A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuñi Culture Growth.: Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882-83, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1886, pages 467-522Cushing, Frank Hamilton
History
A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuñi Culture Growth.: Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882-83, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1886, pages 467-522
Cushing, Frank Hamilton
Indian pottery -- North America; Zuni Indians
In quality of art quite as much as in that of material this local
influence was great. In the neighborhood of ruined pueblos which occur
near mineral deposits furnishing a great variety of pigment-material,
the decoration of the ceramic remains is so surprisingly and
universally elaborate, beautiful, and varied as to lead the observer
to regard the people who dwelt there as different from the people who
had inhabited towns about the sites of which the sherds show not only
meager skill and less profuse decorative variety, but almost typical
dissimilarity. Yet tradition and analogy, even history in rare
instances, may declare that the inhabitants of both sections were of
common derivation, if not closely related and contemporaneous.
Probably, at no one point in the Southwest was ceramic decoration
carried to a higher degree of development than at _A´ wat u i_, yet
the Oraibes, by descent the modern representatives of the _A´ wat u i
ans_ are the poorest potters and painters among the Mokis. Near their
pueblo the clay and other mineral deposits mentioned as abundant at
_A´ wat u i_ are meager and inaccessible. Still, it may be urged that
time may have introduced other than natural causes for change; this
could not be said of another example pertaining to one period and a
single tribe. I refer again to the Zuñis. The manufactures of Pescado
probably surpass in decorative excellence all other modern Pueblo
pottery, while both in their lack of variety and in delicacy of
execution of their painted patterns the fictiles of Ojo Caliente are
so inferior and diverse from the other Zuñi work that the future
archæologist will have need to beware, or (judging alone from the
ceramic remains which he finds at the two pueblos) he will attribute
them at least to distinct periods, perhaps to diverse peoples.
POTTERY INFLUENCED BY MATERIALS AND METHODS USED IN BURNING.
Other influences, to a less extent local, had no inconsiderable effect
on primitive Pueblo pottery: materials employed and methods resorted
to in burning.
Only one kind of fuel, except for a single class of vessels, is now
used in pottery-firing; namely, dried cakes or slabs of sheep-dung.
Anciently, several varieties, such as extremely dry sage-brush or
grease-wood, piñon and other resinous woods, dung of herbivora when
obtainable, charcoal, and also bituminous or cannel-coal were
employed. The principal agent seems, however, to have been dead-wood
or spunk, pulverized and moistened with some adhesive mixture so that
flat cakes could be formed of it. I infer this not alone from Zuñi
tradition, which is not ample, but from the fact that the sheep-dung
now used is called, in the condition of fuel, _kú ne a_, while its
name in the abstract or as sheep-dung simply is _má he_. Dry-rot wood
or spunk is known as _kú me_. In the shape of flat cakes it would be
termed _kú mo we_ or _kú me a_, whence I doubt not the modern word _kú
ne a_ is derived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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