There is no other section of the United States where the potter's art
was so extensively practiced, or where it reached such a degree of
perfection, as within the limits of these ancient Pueblo regions. To
this statement not even the prolific valleys of the Mississippi and
its tributaries form an exception.
On examining a large and varied collection of this pottery, one would
naturally regard it either as the product of four distinct peoples or
as belonging to four different eras, with an inclination to the
chronologic division.
When we see the reasonable probability that the architecture, the
primeval arts and industries, and the culture of the Pueblos are
mainly indigenous to the desert and semi-desert regions of North
America, we are in the way towards an understanding of the origin and
remarkable degree of development in the ceramic art.
In these regions water not only occurs in small quantities, but is
obtainable only at points separated by great distances, hence to the
Pueblos the first necessity of life is the transportation and
preservation of water. The skins and paunches of animals could be used
in the effort to meet this want with but small success, as the heat
and aridity of the atmosphere would in a short time render water thus
kept unfit for use, and the membranes once empty would be liable to
destruction by drying. So far as language indicates the character of
the earliest water vessels which to any extent met the requirements of
the Zuñi ancestry, they were tubes of wood or sections of canes. The
latter, in ritualistic recitation, are said to have been the
receptacles that the creation-priests filled with the sacred water
from the ocean of the cave-wombs of earth, whence men and creatures
were born, and the name for one of these cane water vessels is _shó
tom me_, from _shó e_, cane or canes, and _tóm me_, a wooden tube.
Yet, although in the extreme western borders of the deserts, which
were probably the first penetrated by the Pueblos, the cane grows to
great size and in abundance along the two rivers of that country, its
use, if ever extensive, must have speedily given way to the use of
gourds, which grew luxuriantly at these places and were of better
shapes and of larger capacity. The name of the gourd as a vessel is
_shoṕ tom me_, from _shó e_, canes, _pó pon nai e_, bladder-shaped,
and _tóm me_, a wooden tube; a seeming derivation (with the exception
of the interpolated sound significant of form) from _shó tom me_. The
gourd itself is called _mó thlâ â_, "hard fruit." The inference is
that when used as a vessel, and called _shoṕĭ tom me_, it must have
been named after an older form of vessel, instead of after the plant
or fruit which produced it.
While the gourd was large and convenient in form, it was difficult of
transportation owing to its fragility. To overcome this it was encased
in a coarse sort of wicker-work, composed of fibrous yucca leaves or
of flexible splints. Of this we have evidence in a series of
gourd-vessels among the Zuñis, into which the sacred water is said to
have been transferred from the tubes, and a pair of which one of the
priests, who came east with me two years ago, brought from New Mexico
to Boston in his hands--so precious were they considered as
relics--for the purpose of replenishing them with water from the
Atlantic. These vessels are encased rudely but strongly in a meshing
of splints (see Fig. 500), and while I do not positively claim that
they have been piously preserved since the time of the universal use
of gourds as water-vessels by the ancestry of this people, they are
nevertheless of considerable antiquity. Their origin is attributed to
the priest-gods, and they show that it must have once been a common
practice to encase gourds, as above described, in osiery.
[Illustration: FIG. 500.--Gourd vessel enclosed in wicker.]