Page:The American Indian.djvu/105

Rh at Cape Parry also show this crude firing. We thus have two regions of similar pottery traits, which as previously stated, may, after all, be connected west of Hudson Bay.

In Mexico, Central America, and the Andean region the coil method seems to have been in use, but as to its relative position we cannot be sure. Traces of molding are seen in prehistoric pottery from Central America and Peru, where the potter's art ceased to be mere woman's work and rose to the level of a profession. On a priori grounds the coil method

seems ill adapted to the fine modeling found here, yet it is clear that it is the fundamental method throughout the greater part of the pottery area. That it is the most primitive way may be doubted, since we find the crude pottery of the upper Mississippi and the trans-Bering region simply worked out from a mass. Such questions, however, must await chronological studies of the ceramic art.

The methods of tempering clay with sand, gravel, pulverized stone, or shell, used in the New World, are not essentially different from those employed in the Old. The use of "slips," or thin washes of such clays as will give pleasing color tones was understood in most places, the exceptions being the southern coast of Brazil and Patagonia, the greater part of eastern United States, the upper Mississippi, and Alaska. In short, the use of "slips" is found wherever pottery rises above the mere utilitarian level.

The principle of glaze, highly characteristic of later Old World pottery, was not understood in the New. Yet, in the Pueblo area, a true glaze was used for decoration, giving us