﻿41 8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [VOL. 4/ 



Ceramics. — Of art in clay we may say much the same as of 

 sculpture. No people known to us has furnished such a vast body 

 of material for the study of this art from its beginnings up to the 

 level of glaze and the wheel as have the pre-Columbian Americans. 

 The clay took on a multitude of forms in which were embodied a 

 wide range of mythologic and esthetic concepts. 



The Graphic Arts. — To the history of writing aboriginal America 

 makes many contributions, and these, as the others referred to, within 

 that part of the history of progress wherein Old World evidence 

 is least satisfactory. In the Old World we trace back the history of 

 writing step by step to a point near the beginning of the glyphic 

 system ; in the New World we pass back from the lower margin of 

 the glyphic to the very beginning of the graphic, thus all but com- 

 pleting the history of the evolution of the recording arts. 



With a knowledge of the present and prehistoric phases of picture 

 writing it is easy to utilize and interpret the vast body of material 

 in this branch furnished by archeology ; but, rich as is this material, 

 insufficient light is thrown upon the transition from picture writing 

 to phonic writing, the particular stage of development in which 

 archeologists find one of the most fascinating fields of research. 

 The great body of evidence brought before the conquering Euro- 

 peans was not appreciated by them, but rudely destroyed, and the 

 remains, graphic and sculptural, are now being gathered together 

 and studied in the most painstaking manner by our scholars, who 

 hope almost against hope to find a key to the problems of transition. 

 Within the cluster of graphic phenomena which gave birth to writing 

 we have evidence bearing upon other important branches. We here 

 get glimpses of the history of the calendar ; we find traces of the 

 pictorial art, which had not yet reached the stage of light and shade, 

 perspective, and portraiture, and discover many germs of embellish- 

 ment, mythologic and esthetic. 



Although many of the obscure problems arising in this American 

 field have been successfully worked out, many others are still await- 

 ing the attention of Americanists and will no doubt yield, little by 

 little, to their persistent efforts. 



The more important unsolved problems of aboriginal America are 

 those of race origins, of culture origins, and of chronology. These 

 problems do not relate so much to particular nations as to the history 

 of the race as a whole ; not so much to peculiar or local cultures as 

 to the origin and evolution of the native activities ; not so much to 

 tribal or national chronology as to correlations of race and culture 

 history with the geological time scale. 



