Rautman,
Alison. 2010 A Bird Effigy Vessel (Patajos) from Central New Mexico.
Pottery Southwest 29(1):
2-11.
Rautman
discusses a headless duck-effigy ceramic vessel from a Glaze A pueblo
found in a burned room in the Salinas region of central New Mexico.
The hollow vessel is an unusual pottery style for this area. Other
duck-effigy pots have been reported elsewhere in the Southwest. These
ceramics are described as being duck, shoe, or boot shaped. Several
studies in the 1960s and 1970s talk about this type of vessel. They
claim that it is best viewed as a small cooking vessel. Although this
example has the duck-tail and wing nubs that show a clear relation to
a duck, it does not show any signs of being used for cooking. It is
much smaller in size and has black painted decorations. This seems to
be the only recorded duck effigy found in the Salinas region. This
vessel was found in the Frank's Ruin site, under a collapsed adobe
wall that had fallen on top of a burned stratum along with a large
amount of burned maize and several large sherds. The
duck effigy vessel is made of light colored gray clay (unslipped gray
ware or white ware). It was burned on the top of the body of the duck
and on the left side only, with only a small burned patch on the base
of the vessel. There is no handle. The vessel is unbroken, with only
a very small chip on the neck rim, and little sign of wear along the
rim. Unlike some duck effigy vessels from the northern Southwest,
there is no indication that this vessel ever included any head.
No
comparable duck effigy vessels have been found in the Salinas area
pueblos, but similar examples of painted headless duck vessels have
been found in the northern Southwest and in the Mimbres area. These
examples differ in the fact that they have handles and in the Mimbres
examples, have painted anthropomorphic faces. It is then suggested
that these vessels had some ceremonial function, but the fact that it
was found among foodstuffs, pottery and basketry suggests that any
ritual or ceremonial function was not incompatible with its inclusion
in daily activities.
Hegmon,
Michelle. 2002 Recent Issues in the Archaeology of the Mimbres Region
of the North American Southwest. Journal
Of Archaeological Research
10(4): 307-357.
The
Mimbres region on southwestern New Mexico is famous for its
spectacular pottery with naturalistic designs. Because of this, the
region is also infamous for the commercial looting of sites. Hegmon's
research in this region has focused on interpretations of social
organization and ideology based on architecture, mortuary patterns
and most importantly, pottery designs. The Mimbres region is
considered part of the larger Mogollon area. In general the Mogollon
are associated with pit houses and red and brown pottery, although
Mimbres also has above-ground architecture and black-on-white
pottery.
The
extraordinary paintings on Mimbres bowls and their placement in
burials suggest the possibility that the
black-on-white pottery was not made for daily or domestic
use. In much of the Puebloan Southwest, jars are far more common than
bowls, which are generally painted. A different pattern is seen in
the Mimbres region, where unpianted bowls are common and bowls are
more common than jars. Hegmon discussed Lyle's work which concluded
that bowls were used for more varied purposes than jars. She says
that many authors have made general statements about the various
motifs: there are many many rabbits, many animals in general, some
people, some “ritual” scenes, and very few plants. However, there
is no published study that systematically or
quantitatively considers the frequencies of various kinds of images
across a large or representative sample of Mimbres pottery. Hegmon's
main point is that there is no
published study that systematically deals with a number
of issues relating to one of the most famous pottery types in the
Southwest. They know a great deal about what is depicted in Mimbres
paintings in general, but these general impressions have yet to be
substantiated with detailed, systematic, quantitative analyses that
consider style, origin information, and the full range of designs.
It is interesting to me that your Hegmon 2002 article seemed to focus primarily on ceremonial pottery as both of my articles seem to have found that there is both ceremonial and plain, everyday pottery, if you will.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the Chacoan Great Houses are surrounded by ceremonial pottery, but there are also ceramic middens around that show evidence of a great deal of just regular usable pottery in various stages of production. Of course, the levels of production reduced later as Chaco imported ceramics from other areas for all of their needs.
The point of all this is I wonder why Hegmon only focused on ceremonial ceramics when there are often so many ceramics to be found in the Southwest.
Works Cited
Toll, H. Wolcott
2001 Making and Breaking Pots in the Chaco World American Antiquity 66(1):56-78