270 THE ANCIENT INDIAN POTTERY OF MARAJO, BRAZIL. 
If the maker of the pottery had attached the Christian significance 
to the figure he was drawing, he would not have represented it on 
the opposite side of the same vessel without the transverse bar, and 
if the Indians, who made the Marajé mounds had been christian- 
ized they would not have buried their dead in jars. It seems to 
me that the Indian artist, finding he had a large space to fill up 
on one side, drew a transverse line across the perpendicular one 
to make the figure larger. The cross also appears on a’, fig. 72. 
The question of the primary significance of the S-shaped design 
I must leave to the student of the philosophy of art, together with 
the question of the independent origin of ornament, which also 
arises in the study of this pottery. The observant reader will 
detect the same pattern that I have just been describing, in use in 
carpets, ornamental borders and a hundred other places to-day. 
Among other relics from the Arary mound is a large bead of 
clay roughly represented in fig. 72, h. It is very irregular in shape, 
rudely made, and the ornamentation is badly executed. It is 
much broken. Its length is two and a quarter inches. 
Fig. 72, k, represents the end of an object cylindrical in the mid- 
dle, and suddenly swelling out at both ends, one of which is bro- 
ken. The design is deeply engraved, and the object was perhaps 
used as a stamp, but it is so irregular that it would have served 
very indifferently for that purpose. The width across the face is 
about an inch and three-quarters. A somewhat similar figure to 
that on the end is engraved on the side. The perforation extends 
nearly through from one end to the other. It might be taken for 
an unfinished bead were it not that two other partially perforated 
objects of a somewhat similar character are found in the collection. 
One of these is a lens-shaped piece of pottery, an inch and three- 
quarters across the flat face, which appears to have been ground 
into its present form. A hole is bored through it in a direction 
perpendicular to the centre of the flat face. The other is a pear- 
shaped object, about the size of a large marble, perforated in like 
manner from the smaller end.. Its use I cannot divine. 
We have no historical record of the tribe that built the Marajé 
mounds. Senhor Penna has had the kindness to examine care- 
fully into the subject for me, and it would appear that the 
mounds antedate the discovery of America. We have no record 
of the existence of any tribe in the lower Amazonas within his- 
toric times, that buried its dead in jars. I do not feel like coin- 
