Rh facture bore to a sister art, and then, slowly but surely, to decipher every method followed by primitive artist; to tell how spinner, weaver, net maker worked, and with what materials, and then to discover that every stitch of plain weaving, diaper weaving, twined weaving and coiled weaving known to modern art was used by these ignorant and savage people of the dark ages.

Mr. Gushing thus describes the process of manufacture as he saw it carried on, and as I have seen it again and again, at Zuni, Laguna, Acoma and the Hopi pueblos.

Forming a rope of soft clay, she coiled it upon a center, to form the bottom. Placing it upon an inverted food-basket, bowl-shaped, she pressed the coils of clay closely together, one upon the other (Fig. 10), and as soon as the desired size was attained, loosened the bowl from the basket and thus provided herself with a new utensil. In consequence of the difficulty experienced in removing these bowl-forms from the bottom of the baskets which had to be done while they were still plastic, to keep them from cracking they were very shallow. Hence the specimens found among the older ruins and graves are not only corrugated outside, but are also very wide in proportion to their height.

The other primitive method followed was one that is still practiced by all the pottery makers of the South-west. It is an imitation of basketry methods{{SIC| |;} not a moulding upon baskets, but an application of coiled methods of weaving to the manufacture of pottery. Just as the basket weaver wraps one coil upon another, so does the pottery maker take her rope of clay and coil it up as shown in Fig. 11.

By and by the desire for ornamentation of pottery arose, and from this sprang the discovery of the fact that, while the clay was plastic, the exterior of the vessel could be smoothed with a spatula of bone or gourd, no matter what its size, if supported at the bottom in a basket or other mold so that it could be shifted or turned about without direct handling. See Fig. 7.

To smooth such a vessel inside and out required that it have a wide mouth, but, by and by, the potter determined that the mouth must be contracted as much water was spilled in carrying the full olla from the spring or river to the house. She still used the basket as a base for her pottery as shown in Fig. 12, and to this desire for a small mouthed olla Gushing claims we owe the beautiful shape of Fig. 13.