880 ANCIENT PUEBLO POTTEET 



nearly meets the one on the under side. It may be that these holes were 

 simply the beginning of the excavation of the central portion of the object. 

 I cannot conceive any use to which this piece of sculpture could be put, unless 

 it was intended as an ornament. That it is a rude, and perhaps somewhat 

 conventionalized, representation of a marine shell there can be no doubt. 

 Thinking this was the case I submitted the object to Professor Hamlin, of 

 the Museum of Comparative Zoology, who has kindly given me the fol- 

 lowing answer to mj? question : 



"The maker of this specimen did not copy any known shell. The 

 narrow longitudinal aperture merging into the canaliculated spire corre- 

 sponds fairly to a cone like the well-known East Indian marmoreus, Lin., 

 while the elevation of the spire may have been borrowed from the West 

 Indian species teshidinarius, Mart., to which, on the whole, it is most like. 

 On the other hand, the sharp inner lip, situated where a wide and smooth 

 columella is found in cones and most other marine gasteropods, the sudden 

 bend in the lower part of the otherwise straight aperture, and the swollen 

 lower portion of the shell, where cones taper regularly in a straight line, 

 are, taken together, unlike a cone or any other known shell. The specimen 

 is, besides, several times larger than any described recent or fossil cone that 

 has been found in North America. It was apparently carved by one who 

 had a good general conception of a dextral gasteropod shell, and was con- 

 tent to follow that in his work rather than the features of any individual 

 specimen." 



Although the various members of the surveying parties noticed the 

 great quantity of fragments of ancient pottery found along the old trails 

 and in the vicinity of ruins in New Mexico, very little seems to have been 

 collected. 



Mr. T. O'Sullivan, while at a ruined pueblo on the San Juan River, 

 New Mexico, in October, 1874, picked up a number of pieces of ancient 

 pottery, eight of which are before me. Two of these fragments are red and 

 the others are gray. The ornamentation on all is in black, and consists of 

 the characteristic geometrical figures and parallel lines. On one fragment, 

 between two groups of parallel lines which passed around the inside of the 

 bowl, of which this fragment is a portion of the side, there is a band, 



