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ANCIENT OLLA MANUFACTORY ON SANTA CATALINA ISLAND, CALIFORNIA*

Paul Schumacher

During my explorations along the Pacific coast I paid much
attention to the discovery of the workshops of one of the most

beautiful articles of true aboriginal workmanship. It is the olla, a
cooking vessel made of a species of steatite, the pot stone, or lapis
ollaris of old, of which Theophrastus and Pliny speak as a material

used for the manufacture of vessels among the ancient eastern nations.
My observations and notes, which I made while working on the mainland,
pointed to the islands in the Santa Barbara channel as the locality in
which the manufacture was carried on. I expressed the opinion in my

report to the Smithsonian Institution (Hayden's Bulletin, vol. iii, p.
50) that the site must be looked for on Santa Catalina island.    During
my last years's visit to the island, on behalf of the Peabody Museum,.
I discovered the first quarries in the locality called Pots valley.

The pits and quarries revealed the busy hand of the aborigines, among

the debris, in the partly-covered pits where cooking vessels were found
in all stages of finish, from the boulder but partly worked out from
the rock and still firmly attached to it, the globular form roughly

r'ounded, the boulder in which the excavation has already been commenced,
and so on to the smoothly finished pot.   All the implement's with which

the task was accomplished were also found, and by observing the progress
of the work in the many specimens discovered, it was not'difficult to

ascertain the mode of manufacture, the result of which I made a subject'
of an essay accompanied by illustrations (Report of the Peabody Museum,
1877). Not only were cooking vessels extensively manufactured on this
island,' but also flat dishes (which the Mexicans call Comales), cups,
pipes, stone rings which were used as weights for digging-sticks, and
all kinds of trinkets. These articles constituted the money of the
people of Santa Catalina, like the shell-beads of the neighboring

island of Santa Cruz, where they were extensively manufactured by the
aborigines, and whence they were distributed far along the coast, and
to some extent into the interior. The quarries are more abundant in

number towards the south-eastern end of Santa Catalina where for about
two miles square not less than three hundred quarries and pits were

discovered during my last visit, with a large number of pot-boulders,
sherds, tools, etc.

* American Naturalist, Vol. XII, No. 9, p. 629.   Philadelphia, 1878.