蘭嶼島上十個頂著水瓶的雅美族婦女

[英文]Women in striped dresses carry ceramic jars in front of a bamboo-and-thatch building. According to Chen Chi-lu, only the Ami and Yami continued to manufacture pottery into the 1950s and 1960s. While pottery-making was women$s work among the Ami, it was men$s work on Orchid Island. The pottery pictured here are for storing water. Kano Tadao writes: @Water for drinking or culinary use is always drawn from an open or artesian well inside the village. Besides the puraranaum, a water pot used for carrying and storage, a bamboo cylinder or a coconut-shell may be used for the same purpose. ..Sea-water is often used for boiling fish@ (Kano 1956, p. 234). Chen Chi-lu adds: @For a cooking pot or water vessel, the Yami potter first puts a leaf...on the ground, and puts the clay on the leaf. A pancake of clay forms the base. Clay strips are then built up on it to form the wall of the vessel. It is then shaped by hand and by paddle and anvil to the desired form. Finally it is finished by paddle and anvil when half dry and smoothed with the edge of the bamboo engraver....When a water vessel is made, a concave base is obtained by hand pressure when it is half dry....After the pots or bowls have been completely shaped, they are never exposed to direct sunlight, but are wind-dried for several days, usually in the upper story of the working hut. Sometimes the drying is hastened by arranging the pots or bowls around a slow-burning fire on the lower floor of the hut....After a one meter square crib of meter-long fuel logs have been formed on the ground in such a way as to allow circulation of air underneath, the pots and bowls are then arranged on a floor within the crib, with the bases resting on the fuel. Additional fuel is then stacked around and over the vessels. The pile is fired from the top, the air circulating around the pots from underneath and creating an excellent draft....Making and firing pottery requires great skill and the pots are often broken in manufacture. In consequence, potters observe numerous taboos during the pottery-making season@ (Chen 1968, pp. 115-116).