Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico And Arizona in 1879: Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880-81, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1883, pages 307-428Stevenson, James
History
Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico And Arizona in 1879: Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880-81, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1883, pages 307-428
Stevenson, James
Indian pottery -- North America; Indians of North America -- Arizona; Indians of North America -- Industries; Indians of North America -- New Mexico
The collection contains two thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight
specimens. Although it consists very largely of vessels and other
articles of pottery, yet it embraces almost every object necessary to
illustrate the domestic life and art of the tribes from whom the largest
number of the specimens were obtained. It includes, in addition to
pottery, implements of war and hunting, articles used in domestic
manufactures, articles of clothing and personal adornment, basketry,
trappings for horses, images, toys, stone implements, musical
instruments, and those used in games and religious ceremonies, woven
fabrics, foods prepared and unprepared, paints for decorating pottery
and other objects, earths of which their pottery is manufactured,
mineral pigments, medicines, vegetable dyestuffs, &c. But the chief
value of the collection is undoubtedly the great variety of vessels and
other articles of pottery which it contains. In this respect it is
perhaps the most complete that has been made from the pueblos. Quite a
number of articles of this group may perhaps be properly classed as
“ancient,” and were obtained more or less uninjured; but by far the
larger portion are of modern manufacture.
ARTICLES OF STONE.
These consist of pestles and mortars for grinding pigments; circular
mortars, in which certain articles of food are bruised or ground;
_metates_, or stones used for grinding wheat and corn; axes, hatchets,
celts, mauls, scrapers &c.
The cutting, splitting, pounding, perforating, and scraping implements
are generally derived from schists, basaltic, trachytic, and porphyritic
rocks, and those for grinding and crushing foods are more or less
composed of coarse lava and compact sandstones. Quite a number of the
metate rubbing stones and a large number of the axes are composed of a
very hard, heavy, and curiously mottled rock, a specimen of which was
submitted to Dr. George W. Hawes, Curator of Mineralogy to the National
Museum, for examination, and of which he says:
“This rock, which was so extensively employed by the Pueblo Indians for
the manufacture of various utensils, has proved to be composed largely
of quartz, intermingled with which is a fine, fibrous, radiated
substance, the optical properties of which demonstrate it to be
fibrolite. In addition, the rock is filled with minute crystals of
octahedral form which are composed of magnetite, and scattered through
the rock are minute yellow crystals of rutile. The red coloration which
these specimens possess is due to thin films of hematite. The rock is
therefore fibrolite schist, and from a lithological standpoint it is
very interesting. The fibrolite imparts the toughness to the rock,
which, I should judge, would increase its value for the purposes to
which the Indians applied it.”
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