Among the remains of the
newer Stone Age, on the other hand, comparatively abundant keramic
specimens have been unearthed, without doubt or cavil, from the long
barrows--the burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now represented
by the Finns and Lapps, which occupied the whole of Western Europe
before the advent of the Aryan vanguard. One of the best bits is a
curious wide-mouthed, semi-globular bowl from Norton Bavant, in
Wiltshire, whose singular shape suggests almost immediately the idea
that it must at least have been based, if not actually modelled, upon a
human skull. Its rim is rough and quite irregular, and there is no trace
of ornamentation of any sort; a fact quite in accordance with all the
other facts we know about the men of the newer Stone Age, who were far
less artistic and aesthetic in every way than their ruder predecessors of
the interglacial epoch.
Ornamentation, when it does begin to appear, arises at first in a
strictly practical and unintentional manner. Later examples elsewhere
show us by analogy how it first came into existence. The Indians of the
Ohio seem to have modelled their pottery in bags or nettings made of
coarse thread or twisted bark. Those of the Mississippi moulded them in
baskets of willow or splints. When the moist clay thus shaped and marked
by the indentations of the mould was baked in the kiln, it of course
retained the pretty dappling it received from the interlaced and woven
thrums, which were burnt off in the process of firing.
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