494 PUEBLO POTTERY AND ZUNI CULTURE-GROWTH. 



clay and nearly all the color minerals used in the Pueblo potter's art. 

 Yet at the greatest ruin on the upper Colorado Chiquito (in an arm of 

 the valley of which river A' wat u i itself occurs), where the fallen walls 

 betoken equal advancement in the status of the ancient builders and 

 indicate by their vast extent many times the population of A' wat u i, the 

 potsherds are coarse, irregular in curvature, badly decayed, and ex 

 ceptionally scarce. In the immediate neighborhood of this ruin, I need 

 not add, clay is of rare occurrence and poor in quality. 



A more reliable example is furnished by the farming pueblos of Zuni. 

 At He sho ta tsi nan or Ojo del Pescado, fifteen miles east of Zuiii, 

 clays of several varieties and color minerals are abundant. The finest 

 pottery of the tribe is made there in great quantity, while, notwith- 

 standing the facilities for transportation which the Zuiiis now possess, 

 at the opposite farming town of K'id/p kwai na kwinj or Los Ojos Cali- 

 entes, where clay is scarce and of poor texture, the pottery, although 

 somewhat abundant, is of miserable quality and of bad shape. 



In quality of art quite as much as in that of material this local influ- 

 ence was great. In the neighborhood of ruined pueblos which occur 

 near mineral deposits furnishing a great variety of pigment-material, 

 the decoration of the ceramic remains is so surprisingly and universally 

 elaborate, beautiful, and varied as to lead the observer to regard the peo- 

 ple whodwelt there as different from the people whohad inhabited towns 

 about the sites of which the sherds show not only meager skill and less 

 profuse decorative variety, but almost typical dissimilarity. Yet tra- 

 dition and analogy, even history in rare instances, may declare that 

 the inhabitants of both sections were of common derivation, if not closely 

 related and contemporaneous. Probably, at no one point in the South- 

 west was ceramic decoration carried to a higher degree of development 

 than at A' wat n i, yet the < >raibes, by descent the modern representatives 

 of the A' wat u i mis arc the poorest potters and painters among the Mokis. 

 Near their pueblo the clay and other mineral deposits mentioned as 

 abundant at A' wat u i are meager and inaccessible. Still, it may be urged 

 that time may have introduced other than natural causes for change; 

 this could nut be said of another example pertaining to one period and a 

 single tribe. I refer again to the Zunis. The manufactures of Pescado 

 . probably surpass in decorative excellence all other modern Pueblo pot- 

 tery, while both in their lack of variety and in delicacy of execution of 

 their painted patterns the fictiles of Ojo Oaliente are so inferior and 

 diverse from the other Zuni work that the future archaeologist will have 

 need to beware, or (judging alone from the ceramic remains which he 

 finds at the two pueblos) he will attribute them at least to distinct pe 

 riods, perhaps to diverse peoples. 



