9 Pre-Columbian Pottery Vessels, Maya, Aztec, West Mexican + Anasazi

Pre-Columbian, Mexico and American Southwest, Maya, Aztec, West Mexican, and Anasazi cultures. A gathering of nine earthenware pieces drawn from several corners of the ancient Americas, their surfaces burnished, fire-clouded, and softened by long burial. The group comprises three jars, among them a wide-mouthed olla with everted rim and a pair of pedestal-necked bottles of West Mexican character, four hemispherical bowls of graduated size, a modeled pipe bearing a human face, and a shallow kidney-shaped Anasazi scoop or drinking vessel associated with the pueblo communities of the Colorado Plateau. Coil-built and hand-burnished rather than wheel-thrown, such wares served the daily rhythms of storage, serving, and offering, and frequently accompanied the dead as grave furniture. Unslipped or thinly slipped, they carry the potter's hand in every asymmetry, the tools of ordinary life rather than courtly display. The Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloan) scoop is the outlier in this assemblage, both geographically and technologically. Where Mesoamerican potters worked fine-tempered clays fired in open pits, the Colorado Plateau tradition favored sand and crushed-sherd tempers suited to mesa-top firing conditions in the Four Corners. Such asymmetric scoop and ladle forms are commonly recovered from pueblo room blocks and are generally interpreted as dippers for water or gruel drawn from larger storage ollas. The face pipe belongs to a widespread Mesoamerican habit of giving smoking implements human features, so that the act of drawing breath through the bowl animated the effigy. Tobacco (picietl) was burned in ritual, curing, and divination contexts, and effigy pipes are recovered from both domestic middens and offering deposits. Item # 203844

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