clays of several varieties and color minerals are abundant. The finest
pottery of the tribe is made there in great quantity, while,
notwithstanding the facilities for transportation which the Zuñis now
possess, at the opposite farming town of _K‘iáp kwai na kwin_, or Los
Ojos Calientes, where clay is scarce and of poor texture, the pottery,
although somewhat abundant, is of miserable quality and of bad shape.

In quality of art quite as much as in that of material this local
influence was great. In the neighborhood of ruined pueblos which occur
near mineral deposits furnishing a great variety of pigment-material,
the decoration of the ceramic remains is so surprisingly and
universally elaborate, beautiful, and varied as to lead the observer
to regard the people who dwelt there as different from the people who
had inhabited towns about the sites of which the sherds show not only
meager skill and less profuse decorative variety, but almost typical
dissimilarity. Yet tradition and analogy, even history in rare
instances, may declare that the inhabitants of both sections were of
common derivation, if not closely related and contemporaneous.
Probably, at no one point in the Southwest was ceramic decoration
carried to a higher degree of development than at _A´ wat u i_, yet
the Oraibes, by descent the modern representatives of the _A´ wat u i
ans_ are the poorest potters and painters among the Mokis. Near their
pueblo the clay and other mineral deposits mentioned as abundant at
_A´ wat u i_ are meager and inaccessible. Still, it may be urged that
time may have introduced other than natural causes for change; this
could not be said of another example pertaining to one period and a
single tribe. I refer again to the Zuñis. The manufactures of Pescado
probably surpass in decorative excellence all other modern Pueblo
pottery, while both in their lack of variety and in delicacy of
execution of their painted patterns the fictiles of Ojo Caliente are