Feather symbol in ancient Hopi design / by Jesse Walter Fewkes.

  • Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 1850-1930.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Feather symbol in ancient Hopi design / by Jesse Walter Fewkes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ican Ethnology, under the auspices of which institution these objects were collected, will describe these variations in detail, and as this report is elaborately illustrated, the reader will soon have abundant published material from which to study modifi¬ cations of the feather symbol in ancient Tusayan. We have no difficulty in recognizing among the many figures of animals which the ancient Hopi potter depicted on her wares the great group to which any one belongs. Four-legged animals of two kinds, frogs and lizards, are readily separated from mam¬ mals; apodal reptiles or snakes are easily distinguished from both, and there is no difficulty in separating the moth or butter¬ fly from the spider or dragon-fly. The great group to which the animal depicted belongs is not difficult to discover, and from a large series of related designs one may trace quite readily the changes in form which have resulted in highly conventionalized modifications. The most constant group of animals chosen for realistic or symbolic representation on ancient Tusayan ceramic ware is that of birds. More than two-thirds of all the pictographs on ancient pottery where animals are intended represent avian forms. The modifications which these figures pass through as they become conventionalized likewise exceed in number and variety those of any other animals, and a comprehensive study of the different symbols representing birds would be a most interesting and in¬ structive one. This study is important as a ground-work for the following conclusions, for in no other way can we identify as feathers some of the highly modified symbols which are here con¬ sidered. An adequate discussion of different forms of birds in ancient designs would necessitate more pages of text and illus¬ trations than could here be devoted to it. If my conclusions seem hasty, I must ask the reader not to reject them without ex¬ amining collateral evidences which I have elsewhere presented. The ancient Hopi decorator not only represented birds in many more different shapes than she did other animals, but even decorated other animals with feathers in accordance with ancient traditions. Nor did she stop with animals ; symbolic figures of the sun or the lightning or the rainbow have symbols of feathers attached to them, and this, to us incongruous, associa¬ tion is often essential to indicate the symbol. This predomi¬ nance in the number of pictures of feathered gods is a faithful