54 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 94 



Much of the later ware was undoubtedly the work of the Manahoac 

 tribes, and some of the vessels may have been made and used after 

 the year 1608. 



Many of the vessels thought to have been made during the recent, 

 or later, period were decorated by pressing cords into the plastic clay. 

 Simple designs were thus produced — always straight lines, which 

 usually extended only a short distance below the rim. Specimens of 

 pottery decorated in this manner were found on various sites, but 

 the majority of the more interesting pieces were discovered on Jerrys 

 Flats; examples of these are shown in plate 13. The cords thus used 

 varied greatly in size from that of a coarse thread to others more 

 than ^ inch in diameter. 



It is evident that the Indians of X'irginia, at the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century, made a variety of cords to serve different 

 purposes. This was referred to by Captain Smith " soon after the 

 settlement of the colony when he wrote : 



Betwixt their hands and thighes, their women use to spin the barks of trees, 

 deare sinews, or a kind of grasse they call Pcuimciwxv:^ of these they make a 

 thred very even and readily. This thred serveth for many uses, as about their 

 housing, apparell ; and also they make nets for fishing, for the quantity as 

 formally braded as ours. They make also with it lines for angles. 



This readily explains the diiTerence in size and appearance of the 

 many impressions of cords that appear on the surface of the fragments 

 of vessels. As to the materials used in making the cords, some were 

 probably formed by twisting the bark of a milkweed as described by 

 Colonel Byrd '" more than two centuries ago. The milkweed was 

 the Indian hemp of the early settlers, and is thought to have been the 

 plant mentioned by Byrd as " silk grass ", known to many persons 

 in Virginia at the present time as silk weed. On November 10, 1728, 

 Colonel Byrd described certain customs of the Saponi, a Siouan 

 tribe related to the Manahoac, and wrote in part (p. 81): "The 

 Indians use it in all their little manufactures, twisting a thread of it 

 that is prodigiously strong. Of this they make their baskets and the 





^* Op. cif., Arber edition, p. 69. 



" Rather than being the name of " a kind of grasse " this may be an Al- 

 gonquian word for some cord, rope, or thread. Strachey in "A Dictionarie of 

 the Indian Language ", gave the following " Penninaugh, a rope " , and " Peym- 

 mata, threed". 



'" Byrd, William, The Westover manuscripts : containing the history of the 

 dividing line .... Petersburg, Va., 1841. 



