perished in the earthquake of 1899. A large part of the interior is covered with dense forests, and except along the coast the population is scanty. For the naturalist Ceram is without much interest, lacking characteristic species or abundance of specimens. The Bandanese pay occasional visits to shoot bears and deer; there are numbers of wild goats and cattle; and among birds are mentioned cassowaries, cockatoos, birds of paradise, and the swallows that furnish edible nests. A large number of fish are to be found in the various rivers; and as early as 1860 no fewer than 213 species were described. The most valuable timber tree is the iron-wood. Rice, maize, cocoa-nuts, sugar-cane and a variety of fruits are grown; and some tobacco is exported to Europe; but by far the most important production is the sago palm, which grows abundantly in the swampy districts, especially of Eastern Ceram, and furnishes a vast supply of food, not only to Ceram itself, but to other islands to the east. The Dutch have established cocoa and coffee plantations at various points. The coast-villages are inhabited by a mixed Malay population, Buginese, Macassars, Balinese and other races of the archipelago. The interior is occupied by the aborigines, a people of Papuan stock. They are savages and head-hunters. The introduction of Christianity was hampered by the baneful influence of a secret society called the Kakian Union, to which pagans, Mahommedans and Christians indiscriminately attached themselves; and it has several times cost the Dutch authorities considerable efforts to frustrate their machinations (see Tijdschrift van Ned. Ind., fifth year). The total population is estimated at 100,000, including 12,000 Christians and 16,000 Mahommedans. The chief settlements are Savai at the north and Elpaputeh at the south end of the isthmus of Taruno. There was a Dutch fort at Kambello, on the west side of Little Ceram, as early as 1646.
CERAMICS, or Keramics (κἐραμος, earthenware), a general term for the study of the art of pottery. It is adopted for this purpose both in French (céramique) and in German (Keramik), and thus has its convenience in English as representing an international form of description for a study which owes much to the art experts of all nations, though “ceramic” and “ceramics” do not appear in English as technical terms till the middle of the 19th century.
The word “pottery” (Fr. poterie) in its widest sense includes all objects fashioned from clay and then hardened by fire, though there is a growing tendency to restrict the word to the commoner articles of this great class and to apply the word “porcelain” to all the finer varieties. This tendency is to be deprecated, as it is founded on a misconception; the word “porcelain” should only be applied to certain well-marked varieties of pottery. The very existence of pottery is dependent on two important natural properties of that great and widespread group of rocky or earthy substances known as clays, viz. the property of plasticity (the power of being readily kneaded or moulded while moist), and the property of being converted when fired into one of the most indestructible of ordinary things.
The clays form such an important group of mineral substances that the reader must refer to the article Clay for an account of their occurrence, composition and properties. In this article we shall only deal with the various clays as they have affected the problems of the potter throughout the ages. The clays found on or close to the earth’s surface are so varied in composition and properties that we may see in them one of the vital factors that has determined the nature of the pottery of different countries and different peoples. They vary in plasticity, and in the hardness, colour and texture of the fired product, through an astonishingly wide range. To-day the fine, plastic, white-burning clays of the south of England are carried all over Europe and America for the fabrication of modern wares, but that is a state of affairs which has only been attained in recent times. Even down to the 18th century, the potters of every country could only use on an extensive scale the clays of their own immediate district, and the influence of this controlling factor on the pottery of bygone centuries has never yet received the attention it deserves.[1]
General Evolution of Pottery.—The primitive races of mankind, whether of remote ages or of to-day, took perforce such clay as they found on the surface of the ground, or by some river-bed, and with the rudimentary preparation of spreading it out on a stone slab if necessary and picking out any rocky fragments of appreciable size, then beating it with the hands, with stones or boards, or treading it with the feet to render it fairly uniform in consistency, proceeded to fashion it into such shapes as need or fancy dictated. Fired in an open fire, or in the most rudimentary form of potter’s kiln, such pottery may be buff, drab, brown or red—and these from imperfect firing become smoked, grey or black. How many generations of men, of any race, handed on their painfully acquired bits of knowledge before this earliest stage was passed, we can never know; but here and there, where the circumstances were favourable or the race was quick of observation, we can trace in the work of prehistoric man in many countries a gradually advancing skill based on increased technical knowledge. For ages tools and methods remained of the simplest—the fingers for shaping or building up vessels, a piece of mat or basket-work for giving initial support to a more ambitious vase,—until some original genius of the tribe finds that by starting to build up his pot on the flattened side of a boulder he can turn his support so as to bring every part in succession under his hand, and lo! the potter’s wheel is invented—not brought down from heaven by one of the gods to a favoured race, as the myths of all the older civilizations or barbarisms, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek, Scythian, and Chinese have fabled, but born from the brain and hand of man struggling to fulfil his allotted task.
Formerly every writer on the history of pottery seemed to imagine that the very rudest pottery must have been the invention of Egyptian, Chinese or some other distinct race from which the knowledge radiated to all the other races of the prehistoric world. No conception could be more erroneous. Since the middle of the 19th century research has established beyond doubt that wherever clay was found men became potters of a sort, just as they became hunters, carpenters, smiths, &c., by sheer force of need and slowly-gathered tradition. The not yet exploded view that Egypt or Assyria was the special cradle of this art, and that the pottery of the Greeks and Romans directly descended from such a parent stock, cannot survive in view of the incontestable evidence that pottery was made by the prehistoric peoples of what we now call Greece, Italy, Spain and other countries, long before they were aware that any other peoples lived on the earth than themselves.
For centuries this simple hand-made pottery was hardened by drying in the sun, so that it would serve for the storage of dried grain, &c., but the increasing use of fire would soon bring out the amazing fact that a baked clay vessel became as hard as stone. Then, too, came the knowledge that even in one district all the clays did not fire to the same colour, and colour decoration arose, in a rude daubing or smearing of some clay or earth (a ruddle or bole perhaps), which was found to give a bright red or buff colour on vessels shaped in a duller-coloured clay—most precious of all were little deposits of white clay which kept their purity unsullied through the fire,—and by these primitive means the races of the dawn made their wares. On this substructure all the pottery of the last four thousand years has been built, for behind all Egyptian, Greek or Chinese pottery we find the same primitive foundations.
We now reach the beginnings of recorded history, and as the great nations of the past emerge from the shadows they each develop the potter’s art in an individual way. The Egyptians evolve schemes of glowing colour—brilliant glazes fired on objects, shaped in sand held together with a little clay, or actually carved from rocks or stones; the Greeks produce their marvels
- ↑ The archaeologist is frequently puzzled as to the place of origin of some example of ancient pottery—was it made in the district where it was found, or had it been imported from some other centre? When we possess a sufficient body of analytical data obtained by the use of one general chemical method, an analysis of a fragment will frequently enable such a question to be answered, where now all is doubt and speculation. But the analytical results published hitherto are often not worth the paper they are printed on for such a purpose, the older methods of silicate analysis being only approximate.
