DEATH‐MASKS IN ANCIENT AMERICAN POTTERY

Abstract

In depicting the human face, the natives of North America have not been successful. Particularly is this the case in what is called the Atlantic group-that is, those tribes east of the Rocky mountains. In Mexico some of the ancient people had achieved a fairly high mark in the direction of art, and this skill seems to have filtered in varying degree along the Pacific coast as far as the northern limit of the present Haida Indians; yet even in Mexico the human face was not treated broadly and dexterously, but was customarily drawn or modeled as elsewhere-more or less weakly, without ears, in profile. The ear was not shown or was hidden by some kind of ornament. Much of the work of the Pacific group commands respect from an art point of view, and sometimes admiration; but throughout the Atlantic group, excepting the graceful forms of the moundbuilder pottery, it may be said there was little art development. Some of the moundbuilder pipes are interesting, and exhibit a moderate degree of dexterity in modeling objects familiar to them, but they seldom endow the object with its rightful beauty or express it with accuracy or artistic force. When we come to the human head and face, the attempts to reproduce it are generally, from an art standpoint, merely ludicrous. What, then, are we to conclude when suddenly we come upon a group of funeral jars from Arkansas bearing some truly remarkable and accurate human faces ? We may select for examination the best of these image vases, so far as I know them-