H.— ANTHROPOLOGY 167 



Neolithic stage are all imitations in clay of receptacles originally made in 

 other materials. Goatskins, leather bags, gourds and baskets are some 

 of the natural predecessors of pots. It is only to be expected therefore 

 that the clay imitations of these will be found far and wide among people 

 who may have had no racial connection or commercial intercourse of any 

 kind. It is only occasionally that geographical conditions may intervene 

 to prove that there is a real unity of culture underlying the superficial 

 resemblances. There is, however, one happy instance of this. Gourds 

 are indigenous in tropical and semi-tropical countries, but do not grow 

 naturally in Europe. When, therefore, pots derived from gourd-forms 

 are found in Moravia, it is a logical and necessary inference that the people 

 who made them on the Danube came from a gourd-producing country 

 like Asia Minor, or were in close commercial relation with it. 



The same caution that is needed in reasoning about the technique 

 and the form of very primitive pottery must also be used in regard to a 

 great deal of the decoration. Pitting holes with the fingers, puncturing 

 rudimentary designs with a stick or a bone, studding the surface with 

 warts and bosses, even imitating the human face, are probably devices 

 natural to any and every primitive man or woman. The production of 

 simple patterns by tying a string on the wet clay or copying the impres- 

 sions made by a net or a basket is equally natural and by no means 

 distinctive of any one people. 



In short, it is seldom possible to produce any convincing argument 

 from pottery as to dissemination of culture or movements of peoples 

 until the potter has so completely mastered his material and his imple- 

 ments that he, or more generally she, begins to invent freely and to form 

 distinctive schools of design and ornament. This stage is reached by 

 the advanced peoples of Egypt, the Near East, and the Aegean, in the 

 Copper and Bronze Ages while Europe still lags far behind. And so 

 it is natural that the best studies of pottery connections which have yet 

 appeared, from the pens of such writers as J. L. Myres and Frankfort, 

 deal with these more advanced regions. Into the complexities of their 

 arguments I cannot here enter ; but I think it may be well to emphasise 

 that the quality of their reasoning is put on a different plane from that 

 of many other writers by the fact that it is based on actual technological 

 knowledge. It is only too evident that many general writers on the 

 theory of pottery have never seen a primitive potter at work, have never 

 experimented with their own hands, and have seldom even read the very 

 considerable though scattered literature produced by travellers who have 

 accurately studied primitive methods among contemporary peoples. 



In concluding this necessarily very brief resume of the pottery question 

 I should like to contrast two examples of reasoning, the one of which has 

 led to useful and fruitful results while the other threatens to plunge us 

 into confusion. All archaeologists are agreed that the beakers which 

 have such a wide distribution over Europe in the Bronze Age are derived 

 from a single source, though they are not unanimous as to the centre of 

 origin. Their arguments are based on a study of graduated evolution 

 and a connected system of distribution which it would be too long to 

 examine but which is generally recognised as valid. This unification 



