KIDDER— CASAS GRANDES POTTERY 



For an understanding of the club-shaped element, recourse must 

 be had to the drawings and photographs (particularly pi. vi), as a 

 clear verbal description of it is quite impossible. Its simplest and also 

 its commonest form is illustrated by plate VI, figures I to 5 inclusive, 

 where it consists of a club-like object surrounded by a curved open 

 space. Figures 6 to 9 inclusive are almost the same, but have a line 

 (6, 7) or an ornamented band (8, 9) entering the open space and 

 curling about the central figure. In these two series the emphasis 

 is on the black or positive part of the design ; in the rest of the exam- 

 ples, however, the emphasis is shifted, the black parts, particularly 

 the club-shaped elements, no longer form the positive part of the 



Fig. 8. — Serpent. (Museum of the American Indian.) 



design but serve merely so to cut the fields as to bring out the features 

 of a design in the base color. This method may be called negative or 

 background drawing. Of the negative drawings on plate vi, some 

 (12, 13, 14, 19, 21, 22, 24) obviously represent life forms; others 

 (15, 16, 17, 18) may be merely decorative. 



To discuss all the questions raised by this interesting group would 

 require more space than is available. One line of inquiry may, how- 

 ever, be indicated. To begin with, it can hardly be doubted that all 

 the figures on plate vi are closely related. Some of them convey no 

 impression of naturalism; others are fantastic, but none the less con- 

 vincing, representations of life-forms; a third lot (1 1, 12, etc.) are inter- 

 mediate. Furthermore there are on Casas Grandes pottery truly nat- 

 uralistic drawings of birds, human beings, and serpents (see pi. vn), 

 in the make-up of which certain elements from our "club-complex" 



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