Paddle-stamped pottery: The paddles

Submitted by Sammy Smith (sammy@thesga.org) Have you ever wondered what the paddles Native Americans made to stamp decorations on the outside of pottery looked like? W.H. Holmes included a plate illustrating three paddles made by Cherokees probably in the late nineteenth century in his report “Aboriginal Pottery of the Eastern United States,” which was printed in the Twentieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1898–1899 (published in 1903).