FEWKES] MINOR ANTIQUITIES 141 
beautiful bowls and vases from Sikyatki, Awatobi, and Shongopovi. 
Life motives. predominate also in pottery from the Little Colorado 
region, but they are rare in cliff-dwellers’ pottery, where the propor- 
tions are reversed.! 
There is every reason to believe that all the Casa Grande pottery 
and the decoration connected therewith are the work of women, 
and the industry still survives in feminine hands among both Pueblos 
and Pima. In a pueblo such as Sikyatki, where symbolism in pre- 
historic times reached highest development in the Southwest, we find 
a great predominance of bird designs, but in the Casa Grande pot- 
tery there are only one or two such patterns. 
A number of the more striking specimens of pottery from the 
Pueblo Viejo Valley are figured in color elsewhere.” Stray specimens 
of Gila Valley ware are found 
in the ruins along the Little 
Colorado, where, however, it is 
not indigenous. Many frag- 
ments, most of which bear geo- 
metric designs, were brought 
to light at Casa Grande, but no 
life forms with exception of a 
bird’s head in relief on a small 
fragment (fig. 41). 
The designs on the Pueblo 
and other Southwestern pot- 
tery, ancient and modern, are 
decidedly idealistic rather than 
realistic. The life forms rarely 
represent real animals but 
rather those which the native potters conceived of as existing. The 
varied pictures of living beings which, as already stated, constitute 
so important a feature in the decoration of Sikyatki pottery, were 
not copied from nature but are highly conventionalized.* 
Although some of the common symbols, as the rain cloud, which 
can be recognized without difficulty among the Pueblos, have not 
yet been traced among Casa Grande decorations, it may be that 
water symbols of another kind were regarded as more important. 
The fields of the Casa Grande farmérs were watered by irrigation, and 
Fic. 47. Design decorating vase. 
1In modern Pueblo pottery life forms play a conspicuous réle, as may be seen by examination of 
modern Keres or Tewa ware. 
2In 22d Ann. Rep. Bur. Amer. Ethnol. 
3 The symbols on Sikyatki ceramic objects were undoubtedly made by women and it is probable that 
they understood their significance. These symbols afford a good idea of woman's prehistoric art in one 
locality of our Southwest and show that it is conventional in the highest degree and largely mythologic, 
two features that characterize the art products of other Pueblos. 
