IN ANCIENT AMERICAN AET. 157 



ventional forms and I have called attention to some of the 

 interesting features noticed in the pottery from the stone- 

 graves of the Cumberland valley in Tennessee and from 

 the burial mounds of Missouri and Arkansas. 1 



As a knowledge of this conventionalism is important to 

 our studies I have traced it in the art of those American 

 peoples among whom it has had an existence, although, it 

 is proper to add, it was not developed among them all. 

 With the ancient Mexicans, for instance, their higher ce- 

 ramic art was more symbolical than conventional, using this 

 latter term with the meaning here given to it. The an- 

 cient Peruvians, too, west of the region influenced by the 

 Aymaras, or their predecessors in the vicinity of Lake 

 Titicaca, seem to have been lacking in these methods of 

 conventional representation, and their highest art may be 

 called realism, to which is often added the expression of 

 an action. In the region of Lake Titicaca another type 

 of art expression exists, and while our collection from this 

 region is still meagre there is enough to show a remarka- 

 ble resemblance to those early old-world forms which cul- 

 minated in the classical type of the Mediterranean peoples. 



In the conventionalism represented on the Cumberland 

 valley pottery, the head of a mammal is one of the most 

 instructive studies. There are, however, other forms less 

 marked, which indicate a contact with the Missouri and 

 Arkansas potters, in whose art the fish, the frog, the owl, 

 the human form and the squash, are the most prominent ob- 

 jects conventionalized. In Nicaragua, the principal forms 

 conventionalized are the animal heads on the feet of tri- 



i Communications on this subject were made to the Boston Society of Natural 

 History in 1879; to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 

 1879 ; to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1882 ; and in lectures at 

 the Peabody Museum and in other places, since 1878, but the details have not been 

 published. I have, however, long had series arranged in the Peabody Museum at 

 Cambridge to show the several groups of conventionalized forms. 



