THE ARCHEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK 1 37 



form. The pots in the iirst-named district usually have the more 

 squat body and bulging sides. A careful comparison between the 

 pottery vessels found by the writer at Ripley, N. Y., and those 

 pictured by David Boyle as having been found by the Laidlaw 

 brothers, in the sites along Balsam lake^ Ontario, Canada, will show 

 that while a general outline and form of the body is similar to the 

 pottery of the Mohawk-Onondaga area, there are differences enough 

 to warrant placing each district in a place by itself. 



Certain forms of the Iroquoian pottery, as in western New York, 

 does not greatly differ from those discovered in the mounds of Ohi/j. 

 especially certain pottery forms described by Professor Mills of 

 Ohio State University (see plate 43). The forms to which we refir 

 are those having a globular body and short neck and a wide flaring 

 mouth, the entire surface of the body being decorated with the 

 marks of a paddle wrapped with grass stems or brushed while still 

 plastic with the same material. Large fragments of such pottery 

 were found by the writer in the prehistoric site at Burning Springs 

 where they were intermixed with sherds of more conventional 

 Iroquoian types. Some of this pottery does not differ materially 

 from certain forms of Algonkian pottery except in the matter of 

 shape. None of the pointed bottoms is found in the Iroquoian dis- 

 trict in New York. Many Iroquoian vessels are small, containing 

 not more than two quarts, while others are larger and have a 

 capacity of several gallons. Complete vessels of the larger type are 

 very rare but many hundreds of sherds of large vessels are found 

 throughout Jeff'erson, Ontario, Erie, Montgomery and Chautauqua 

 counties. 



In the study of the design found on the typically Mohawk potters- 

 it seems apparent that the parallel lines arranged in triangles repre- 

 sent porcupine quill work such as is found on the rims of bark 

 baskets. There are certain other features of Iroquoian pottery that 

 lead one to believe that potters in making their vessels had in mind 

 bark baskets. The square-topped collar is not dissimilar in form to 

 the square top of the bark basket and the dots placed around th^ 

 upper edge seem to imitate the binding of the wooden rim of the 

 basket. Oftentimes dots around the center of the bodw at the 

 beg'nning of the neck, seem like the stitch marks seen on bark 

 bvsketry. This idea was first advanced by Frank Cushing. who gives 

 a figure of an Iroquois basket which he says was copied in clay by 

 potters. We believe that the idea is correct but the Iroquois of 

 historic times did not use bark baskets or vessels of this character. 

 All their baskets that we have seen have had flat bottoms and in 

 outline were more or less oval at the top. 



