Page:The American Indian.djvu/108

74 the whole of the Amazon pottery area we find an extraordinarily large tub-shaped vessel, and in eastern Brazil a local development of effigy jars quite parallel to that of the lower Mississippi.

An interesting theoretical problem lies in these pottery



forms. It appears that almost everywhere the cooking pot tends toward the oval or hemispherical form and that the regional distinctions we have drawn are in vessels for other purposes, often largely ornamental. Thus, when we move northward from the lower Mississippi, pottery becomes strictly a vessel for cooking, or specifically utilitarian. In the North Atlantic area, pottery has a rival in soapstone, but vessels of this material have a form of their own which seems to have



something in common with the cooking kettle of the eastern Eskimo. Some pottery vessels collected by Stefánsson and Anderson between Hudson Bay and the Mackenzie River have corners quite like Eskimo soapstone kettles, but the better type of Alaskan ware has a shape like that common in