Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/696

676 no anxiety about the outside surface. Indeed, he had but one surface to watch till he came to the incurve, if his vessel was to have a narrow mouth. Then, I surmise, he built up roughly a clay mold, well sanded, pressing what was left of his fabric into the inside of this mold as he built his vessel upward. Frequently, doubtless, the fabric was not sufficient to go to the top, which explains why sometimes only a part of a jar shows the cord markings. The jar completed, it was easy to pull away the upper mold shell of clay and by means of the fabric lift the vessel out of the mold hole and remove it to the drying spot, where the fabric was peeled off and handles or other projecting parts added. The cord-markings are plainly shown in Plate XXXIX, from Mr. Holmes's casts.

The distorting and overlapping of the meshes observed by Mr. Holmes were probably due to the gathering in to fit the interior of the mold, for it must be borne in mind that the fabric was not shaped in any way to fit the mold, but was doubtless a fragment of some squarely woven article. Thus gathering and overlapping were necessary to make it conform to the inside surface of the mold.

When coarse basketry was used for a mold that was intended to be removed before firing, the interstices of the basket work were probably rubbed full of a mixture of sand and clay to prevent the finished vessel from sticking or catching, which explains, I think, the peculiarity of design in some cases, for only the more prominent features of the basket work would impress the vessel. In Mr. Holmes's fine paper on this subject in the Third Annual Report of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, the illustrations—Figs. 1.07, 108, 109, 111, and 112—present this peculiarity of design, due to the fact that the chief members of the basketry were covered by the sand-clay mixture. It seems quite probable that to gain stiffness these baskets may also have been put into a ground mold. I have not been able to examine the interstices in the casts Mr. Holmes so cleverly made, but a careful examination would probably show evidences in favor of the mold-hole idea. The fabrics used,