European pottery has long received close attention from archæologists, but it is only within recent years that it has been thought worth while to study that of the Western continent. Like the other remains of the Amerinds, their pottery was not considered of much importance by archæologists, and while American money and talent were being bestowed upon the well-worked European field, our Amerind pottery was abandoned to the curiosity hunter. The artistic qualities of the Old World pottery fascinated the student, and this, together with a natural deep interest in peoples closely associated with our own past, served to obscure the real value of an investigation of the Amerind field for the information that might be disclosed concerning the character and distribution of Amerind tribes, for its bearing on the history of the ceramic art in general, as well as for its story of primitive effort and invention. Pottery is said to have been invented 2698 years +B.C.+ by the Chinese emperor Hoang-ti, but of course it was made by some tribes long before this. Like every other art, it existed among some tribes, while other tribes had no knowledge of it. There was never a time, and there never will be a time, when all people possess an equal degree of information or skill, so that when something has been invented or discovered by one tribe or people it may have been in use for a long period by another. At the beginning of the Columbian era, most of the Amerinds knew how to make some kind of earthenware. Various methods were used in various places to produce the pottery. Some was modelled in baskets or on basket forms, right side up or up side down as happened to be necessary, some was modelled in a hole in the ground, or in the lap, and still other groups were produced by coiling round and round slender ropes of clay, which were afterwards smoothed off or not as suited the knowledge or desire of the potter. The progression in a general way was probably about this: 1. Made on the inside of a wicker form—confined chiefly to bowls; 2. Made on a netting in a mould hole; 3. Coil-made; 4. Free-hand modelling; 5. Wheel-made, which Amerinds appear never to have attained. There was doubtless no sharp line of separation between these various processes, but they merged into each other. The coil process was about the highest development of the Amerind potter’s skill, and it was in use all over the continent. As Holmes points out in his admirable paper,[81] the Pueblos are the only people who used the coil as a means of decoration as well as construction, so far as now known. All the other potters smoothed the coils off so that no trace eventually was left of them, and this is the practice of the modern Moki potters. They work by no special rule. According to my own observation, the making of pottery is a desultory occupation and is done by the women. Sometimes I saw a woman toiling alone with her ropes of clay, out-of-doors, and again several women