462 



FEWKES: A PREHISTORIC STONE MORTAR 



also in the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. 

 Similar paint palettes with modifications in decorations are 

 widely distributed; those from the mound-builders sometimes 

 bear incised figures of serpents in their surfaces. As a paint 

 palette admits of few variations in form it is not strange that 

 similar shapes occur likewise among Pueblos and mound-build- 

 ers, 6 and, especially in predynastic times, in Egypt 7 (fig. 3). 



Fig. 2. Paint palette. Size 2\ by 4£ inches. 



Everything used by a primitive people in their ceremonies has, 

 from that fact, a magic power and the stones upon which pig- 

 ments are ground by the Pueblos partake in a measure of this 

 power. The symbolic figures that decorate paint palettes no 

 doubt increase, in their opinion, the efficacy of the pigment. A 

 similarity in the way these palettes are regarded in the Old and 

 the New World is a good instance of thought convergence. 



A few objects of stone supposed to be pestles or paint grinders, 

 possibly used with these pigment palettes, are known from the 

 Gila. One of these from Casa Grande has the form of a " coiled 

 serpent," 8 a highly suggestive fact taken in connection with a 

 snake-decorated mortar. 



6 Holmes, W. H., Certain notched or scalloped stone tablets of the mound builders. 

 Amer. Anthropol., 8, No. 1, fig. 9. Jan.-March, 1906. 



7 Bates, Oric. Ancient Egyptian fishing. Harvard African Studies, No. 1. 



8 Twenty-eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pi. 

 48, fig. 1. 



