Among the ceramic remains from the oldest pueblo sites of the Southwest, pottery occurs, mostly in four varieties:  the corrugated or spiral; the plain, yet rough gray; white decorated with geometric figures in black; and red, either plain or decorated with geometric devices in black and white.  The gray or dingy brown, rough variety, resulted when a corrugated or coiled jar had been simply smoothed with the fingers and scraper before it was fired.  A step in advance, easily and soon taken, was the additional smoothing of the vessel by slightly wetting and rubbing its outer surface.  Even this was productive only of a moderately smooth surface, since, as learned by the Indian potters long before, in their experience with the clay-plastered parching-tray, it was necessary to mix the clay of vessels with a tempering of sand, crushed potsherds, or the like, to prevent it from cracking while drying; this, of course, no amount of rubbing would remove.  Hence, by another easy step, clay unmixed with a grit-tempering, made into a thin paste with water, and thickly applied to the half-dried jar with a dab or brash of soft fiber, gave a beautifully smooth surface, especially if polished afterward by rubbing with water-worn pebbles.  The vessel thus prepared, when burned, assumed invariably a creamy, pure white, red-brown or, other color, according to the quality or kind of the clay used in making the paste with which it had been smoothed or washed.

Thus was achieved the art of producing at will fictiles of different colors, with which simple suggestion painting also became easy.  Black, aside from clay paste, was almost the first pigment discovered; quite likely because the mineral blacks from iron ores, coal, and the various rocks used universally among Indians for staining splints, etc., would be the earliest tried, and then adopted, as they remained unchanged by firing.  Thus it came about, as evidenced by the sequence of early remains in the Southwest, that the white and black varieties of pottery were the first made, then the red and black, and later the red with white and black decoration.  Take, as an example, the latter.  Of course it was a simple mode to employ the red (ocherous) clay for the wash, the blue clay (which burned white) for the white pigment in making lines, and any of the black minerals above mentioned for other marking.

In these earliest kinds of painted pottery the angular decorations of the corrugated ware or of basketry were repeated, or at the farthest only elaborated, although on some specimens the suggestions of the curved ornament already occurred.  These resulted, I may not fear to claim, from carelessness or awkwardness in drawing, for instance, the corners of acute angles, which, “cutting across-lot” would, it may be seen, produce the wavy or meandering line from the zigzag, the ellipsoid from the rectangle, and so on.