04 BULLETIN 134, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



as crude as any pottery from tropical America, its makers knew that 

 a pure clay paste on drying or firing would crack from unequal 

 stress. The micaceous sand in the paste no doubt was added uninten- 

 tionally just as it was found with the clay. One may speak of it as a 

 natural temper. 



Technique of pottery making. — The next step to consider is the 

 actual construction of the vessel. The clay, already broken out of 

 the ground in or near the river by the women with a thick, heavy, 

 pointed stick, is cleaned of all dirt and foreign particles, and during 

 this cleaning process is mashed with the hands. In this condition 

 it may be left for a time before being worked up, but it becomes grad- 

 ually harder. As the women are the potters, they not only select the 

 proper kind of clay at certain places along the river that they know 

 will yield a good muddy clay, " navsa," (Tule), but later when 

 it has thoroughly dried take it up with the lump after lump, mixing 

 it with water and rolling it with the outstretched palm of the hand 

 into the shape desired. 



A lump of clay that is to become the foot of the pottery vessel is 

 taken and pressed between the hands into the form of an annular slab 

 with flattened base and convex, tapered upper surface. About one- 

 half the distance from the outer rim to the center of this disk its upper 

 convex surface becomes everted and the coiling process, whereb}^ the 

 body of the vessel is shaped, is begun. By simple manipulation 

 with the hands small vessels can be formed from lumps of clay, 

 but larger vessels can not be modeled, but must be laid up with ropes 

 of clay by the process of coiling. This process is the greatest aid 

 to the securing of form in larger vessels, besides giving a fibrous 

 structure to clay by arranging it in the lines of greatest tenactiy. 

 In a manner similar to that described by W. E. Roth, 9 as practiced 

 by the Guiana Caribs of the upper Manawarin River each coil in 

 succession is placed around and inside of the everted edge at the con- 

 stricted upper surface of the annular foot, both coil and edge being 

 squeezed together at close intervals with the left thumb and fore- 

 finger on its passage round. If, as in usually the case, the coil 

 happens to be longer than the circuit, it is pinched and pulled off. 

 The vessel is thus built up, not in one continuous coil, but of several, 

 each succeeding one adding to its lateral expansion and to its height. 

 The adjacent coils become locked inasmuch as the upper level of each 

 coil is lower on the inside than on the outside. As the vessel walls 

 reach their maximum projection laterally, a certain amount of re- 

 touching, thinning, and smoothing occurs; the more or less irregu- 

 larly sloping walls are pressed in here or pressed out there to obtain 

 the necessary form, at the same time that the component coils must 



'•".sth Annual Report Bureau of American Ethnology. 1917, p. 131. 



