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Show 240 THE NATIONAL GEOCRAPHIC MAGAZINE Photograph by O. C. Havens AN OPENED GRAVE.' PUEBLO BONITO Note the shafted arrows (central foreground) buried with this ancient Bonitian for his use in the "Happy Hunting Ground." housewife. Without love for her handiwork, without justifiable pride in her skill, she never could have created such masterpieces (see page 237). The pottery of Pueblo Bonito stands at the very apex of ceramic achievement among the prehistoric peoples of our country. Those who have visited Pueblo Bonito and spent hours of meditation within the shadow of its broken walls find it easy to picture these women of the long ago at work with their clays and crude shaping tools. One sees them sitting in the soft light of their earth-floored dwellings, grinding and kneading and rolling into long strips clays which had been selected with great care and often transported from a distance. The potter's wheel was not known to any of the aborigines of the New World; it is an Old World invention; but a rude substitute-a shallow basket or the bottom of a broken olla-was occasionally employed in New Mexico and Arizona as a movable worktable upon which the new vessel was fashioned. Dwellers in the cliffs made basket receptacles before they discovered the art of pottery manufacture, but they retained in the latter industry the technique of the former. Thus it is that a Pueblo woman, even to-day, builds up a bowl or jar with long ropes of plastic earth, pinching each successive coil to firm union with its predecessor, smoothing down the rough surfaces with a bit of wood or gourd rind and later polishing the whole with a water-worn pebble (see page 248). FINGER PRINTS PROVE SMALL CHILDREN WERE TAUGHT POTTERY MAKING Youthful hands often helped shape new vessels to replace those broken on the hearth. Every woman had to learn the potter's trade, and her schooling began early. In fancy, I see brown-bodied little tots studiously striving to duplicate the products of their mother's hands; I hear words of encouragement uttered to soothe the impatience and failures of childhood. In the ruins of Pueblo Bonito we have found rude, miniature ladles and pitchers bearing the imprint of babv fingers; we |