21 
On the whole the potters seem to have been careful workers, in spite 
of the difficulties they encountered in modelling their coarsely tempered 
clay. In many cases they succeeded in getting the bands of decoration 
of uniform width and in making the lines and other impressions uniformly 
equidistant. The few curved lines, however, are poorly executed, the 
potters seeming to have lacked the confidence of the better trained artists, 
who made the bold, curved lines seen on ware from the southern United 
States. 
No evidence of the methods of firing or baking was discovered, although 
the black interiors (where they are not due to the carbonized remains of 
food or to some process designed to render the vessels more impervious) 
suggest that the pots were baked from the inside by inverting them over 
a small fire. The thin-walled pots were naturally more thoroughly burnt 
than those with thick walls; but, although the thin ware is harder and less 
friable than the thick ware, it is more fragile, and consequently broke into 
much smaller fragments. The mottled appearance of some pieces suggest 
that the pots were unevenly burnt. The broken edges of many of the 
thin, well-burnt pieces are of a nearly uniform dark colour. In some 
cases only the colour of the surface was changed by the firing, a few frag- 
ments with greyish outside and inside surfaces, for instance, presenting 
fractured edges of red instead of grey, as one would expect. 
The black core, so commonly seen in the pottery found here, is due to 
the lack of oxidation, which almost invariably occurs when the firing 
is done too quickly, not to the walls being built up with layers of different 
raw materials. The surfaces became hard before the interior of the w r all 
was oxidized, so that the iron content in the clay remained in a reduced 
condition, with the black colour characteristic of imperfectly oxidized 
clay wares. The reducing action in the interior of the wall in many cases 
caused a line of cleavage between the well oxidized outer parts and the 
reduced core, so that the inner black layer appears to be made of a different 
raw material from that of the outer layers. Such imperfectly fired pieces 
naturally were in many cases split by frost and other agencies. 
There is no doubt that a large proportion of the pottery was broken 
during the firing. Other pots seem to have been broken in the “green” 
state, before firing or were only partly fired. This is suggested by the fact 
that some pieces, especially some with red interiors, become quite soft 
and sticky when soaked in water. 
Briefly summarized, the differences between the ware from this site 
and from sites in the same county and in Waterloo county 1 known to be 
later Neutral, are as follows: the pottery here consists mostly of simple 
forms, generally inferior in technique to that of the later Neutral pottery, 
just as much of the latter is inferior to most of the ware found at Iroquoian 
sites in eastern Ontario; it splits more commonly than pottery of the 
later Neutrals; much of it is scarified and bears chequered or other paddle 
markings and textile texturing, which the writer has not seen on later 
Neutral pottery; there is more decoration consisting of stamped and crude 
impressions; the horizontal lines on about half of the pottery are interrupted 
rather than trailed; cord impressed lines, although rare here, are not seen 
Un comparing the pottery the writer is confining himself to the ware of this limited area because it is a region 
with which he is most familiar. 
