It is wonderful what capital and varied results you can get
with no more recondite graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes
turned front downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes used to
egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved designs. Most of
these patterns are more or less plaitlike in arrangement, evidently
suggested to the mind of the potter by the primitive marks of the old
basketwork. But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into
his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, and the flint
knife itself, with which he incised more regular patterns, straight or
zigzag lines, rows of dots, squares and triangles, concentric circles,
and even the mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn
and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct imitation of
plant or animal forms; once only, on a single specimen from a Swiss lake
dwelling, are the stem and veins of a leaf dimly figured on the
handiwork of the European prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form,
as pattern merely, had begun to exist; imitative work as such was yet
unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere.
In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten people who built the
mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli of the Mississippi valley decorated
their pottery not only with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs,
and turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of them evidently
modelled from the life, and some of them quite unmistakably genuine
portraits.
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