Kayenta Anasazi Black on White Bowl with Hatched Bands

Native American, Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi), Kayenta Branch. A hemispherical earthenware bowl painted in dense organic black on a chalky white slip, the interior given over to broad panels of fine parallel lines set at opposing diagonals so that the light ground reads as a lattice of negative stripes. A narrow band of ticked dashes runs along the rim, and the lower interior is left plain, a deliberate pause that lets the busy upper register carry the eye. The exterior is unslipped and unpainted, its surface bearing faint traces of coil scraping. Vessels of this scale served as food bowls in Ancestral Puebloan households of the Four Corners, though examples in good condition were also placed as mortuary offerings. The tight, hatched geometry is characteristic of the Kayenta branch potters of northeastern Arizona and southern Utah. Kayenta potters, working the canyon country west of Chinle Wash and north into the Utah strip, developed one of the most disciplined design vocabularies in the Ancestral Puebloan world. Where Chaco and Mesa Verde painters favored broad solids and interlocked scrolls, Kayenta artisans pursued density: fields of hairline hatching, opposed diagonals, and eventually the full negative style of Tusayan Polychrome, in which the white ground rather than the pigment carries the pattern. The paint is a carbon (organic) black, reduced from boiled tansy mustard or Rocky Mountain beeweed, fired in a reducing atmosphere so it sinks into the slip rather than sitting on it, which explains the soft, slightly grey tone rather than the hard iron-mineral black of contemporaneous Cibola wares. Item # 204502

Estimate:£340.53

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