TIIK ARCHEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF X K\V YORK 287 



Earthenware 

 Pottery Vessels 



All the entire or nearly entire pottery vessels, save two, were 

 found in graves. Most of them exhibited signs of prolonged use. 

 A few seemed to have been especially made for funeral urns and 

 some had been evidently molded in great haste and poorly tempered 

 and baked. Such pots were in every instance broken and the 

 potsherds were soft and flaky, not hard and gritty like good pottery. 



The material of which the pots were molded seems to have been 

 the local Erie clay found everywhere in the region overlying the 

 shale beds. The tempering material in all the specimens discovered 

 is invariably pulverized stone, quartz or granitic rock. In no instance 

 is shell to be found. Most of the pots are of a salmon red color, 

 varying from a sooty red to a light orange. The majority are stained 

 by smoke and carbonized grease. This charred grease is especially 

 noticeable around the inside of the rim where the incrustations are 

 sometimes 5 millimeters thick. In thickness the pottery varies from 

 2 millimeters to 2 centimeters in some fragments. In capacity the 

 vessels range from 5 cubic centimeters in the toy forms found in 

 grave 51, pit 96, to 5 quarts, 4700 cubic centimeters. 



Fig. 42 Outline drawing showing three views of the Ripley pitcher nosed pot 



The general type of the vessels is Iroquoian, but as has been else- 

 where stated they differ in many respects from the central New 

 York specimens of the middle seventeenth century as well as from 

 Erie vessels of that period. 



A large percentage of the pots have one raised point that varies 

 from a small knob to a well-developed pitcherlike nose. Pots of this 

 type are found in Ontario and Jefferson counties. The form of 

 one of these pots is shown in text figure 42 which gives the shape at 

 different positions. Another characteristic of the pots from this 



