4 
TECHNIQUE 
The technique is chiefly drawing, impressing and modelling in soft 
clay, incising, pecking, carving, painting, and inlaying. Colour is found 
chiefly in red and black pictographs on stone. There are also a few red 
spirals and stripes on bone objects; but they are probably of little or no 
service to commercial designers, and are not illustrated here. 
The forms are of human beings, other mammals, birds, snakes, turtles, 
fish, and geometric figures, and combinations of these. Animal forms 
are common in prehistoric Canadian art. 
Plant forms are not certainly recognized among this prehistoric 
material, but are common in modern Indian perishable work in the Eastern 
Woodlands and the Plains, especially on birch-bark work and bead work. 
The design on the pipe illustrated in figure 5, Plate LXXXIV, is an example. 
It is probable that these are post-Columbian representations by the Indians 
of art brought to America by Europeans. Ears of corn are possibly, but 
not probably, represented by the figures on fragments of Iroquoian pottery, 
such as are illustrated in Plate LIX and by an earthenware pipe from 
Ontario in the Provincial Museum, Toronto. Had plant forms been used 
in prehistoric times it seems probable that at least some would have been 
made on such enduring materials as stone, pottery, or bone, and that at 
least one specimen would have been found, for the modern Indians, who use 
these plant forms in great numbers to meet the demand from tourists, 
make very few objects of any kind except of perishable material. 
Geometric forms are common, especially on pottery, on which they 
were drawn when the clay was soft. They also occur as groups of im- 
pressed circles on pottery, in incising, pecking, and painting and inlaying, 
but are rare in modelling and carving, that is, they are usually made on 
surfaces rather than in mass. 
The designs on the specimens are frequently bilaterally symmetrical, 
and some of these are also alike on obverse and reverse, but less than one 
per cent in over 400 specimens — those illustrated in figure 5, Plate XLIII, 
figure 1, Plate XLIV, and figure 2, Plate LXXVII — have both ends alike; 
and these few specimens are probably modern, perhaps being due to the 
introduction of European tools or European ideas. Moreover, those 
illustrated in figure 1, Plate XLIV, and figure 2, Plate LXXVII, being made 
up of circles and parts of circles, almost necessarily have both ends alike. 
Among the prehistoric objects of known Iroquoian origin, curved lines are 
found in carving and modelling, such as animal figures, and in little, stamped 
circles on pottery, but, with the exception of the single specimens of pottery 
illustrated in figure 7, Plate LVII, they are absent from the drawn geometric 
designs. 
Prehistoric Canadian art is characterized by asymmetry in one of the 
three directions; that is, although obverse and reverse may be similar and 
right and left similar, top and bottom differ in about 99 per cent of the 
specimens. In this respect the prehistoric motives differ greatly from 
modern European designs. All is hand work and so has not the limitations 
in character found in designs adapted to machine reproduction. 
Prehistoric Canadian art has been called crude. Even if this were so, 
it might still be urged that good design is often evolved from or based on 
crude beginnings and artists are always searching for basic motives. 
