BULL. 30] 



POTRERO POTTERY 



295 



Potrero (a Spanish word with several 

 meanings, here referring to jiasture 

 ground). A Luiseno village in San Diego 

 CO., s. Cal.; pop. 177 in 1865. The name 

 was subsequently given to a reservation of 

 8,329.12 avres of allotted land, 75 m. from 

 Mission Tule River agency, on which were 

 situated the settlements of La Joyaand La 

 Piche, containing 225 people. In 1905 the 

 Potrero res. was consolidated with that of 

 Morongo, in Riverside co., Cal., under the 

 San Jacinto superintendency. 

 Pots. See Receptacles. 

 Pottery. Many of the more cultured 

 American tribes were skilful potters. 

 The Peru^^ans are generally regai'ded as 

 having taken the lead in this art, but the 

 Colombians, Central Americans, and 

 Mexicans were not far behind, and some 

 excellent work was done also in Brazil 

 and Argentina. Within the area of the 

 United States the art had made very con- 

 siderable advance in two culture centers — 

 the Pueblo region of the S. W. and the 

 great mound province of the Missis- 

 sippi valley and the Gulf states. Over 

 the remainder of North America, N. 

 of Mexico, the potter's art was limited 

 to the making of rude titensils or was 

 practically unknown. The Pueblo tribes 

 of New Mexico and Arizona, as well as 

 some of the adjacent tribes to lesser ex- 

 tent, still practise the art in its aboriginal 

 form, and the Cherokee and Catawba 

 of North and South Carolina have not 

 yet ceased to manufacture utensils of 

 clay, although the shapes have been much 

 modified by contact with the whites. 

 The Choctaw of Mississi])pi and the Man- 

 dan of the mid- 

 dle Missouri val- 

 ley have but re- 

 cently abandoned 

 the art. 



It has been ob- 

 served that pot- 

 tery is not among 

 the earlier arts 

 practised by 

 primitive peo- 

 ples. With nom- 

 ads it is not avail- 

 able because of 

 the fragility of the utensils, but sedentary 

 life encourages its development. Among 

 the more primitive peoples stone-boiling 

 in baskets and in bark and wooden ves- 

 sels was and is practised, and even with 

 some fully sedentary tribes, as those of 

 the N. W. coast, these vessels have not yet 

 been replaced by earthenware. The in- 

 troduction or rise of the potter'sart among 

 primitive peoples is believed to corre- 

 spond somewhat closely with the initial 

 stages of barbarism; but this idea must 

 be liberally interpreted, as some tribes 

 well advanced toward higher barbarism 

 are without it. 



Cherokee Pot with Stamp de- 

 signs. HEIGHT to IN. 



The clay used was mixed with various 

 tempering ingredients, such as sand or 

 pulverized stone, potsherds, and shells; 

 the shapes were extremely varied and gen- 

 erally were worked out by the hand, aided 

 by simple modeling tools. The building 

 of the vessel, the principal product of the 

 potter's art, varied with the different 

 tribes. Usually a bit of the clay was 

 shaped into a disk for the base, and the 

 walls were carried up by adding strips of 

 clay until the rim 

 was reached. |~~ "^W^ 

 When the strips 

 were long they 

 were carried 

 around as a spiral 

 coil. Astheheight 

 increased the clay 

 was allowed to set 

 sufficiently to sup- 

 port the added 

 weight. The 

 Pueblo potters, to 

 facilitate the work 

 of modeling, 



sometimes placed the incipient vessel in 

 a shallow basket, or upon the bottom 

 fragment of an old vessel, or, as for ex- 

 ample the Zuni, upon a specially made 

 dish. As a rule, the baking was done 

 in open or smothered tires or in ex- 

 tremely crude furnaces, and the paste 

 remained comparatively soft. In Cen- 

 tral America a variety of ware was made 

 with hard paste somewhat resembling 

 our stoneware. Notwithstanding the re- 

 markable aptness of the Americans in 

 this art, and their great skill in modeling, 

 they had not achieved the wheel, nor had 

 they fully mastered the art of glazing. 



ROULETTE USED IN DECORATING EARTHENWARE. (RESTORATIOn) 



In New Mexico and Arizona a variety of 

 pottery is found on deserted village sites 

 showing rather crude decorative designs 

 executed in a medium usually of brownish 

 and greenish hues having the effect of a 

 glaze, and while the nature of the mixture 

 is not well known, chemical examination 

 shows that in some cases at least this is a 

 salt glaze. Women were the potters, and 

 the product consisted mainly of vessels 



