Indian Tribes of Eastern Peru Volume 9-10 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 Excerpt: ...outside. Thus the worker goes around and around the pot, until it is completed. No wheel is known; the pot sits in the sand or on a board. The necks of the smaller pots are made separately, and luted on. The small drinking bowls are made exceedingly thin, and in perfect form. The rim is trimmed with the teeth, moistened with the tongue, and finished with the thumb nail. When the pot is finished, it is allowed to stand in the shade until it has hardened, then it is smoothed and polished. If it is a cooking pot, it is fired at once; if it is to be painted, a thin slip of very fine white clay is first applied, and when dry the decoration is laid on with a strip of bamboo. Yellow clay is used for yellow slip, and red stone for red slip. The large rough pots are placed in a slow open fire, and thoroughly burned. The large puberty pots are burned by placing them upside down on a tripod of three smaller pots, and covering them with a great heap of dry thorny bamboo, then a fire is built underneath, and fed with the same material. By this method very little smoke is produced, and the intensity of the heat can be controlled. The fine drinking bowls are treated very differently: a large pot with a hole in the bottom is placed on three stones, or more often three piles of inverted pots and the bowls to be fired are inverted inside the large pot. The first one is placed over the hole and ashes poured around and over it, and others are inverted over this, until the pot is full, or all are used. A slow fire is kept burning under the large pot until all are well baked, then they are taken out one at a time, and while hot, melted copal is poured over them. This accounts for the glazed appearance characteristic of this pottery. The various designs used in the decoration of ...