lO SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 94 



bottle 10 inches. Neither vessel bears any kind of decoration, except 

 for the shell speckling in the tempering. They were found on a 

 plantation 5 miles east of Natchitoches, when the plow turned them 

 up from a few inches below the surface. Mr. Williamson also has in 

 his collection a few similar pots from the same vicinity. 



Decoration on the Natchitoches pottery consists of incised and 

 engraved designs. The simplest technique seems to have been that of 

 merely scratching or incising parallel straight and curved lines in 

 various combinations of the scroll. In some instances this was done 

 after the vessel had dried but had not been fired ; in others, after 

 firing had taken place, and in the finest pottery of all, after even the 

 polishing had been completed. These scratches were then gone over 

 with more care, and elaborate designs, through the use of double 



Fig. 3. — Small bowl polished and engraved with scroll-like designs. 



and reversed scrolls, spots, and reticulated spaces between them, were 

 produced. The final touch was given by rubbing bright red pigment 

 over the engraved designs, particularly those occurring on a band 

 about the neck, as in the small bowl illustrated in plate 4, a. 



Four elements are commonly worked into the pattern of the design, 

 as for example four spiral arms radiating from a disk on the bottom 

 of many of the bowls. On the highly polished bowl shown, these 

 spiral elements extend over the body up to the neck, where a different 

 motif of a zigzag line and large spots is found. But in the less finely 

 finished bottle, shown on the same plate, the area of decoration ex- 

 tends from the neck downward only to slightly below the shoulder. 

 A bowl having five radiating spiral arms in its design is shown in 

 figure 3. Here the rim ornamentation is limited to a narrow band of 

 saw-toothed elements. This bowl is owned by Mr. Casler and came 

 from a shallow grave where there was a flat-headed skeleton. 



