326 THE FIEST POTTEE 



ing-cups and perforated incense burners accompany the- 

 dead in the round barrows ; but the use of the potter's 

 wheel is still unknown, and all the urns and vases belong- 

 ing to this age are still hand-moulded. 



It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all 

 the later improvements in the fictile art in spite of wheels 

 and moulds, pastes and glazes, stamps and pigments, and 

 all the rest of it the most primitive methods of the first 

 potter are still in use in many countries, side by side with 

 the most finished products of modern European skill and 

 industry. I have in my own possession some West Indian 

 calabashes, cut and decorated under my own eye by a 

 Jamaican negro for his personal use, and bought from him 

 by me for the smallest coin there current calabashes 

 carved round the edge through the rind with a rude 

 string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of 

 prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican 

 negroes kneading their hand-made porous earthenware 

 beside a tropical stream, moulding it on fruits or shaping 

 it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and drying 

 it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily- formed 

 kiln of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric 

 types, locally known by the quaint West African name of 

 ' yabbas.' Many of these yabbas, if buried in the ground 

 and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost lost the 

 effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable,, 

 even by the skilled archaeologist, from the actual handi- 

 craft of the palaeolithic potter. The West Indian negroes 

 brought these simple arts with them from their African 

 home, where they have been handed down in unbroken 

 continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry. 

 New and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere 

 around them, but these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans 

 have survived none the less for the most ordinary domestic 



