The Potter's Wheel 151 



Our foremost authority on this subject, W. H. Holmes, 1 makes this 

 observation: "It is now well established that the wheel or lathe was 

 unknown in America, and no substitute for it capable of assisting 

 materially in throwing the form or giving symmetry to the outline by 

 purely mechanical means had been devised. The hand is the true 

 prototype of the wheel as well as of other shaping tools, but the earliest 

 artificial revolving device probably consisted of a shallow basket or 

 bit of gourd in which the clay vessel was commenced and by means 

 of which it was turned back and forth with one hand as the building 

 went on with the other." Of course, if further on (p. 69) Holmes 

 styles the basket used as a support in modelling a clay vessel "an in- 

 cipient form of the wheel," this is only a figure of speech, for this device 

 bears no relation whatever to the wheel. This remark holds good 

 also for "that simple approximation to a potter's wheel, consisting of 

 a stick grasped in the hand by the middle and turned round inside a 

 wall of clay formed by the other hand," evolved for North America 

 by Squier and Davis, 2 and the "natural primitive potter's wheel," 

 consisting of a roundish pebble, ascribed to the New-Caledonians by 

 O. T. Mason 3 after J. J. Atkinson. Wherever wheel-turned pottery 

 has been found in America on aboriginal sites, it has conclusively been 

 proved either that it is of European manufacture, or that the wheel 

 was introduced there by the white man. Thus it has been disclosed 

 that the wheel-made jars, showing also traces of a brownish glaze, 

 which were reported from Florida and other Southern States, and 

 occasionally were even recovered from Indian mounds, are of Spanish 

 manufacture, having been used in early Colonial times for the shipping 

 of olives to America. 4 The Quichua employ for the making of pottery 

 a very simple lathe, which is justly traced to European influence by 

 E. Nordenskiold. 8 It is worthy of note also that the distribution 

 of the wheel over the area mentioned has remained almost stationary 

 for millenniums, and that primitive tribes are not susceptible to adopt- 

 ing it, even if surrounded by civilized peoples who make use of it. 

 The Vedda of Ceylon, for instance, fashion pots by hand, 8 while the 

 surrounding Singalese avail themselves of the wheel. Nothing of the 



1 Aboriginal Pottery of the Eastern United States, p. 50 (Twentieth Ann. Rep. 

 Bureau Am. Ethnology, Washington, 1903). 



2 See J. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times (5th ed.), p. 260. 



• Origins of Invention, p. 161. 



• Holmes, /. c, pp. 129-130. 



• Einige Beitrage zur Kenntnis der sudamerikanischen Tongefasse und ihrer 

 Herstellung (Stockholm, 1906). 



• C. G. Seligmann, The Veddas, p. 324. 



