ANTHROPOLOGY: W. HOUGH 
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little more than daubs and splashes. This degenerate stage extended 
well into historic times, as was proved by the finding, in that horizon, 
of European objects, but before the final abandonment of the site there 
occurred a sort of renaissance, when glaze painting was given up and 
there was produced a yellowish pottery excellently finished and taste- 
fully decorated with dull black pigment. 
The details of this long ceramic history; the growth, for example, of 
vessel forms; the developments in the cooking wares; the influences from 
without that undoubtedly produced some of the changes; all these must 
await closer study and more data. 
The stratigraphy of the site, then, throws invaluable Hght on the 
local culture; it also may be expected to teach us much as to its external 
relations. In the first year's work there has been found pottery of the 
historic period from the Hopi villages, Acoma, Zuni, and Jemez, as 
well as prehistoric wares from the Little Colorado, Lower Gila (?), 
and San Juan. From the East we have pottery, buffalo-scapula hoes 
and snubnosed scrapers; from the South, clay bells and spindlewhorls 
strongly Mexican in type. Such finds as these give an indication of 
what important results may confidently be hoped for. If we can defi- 
nitely recognize and chronologically arrange the successive culture stages 
at Pecos, we can extend that knowledge and thus fit into their proper 
chronological order the one-culture ruins that abound in the Rio Grande. 
We may also hope to learn, from trade objects found at Pecos and in the 
chronologically arranged one-culture ruins, the relative age of many other 
groups, not only in the Southwest but even well beyond its borders. 
MAN AND METALS 
By Walter Hough 
U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM. WASHINGTON. D. C. 
Received by the Academy, Jeinuary 24, 1916 
In the course of a long-continued study of the uses of fire by man, I 
have recently completed a review of the branch referring to metallurgy, 
the results of which are embodied in the following brief summary. 
The free metals which early man might have found and used are 
copper, gold, and silver. It is known that he used copper, and to some 
extent silver and gold, and that he worked them as other hard sub- 
stances, becoming gradually acquainted with the property of ductility 
of these metals. Since copper was the most common metal in a free 
state and potentially at an early stage the most useful, it is safe to say 
that its employment was the beginning of the age of metals. Strictly, 
