I have seen the same Jamaican negroes kneading
their hand-made porous earthenware beside a tropical stream, moulding it
on fruits or shaping it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and
drying it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed kiln
of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric types, locally
known by the quaint West African name of 'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas,
if buried in the ground and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost
lost the effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable, even
by the skilled archaeologist, from the actual handicraft of the
palaeolithic potter. The West Indian negroes brought these simple arts
with them from their African home, where they have been handed down in
unbroken continuity from the very earliest age of fictile industry. New
and better methods have slowly grown up everywhere around them, but
these simplest, earliest, and easiest plans have survived none the less
for the most ordinary domestic uses, and will survive for ages yet, as
long as there remain any out-of-the-way places, remote from the main
streams of civilised commerce. Thus, while hundreds of thousands of
years, in all probability, separate us now from the ancient days of the
first potter, it is yet possible for us to see the first potter's own
methods and principles exemplified under our very eyes by people who
derive them in unbroken succession from the direct teaching of that
long-forgotten prehistoric savage.
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