Color terms and consonant symbolism

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, [ISO-8859-1] A.W. Tüting wrote:
>   I just found another piece of information. The Catawba valley potters
> let their clay age, just like what the Chinese have been doing it since
> ancient time. This gives more plasticity of the clay. I don't know if
> other cultures does the same, or when the Catawba potters learned it.
> These Catawba potters are not necessarily Catawba Indians. I think
> there are no pure Catawba Indians any more because of their custom to
> marry outside and their small population. "

I think there might be some vagueness on the chronology here.  I assume
that aboriginal Catawba pottery was a thing of the past by the 1700s, if
the progress of matters in the East was anything like that in the
Mississippi Valley.  Most of the Mississippi Valley Siouan groups were
quite vague on the whole process of making pots by the late 1800s, as they
had been using trade equivalents for so long.  Radin elicited quite a
fanciful process from Winnebago speakers.  Whether any modern Catawba
folks have taken up ceramics again, I couldn't say.

> It appears that the aging process of clay mixtures seems to be a pretty
> common way of processing worldwide (with regard to pottery in general
> and not restricted to the production of porcelain).

Not sure if this last was Alfred or his friend speaking, but I recall
seeing some discussion of tempering in the friend's web site, and I can
report that adding burnt shell to clay as temper is one of the diagnostic
features of Mississippian cultures (from c. 1000 AD and earlier),
including Oneota, which has a sort of rough equivalence with early
Mississippi Valley Siouan.  It's thought that the lime this added to maize
boiled in the pots helped break it down to make it more digestible.
Earlier and peripheral areas used fine sand and also "grog"  - crushed
sherds of earlier pottery - as temper.

It's not clear to me on what basis and at what time Mt. Unaker was named,
i.e., whether by the European commercializers of the kaolin digging
operations, or earlier, by the Cherokee.  There are a fair number of
"White Mountains" in the world, of course, named so for various reasons.
I recently drove over Red Hill Pass in South Park and noticed that the
slopes were indeed somewhat reddish, especially by contrast with the soil
of the main park basin.