Mississippian Caddo Engraved Blackware Bottle

Native American, Caddo, Mississippian period. A swelling globular body rises to a tall, tapering neck finished with a plain everted lip, the burnished surface fired to smoky charcoal gray that warms to soft brown across the shoulder and lower wall. Two fine horizontal lines encircle the base of the neck, and from them descend clustered vertical and hooked strokes that mark out widely spaced panels, incised with a sharp point into leather-hard clay before firing. Long-necked bottles of this kind rank among the most accomplished work of Caddo potters in the Southeastern Woodlands, raised by coil and paddle and polished with a smooth pebble. Vessels of the form held liquids and are recovered most frequently from burials, where they likely accompanied the dead as offerings of prestige and sustenance. The Caddo, ancestors of the modern Caddo Nation, held a homeland spanning what is now northeastern Texas, southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and southeastern Oklahoma. Their potters worked without the wheel, then fired in a reducing atmosphere that drew carbon into the clay body and yielded the characteristic dark gray to black surface. Engraved bottles are the diagnostic Caddo achievement, and their scroll, meander, and hooked-line vocabularies underpin the named types (Hickory Engraved, Haley Engraved, Ripley Engraved, and others) by which archaeologists build regional chronologies. The underside carries an old ink collection notation, "Fowler B3 108", the sort of mark left by a private cabinet rather than an institution. The convention is consistent with a burial-provenience shorthand, in which the letter-and-numeral pair designates an interment and the following figure the sequence of objects recorded from it. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 202990

Estimate:£224.25

View all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorEthnographical