Around AD 1050-1150, the people who created this bowl inhabited the Southwest region of what is present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. The Anasazi people were one of many ancient, village-dwelling people in that area. Some of their neighbors were the Hohokam, Mogollan, and Fremont Native peoples. Their name, ánaasázi, is actually a Navajo (Diné) name meaning “the Ancient Ones,” and being such ancient people they may have many descendants, such as the Hopi and Pueblo people who are still around today. They were nomadic people who foraged and moved around from area to area in the Southwest region in search of good weather, land to farm, plants to eat, game to hunt, and other Natives to trade with. 

The Anasazi distinct pattern is black-on-white painted ceramics and plan and textured gray cooking pottery, but this Anasazi bowl is very unique. Inside the bowl, there are nine faint lines going down from the rim and the lines do not touch or meet with another line all, and, additionally, there are marks as if the Anasazi potter attempted to erase the nine lines design he initially started. So what is so unique about this is that the painting of one design, where the lines don’t touch or meet, then proceeding to paint a completely different pattern of a checkerboard along the rim of the bowl, is all unusual for early Anasazi pottery. 

Could there have been a change beginning to their culture of pottery or an adaptation of another culture to theirs? Since they were nomadic people at one point, they could’ve seen other Natives’ designs and patterns on their pottery, and this Anasazi person wanted to try something different with his bowl. Through migration and trading, he could’ve seen and learned about the other Natives’ customs and traditions. 

Although the Anasazi people may be thought of as ancient, “prehistoric” people, even thousands of years ago they were more than keen and intelligent enough to conceive of the idea of using earthly clay, mineral pain, and fire to create bowls and drinking mugs with handles, and then doctorate them with checkerboard-like patterns and unique, interlocking geometric patterns. Just as they used to mold and create bowls and drinking mugs with handles from scratch with their bare hands and decorate them with paint thousands and thousands of years ago, we basically still follow the same fundamentals of pottery and ceramics they had then.

Many Pueblo people today prefer the term "Ancestral Puebloan" to "Anasazi." Read about why here. 

Works Cited

Axtell, Robert L., et al. “Population Growth and Collapse in a Multiagent Model of the Kayenta Anasazi in Long House Valley.” Proceedings of the NAtional Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 99, no. 3, 2002, pp. 7275-70. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3057853.

Education and Outreach Collections from the University of Chicago. Anasazi: 400AD-1300AD https://ecuip.lib.uchicago.edu/diglib/science/cultural_astronomy/cultures_anasazi-1.html.

Harlow, Francis H. The Olson-Brandelle North American Indian Art Collection, ed. Sherry C. Maurer, Augustana College, 2010, pp. 61-62.

Lister, Robert H. “The Beginnings: From the Archaic to About AD 900,” Anasazi Pottery (University of New Mexico Press, 1978), pp. 21-31.

Warburton, Miranda, and Richard M. Begay. “An Exploration of Navajo-Anasazi Relationships.” Ethnohistory, vol. 52, no. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 533-561.

Around AD 1100-1275, after being nomadic people in search of good weather and land and plan and animals to eat for some time, this Anasazi clan became sedentary people settling in the area of what is today southwestern Colorado. Since the San Juan River was nearby, they moved into the Mesa Verde area. The river provided them with resources, such as water, fish, and animals. They built water and soil control devices, such as reservoirs, terraces, and checkdams, so they were able to farm and raise crops, such as beans, squash, and maize, which is a kind of corn. 

Agriculture was very important to their way of life, so much so, that the weather also became just as important because they needed to know when was the right time to plant and harvest their crops. They had such an interest in the weather due to farming that it led them to watch the sun, moon, and sky. And so they built these unique structures out of straw and earth, so that they could measure and mark the time of year, like a calendar, for the equinoxes and solstices of the different seasons. As the Anasazi people tracked the sun in the sky, it captured their fascination so much that not only did they build their villages in a way that mirrored the sky they were looking at, but they also developed many religious beliefs to explain the path of the sun. 

As a result, they also built structures called “kivas,” where they would pray and hold ceremonies and formal meetings, but they were also used as a clubhouse for the Anasazi boys and men to hang out and eat food out of their decorative bowls and drink water out of their mugs with handles. Just like the decorative bowls were made by the Anasazi potters, so were the drinking mugs. For serving their drinks and food, they created white pottery with geometric patterns in black, and for storing food they made grey pottery with corrugated surfaces. 

The interlocking geometric design with zigzag motifs and crosshatching pattern painted on the mug by the Anasazi potter could’ve been inspired by many things, such as the different climates he experienced, the way his village was built and connected, the different kinds of relationships he was intertwined with, and the practices and beliefs he believed in. Or he could’ve simply just been looking at the woven pattern of a basket and mixed his own ideas with it and created something new. 

Although this decorative bowl and designed mug with a handle are from the past of thousands and thousands of years ago, we still use the same shaped bowls and mugs to this day to eat and drink. 

See a similar mug in the display case on the first floor of the Tredway Library.

Works Cited

Anasazi: 400AD-1300AD. Education and Outreach Collections from the University of Chicago. https://ecuip.lib.uchicago.edu/diglib/science/cultural_astronomy/cultures_anasazi-1.html

Colton, Harold S. “Reconstruction of Anasazi History.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 86, no. 2, 1943, pp. 264-69. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/985105.

Euler, Robert C. “Demography and Cultural Dynamics on the Colorado Plateaus.” The Anasazi in a Changing Environment, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1998, pp. 192-229.

Washburn, Dorothy K., et al. “ A Symmetry Analysis of Design Structure: 1000 Years of Continuity and Change in Puebloan Ceramic Design.” American Antiquity, vol. 75, no. 4, 2010, pp. 743-72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25766230.

This bowl was created by Amanda Swimmer in the 1980s but it has a unique style as if it was an older artifact. Swimmer was part of a revival of traditional pottery during that time period as part of a larger movement to recover language, arts, culture, and foodways that had been endangered by various geographic and cultural removals. 

Swimmer was born in 1921 in the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina, which is a territory that was purchased by the Eastern Band of Cherokee in 1871. She began to experiment with pottery, using clay from near her home and firing it in the yard with different woods that give the pots their different colors. She began working at the Oconoluftee Living History Center, which is run by the Cherokee Historical Association, and learned more about pottery by watching others. 

While her work and others’ such as that of Anna Belle Sixkiller Mitchell is often seen as a “revival” of practices that had been “lost,” the Eastern Band Cherokee kept their knowledge of pottery-making. After the Trail of Tears removal to Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee came back to their homelands in North Carolina and Tennessee, where a woman named Iwi made pottery. Swimmer learned more about pottery-making from women like Cora Arch Wahnetah (born in 1907), who learned from her mother and whose grandmothers on both sides were also potters. Her knowledge was important to the Cherokee Historical Association’s work to demonstrate traditional ways of making and firing pottery at Oconoluftee. 

An effigy bowl is made with a human or animal figure and represents the connection of human and nonhuman, spiritual and physical worlds, and life and death. While this one was not made to be functional, effigy bowls would have been used for a specific purpose, such as making medicine or for funerals. This bowl is alive with tradition and spirit.

Visit the site of the Oconoluftee Indian Village Living History Center.

Works Cited

Azar, Madelaine C. and Vincas P Steponaitis. “Modeling the Cosmos: Rim-effigy Bowl Iconography in the Central Mississippi Valley.” Archaeologies of Cosmoscapes in the Americas, ed. J. Grant Stauffer, Bretton T. Giles, and Shawn P. Lambert. Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2022, pp. 25-45. https://rla.unc.edu/personal/vps/articles/Azar%20&%20Steponaitis%202022%20(Cosmoscapes).pdf. 

Beason, Roxanne. “Lost and Found: Anna Belle Mitchell, Jane Osti, and the ‘Revival’ of Cherokee Pottery in Oklahoma.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture. May 20, 2022. https://cmsmc.org/publications/lost-and-found.

 “The Bigmeat Family: Eastern Cherokee Potters.” ClayHound Web - Cherokee Pottery. https://clayhound.us/gallery/61.htm . Accessed December 2024.

Farriello, M. Anna. “People: Amanda Swimmer.” Cherokee Traditions: From the Hands of our Elders. Western Carolina University, 2011.. https://www.wcu.edu/library/digitalcollections/cherokeetraditions/people/Potters_AmandaSwimmer.html

Farriello, M. Anna. “People: Cora Arch Wahnetah.” Cherokee Traditions: From the Hands of our Elders. Western Carolina University, 2011. https://www.wcu.edu/library/digitalcollections/cherokeetraditions/people/Potters_CoraWahnetah.html.

Shallow of Figures is a decorative bowl that conveys a sense of age, but contests the idea of the “Vanishing Indian.” Native Americans are still here and are not going anywhere. This art holds pieces of the past as well as the future. It gives us insight into ways of life and art in the past, in the fact that Native American decorative arts show a sense of artistry and humanity when mainstream society attempted to portray them as “savages” or “disappearing.”

This item makes me think of Egyptian artifacts being uncovered and how fragile they are. The bowl presents itself as an artifact, and that’s the artist’s intention. Smith is expressing his disdain for archaeologists and the way they have treated the deceased and “artifacts” of Native American culture. The bowl expresses this through its broken and jagged edges and the figures lying in the bottom of the bowl. These aspects are intentional to make the point that people should be respected and not treated as simple artifacts. Native American people are still here. 

These dismantled figures may also be a representation of how Native Americans’ homes and safe havens were taken away from them through violence and assimilation. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, they were forced to assimilate and for many this broke their culture and way of life. 

This section takes its title from the 2016 film What Was Ours, which follows a group of members of the Shoshone and Arapaho nations to Chicago to visit objects that were taken from them and are now at the Field Museum. Watch the trailer.

Works Cited

“Author Profile - Richard Zane Smith.” Studio Potter, https://studiopotter.org/richard-zane-smith. Accessed December 2024.

Sherry Maurer and Logan Beausoleil. The Olson Brandelle North American Indian Art Collection. Ed. Sherry Maurer. Rock Island: Augustana College, 2010,pp. 256-57.