90 Sioux City Academy of Science and Letters. 



Common stone and bone scrapers used for the pur- 

 pose of scraping hides and for marking pottery, and 

 another tool for marldng pottery was a bone instru- 

 ment with notches in the end, so made that in drawing 

 it once across the soft clay several lines were made. 



The art of making pottery was the crowning feature 

 of this civilization, if the word civilization may be used 

 in this connection. The ability to make dishes and pots 

 for cooking was a long stride in the direction of domestic 

 qualities, wherein the red man is usually deficient. Many 

 and various are the pots and dishes to be found in broken 

 fragments in the mound. In all probability the dis- 

 covery of this art was about the same as that of the 

 southern Indians. The first vessels were made of wicker 

 or straw and grass. Clay was then plastered onto the 

 outside to protect them from the fire. The savages soon 

 noticed that after the wicker had burned away the clay 

 would harden and remain upright and could be handled. 

 Experiments were made and soon it was demonstrated 

 that pots and kettles could be made without the aid of 

 reeds or grass. 



Their most finished article was a crude affair as 

 compared with the fine china of our times, and there 

 must have been unnumbered dishes of all kinds, as it is 

 impossible to dig to the depth of one foot without un- 

 covering several pieces of different dishes. A large por- 

 tion of these are decorated. Some of them are reddish 

 brown, most of them black. A few specimens of light 

 gray are to be found, but these are rare. The decora- 

 tions consist of intersecting straight lines forming dif- 

 ferent designs. There are very few curved lines, and 

 these are crude and uneven. Some of them are orna- 

 mented with fancy rims, which served the purposes of 

 decoration and lifting. Some were graced with ears of 

 various kinds and designs, usually worked into the head 

 of some bird or animal. The examination of this mound 

 disclosed thirty different decorations, some of them on 

 the body of the vessel, others on the rim and a few on 

 the neck and shoulder. 



The investigations during the past few years have 

 been disappointing in that no complete pot has been 



