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MISSOURI AND ARKANSAS PREHISTORIC POTTERY. (Selections from Wisconsin Historical Society's collections.)

Photo. by F. W. Curtiss, Dec., 1893.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN

HISTORY,'

BY FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, PH. D.

[Address delivered at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893.]

In a recent bulletin of the superintendent of the census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports."2 This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital

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'The foundation of this paper is my article entitled, "Problems in American History," which appeared in The Egis, a publication of the students of the University of Wisconsin, November 8, 1892. This address was first delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association, in Chicago, July 12, 1893. It is gratifying to find that Professor Woodrow Wilson whose volume on Division and Reunion," in the Epochs of American History series, has an appreciative estimate of the importance of the West as a factor in American history-accepts some of the views set forth in the papers above mentioned, and enhances their value by his lucid and suggestive treatment of them in his article in The Forum, December, 1893, reviewing Goldwin Smith's History of the United States.

9 Extra-Census Bulletin, No. 2, April 20, 1892.

PREHISTORIC POTTERY - MIDDLE MISSISSIPPI
VALLEY.

BY JAMES DAVIE BUTLER, LL. D.

[Address delivered at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893.]

The State Historical Society of Wisconsin has just added to its museum two hundred and fifty-four specimens of prehistoric pottery. Its purchase of the Perkins collection of copper implements, in 1875, rendered the Society easily first in that department of antiques. Nor was it far behind in the line of Indian curiosities, gathered by Governor Doty, and in relics of the stone age. The treasures of the ceramic art just now acquired form a new departure, and round up the circle of its exhibits. They are also more suited to spectacular display than any species of aboriginal remains which it has hitherto shown.

The new treasure-trove consists of two hundred and fifty-four pieces. They were all discovered in southeastern Missouri or northeastern Arkansas, in the Missouri counties of Scott, Mississippi, and New Madrid, and in Cross and Poinsett counties in Arkansas. All were found

They had

in graves of a depth of from two to five feet. usually been placed one each side of a skull. In transatlantic cemeteries similar vessels, when buried with the dead, were often purposely broken, either as a token of grief or to make them valueless in the eyes of graverobbers. But these Mississippi memorials were laid in the dust unbroken, and probably contained food or drink. Indeed, when exhumed, so many of them were still whole, that only about ten per cent of the number needed to have their fragments glued together.

The material is clay of various colors, but usually blackish. It is tempered with bits of shell, which often give it a pepper-and-salt appearance, the pepper predominating. All the articles are hand-made-showing no trace of any wheel manufacture, but they are moulded in forms. symmetrical and sometimes of classic elegance. None of this handiwork indicates acquaintance with the art of glazing - though some articles were rubbed smooth and reddened with ochre, or veneered with a different variety of clay. Not a few, in the shape of gourds or squashes, would seem to have been modeled and shaped on these natural moulds. Others show the forms of mud turtles, fishes, and various animals. A few imitate the human figure. One female, kneeling low, appears to be in an attitude and with a look of humble but earnest supplication.

The variety in form, size, and fashion is very considerable. There are shallow or wide-mouthed vessels which we term pans, bowls, basins, porringers, and cups, according to size and shape. One, seemingly copied from a shell, has a nose like a butter-boat. Where the mouths are somewhat narrower, we may call them pots, some of which would hold a pailful. Some pots have projections on their rims, or a sort of ears, through which thongs would slip to suspend them over a fire or elsewhere. Others run up in the style of longnecked birds, which serve as handles. The articles which are most narrow-mouthed, it is natural to call bottles. Of these some are as big-bellied as demijohns, while others are so slender that their bodies have only two or three times the diameter of their necks. At the base the bottles are either flattened, or they stand on three legs. When a neck supports the head of an animal, the animal's mouth sometimes forms the bottle mouth, but at other times that orifice is in the back of the animal's head. The ears of the human heads were pierced as if for ear-rings.

It will be observed that many styles of archaic pottery have no representatives in the collection we have now acquired. The coil pattern, for instance, so common further south and east, has here no existence. In this variety, the

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