15 
Most of the pots were probably used exclusively for culinary purposes,, 
but some of the larger vessels may have served for holding grain and other 
foods. That food was cooked in many of them is suggested by the accumu- 
lation of black encrusted matter on the inside surfaces of the rims, necks, 
and shoulders. According to Lafitau the Indians never removed the 
scum from their pots for fear of wasting the contents 1 , and this may account 
for the presence of the encrustation. Some pots have the carbonaceous 
encrustation on the outside also. 
MANUFACTURE OF POTTERY 
The material used in the manufacture of pottery was either clay alone 
or clay tempered with crushed stone, mostly gneiss, in fewer cases diabase, 
diorite, and chert: in some pieces the tempering consists of coarse sand, 
and in one fragment apparently limestone. The structure of some nodules 
of baked clay, of which several were found, suggests that some of the ware 
was tempered -with vegetal material. No shell tempering appears to have 
been used, unless the shell was so finely powdered as to be unrecognizable. 
The stone tempering is in many cases very coarse. A piece of stone in one 
pottery fragment is half an inch long and about as thick as a lead pencil. 
Excess of such coarse tempering naturally increased the friability of the ware. 
It was necessary to add tempering material to the too plastic clay, as 
otherwise, owing to the hasty and imperfect methods of firing necessarily 
adopted, much of the ware would burst into fragments early in the burning. 
A body composed of clay and crushed stone was far more open or porous, 
and contained less moisture, than one of clay alone; its porosity reduced 
the shrinkage in drying to a minimum, the steam arising from the clay 
readily escaping during the early stages of firing. 
Most of the ware is tempered. The fragments of untempered ware 
all belong to very small, crude pots, but they seem just as firm and durable 
as any of those tempered with crushed stone. Very little tempering 
material, except fine particles of mica, shows on the surface. 
The large number of split pieces indicates that the walls were not 
formed by coiling, because coiled ware seldom if ever splits. The edges of 
some fragments which do seem to suggest coiling are merely instances of 
luting. The laminated appearance of the broken edges, and the fact that 
so many of the pieces are split into as many as three distinct layers 2 , would 
at first sight suggest that the walls of the pots had been built up by applying 
successive layers of clay. The splitting, however, as explained below, 
was probably due to imperfect firing rather than to the method of manu- 
facture. The pots were probably modelled directly from a mass of clay, 
as were unquestionably some of the very small cup-like vessels. 
There is no evidence that a slip was applied to the surface. 
Rims were formed either by adding a piece with a lap weld to the 
thinned-out edge of the top of the unfinished vessel, or by folding the thinned 
1 “Us n'§cuinent jamais leur chaudiere, de peur de rien perdie.” — Mceurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, Paris, 
vol. II, p. 91 (1724). 
2 Nine hundred and sis, or about 11 per cent of the fragments, are split. A very small proportion of these are 
pieces of rims. This can be accounted for partly by the fact that there are more fragments of bodies than of rims, 
and partly that the rims were probably more evenly burned than the walls below. The cleavage is very seldom 
seen in the thinner pieces. The lines of cleavage are mostly between the dark coloured core and the outer, lighter 
coloured parts. 
59255—2* 
