Caddo Greyware Bottle - Burnished Globular Body, Tall Flaring Neck

Native American, Caddo. A generous globular body swells outward at the shoulder before tapering to a slender, gently flaring neck, the whole raised by coil and hand from a fine grog-tempered clay. The surface, burnished with a smooth stone while leather-hard, carries the soft grey-to-charcoal mottling of a reduction firing, its unpainted skin lit only by the play of light across faint smudges and pits. Bottles of this form served the Caddo peoples of the Red River valley and adjoining Southeast as containers for liquids, likely including infusions consumed in ritual and social settings, and were frequently interred with the dead as grave furniture. Its authority is entirely one of proportion: a swelling belly answered by a rising column, form purified of ornament. Caddo ceramics rank among the technically finest wares produced in native North America. Working without the potter's wheel, Caddo artisans built vessels by coiling, then compacted and polished the walls to a near-metallic sheen before firing in a smothered, oxygen-starved fire that turned the clay grey to black. Bottle forms of this kind cluster in mound and cemetery contexts across the Caddoan Mississippian heartland (present-day northeastern Texas, southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and southeastern Oklahoma), where they accompanied burials as part of an elaborate mortuary program. Plain, unengraved examples such as this one emphasize silhouette alone and are often assigned to types within the broader plain greyware family, a determination best confirmed by paste and temper analysis. Item # 202884

Estimate:£227.02

View all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPorcelain & Pottery