Prehistoric Anasazi Tularosa Black-on-White Olla

Native American, Ancestral Puebloan, Tularosa Black-on-White. A wide-shouldered olla of buff ceramic, its globular body rising to a short cylindrical neck and everted lip, dressed overall in a chalky white slip and painted in dark mineral pigment. The body carries a dense field of interlocking stepped scrolls and sawtooth-edged frets, the negative white lines reading as forcefully as the painted ones, a hallmark of the Tularosa design vocabulary. The neck is banded separately with rectilinear panels and pendant dot clusters, divided from the shoulder by a framing line and a row of tick marks. Vessels of this scale served household storage of water, grain, or seed in the pueblos of the Cibola and Mogollon Rim country, where such painted jars doubled as statements of a potter's command of layout. The rim interior retains traces of the same dark pigment. Tularosa Black-on-White belongs to the Cibola White Ware tradition of west-central New Mexico and east-central Arizona, produced during the Pueblo III horizon. Its diagnostic signature is the interlocking scroll: opposed spirals built from solid and hatched elements, arranged so that the unpainted ground carries equal weight to the pigment. Painters worked with a mineral-based iron paint over a kaolinite slip, firing in a reducing atmosphere to hold the white ground bright. The type is closely allied to Reserve Black-on-White, from which it develops, and the two are often separated by the increasing dominance of scroll layouts and the finer hatching that distinguishes Tularosa work. Item # 204503

Estimate:£454.04

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