Most of the pottery from Sikyatki is ornamented with geometric designs
and linear figures, the import of many of which are unknown.
Two extreme views are current in regard to the significance of these
designs. To one school everything is symbolic of something or some
religious conception; to the other the majority are meaningless save
as decorations. I find the middle path the more conservative, and
while regarding many of the designs as highly conventionalized
symbols, believe that there are also many where the decorator had no
thought of symbolism. I have ventured an explanation of a few of the
former.
Terraced figures are among the most common rectangular elements in
Pueblo ceramic decorations. These designs bear so close a likeness to
the modern rain-cloud symbol that they probably may all be referred to
this category. Their arrangement on a bowl or jar is often of such a
nature as to impart very different patterns. Thus terraced figures
placed in opposition to each other may leave zigzag spaces suggesting
lightning, but such forms can hardly be regarded as designed for
symbols.
Rectangular patterns (plates CLXII-CLXV) are more ancient in the
evolution of designs on Tusayan pottery than curved geometric figures,
and far outnumber them in the most ancient specimens; but there has
been no epoch in the development reaching to modern times when they
have been superseded. While there are many specimens of Sikyatki
pottery of the type decorated with geometric figures, which bear
ornamentations of simple and complex terraced forms, the majority
placed in this type are not reducible to stepped or terraced designs,
but are modified straight lines, bars, crosshatching, and the like. In
older Pueblo pottery the relative proportion of terraced figures is
even less, which would appear to indicate that basket-ware patterns
were secondary rather than primary decorative forms.
By far the largest element in ancient Tusayan pottery decoration must
be regarded as simple geometric lines, triangles, spirals, curves,
crosshatching, and the like, some of which are no doubt symbolic,
others purely decorative (plate CLXVI). In the evolution of design I
am inclined to believe that this was the simplest form, and I find it
the most constant in the oldest ware. Rectangular figures are regarded
as older than circular figures, and they possibly preceded the latter
in evolution, but in many instances both are forms of reversion,
highly conventionalized representations of more elaborate figures.
Circles and crosses are sometimes combined, the former modified into a
wavy line surrounding the latter, as in plate CLIX, _c_, _d_, where
there is a suggestion (_d_) of a sun emblem.