Papers of the Southwestern expedition, no. 2

Pueblo pottery making: a study at the village of San Ildefonso

The present paper is a careful study by Dr. Guthe of pottery making at San Ildefonso, a typical Pueblo Indian town on the Rio Grande, north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The field-work was undertaken in 1921 as part of an archaeological survey of the Southwest, that has been carried on for a number of years by the Department of Archaeology of Phillips Academy. From prehistoric archaeology to modern pottery making may seem a far cry, but in the Southwest the past merges almost imperceptibly into the present, and the Pueblos of today live in almost exactly the same way, and practise almost exactly the same arts, as did their ancestors of a thousand years ago. In the Southwest, therefore, the archaeologist has the invaluable opportunity of observing, and of studying at first hand, the life whose earlier remains he unearths from the ancient ruins. When one considers what such a privilege would mean to the excavator in, for example, the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, or the Neolithic village-sites of Europe, it becomes obvious that the Southwestern archaeologist should devote a not inconsiderable part of his time to the study of that industrious, kindly, hospitable, and thoroughly charming folk, the Pueblo Indians. Living a sedentary, agricultural life in an arid country it was inevitable that the Pueblos should early have developed into expert and prolific potters; and so pottery, in the form of sherds scattered about their former dwellings, and of vessels piously interred with their dead, is the most striking, the most abundant, and the most readily accessible form of evidence to be dealt with by the Southwestern archaeologist. The value of pottery to the student of the past cannot be more happily expressed than in the words of the historian Myres: When with the soft clay which has, so to say, no natural shape or utility at all, the human hand, guided by imagination, but otherwise unaided, creates a new form, gourd-like, or flask-like, or stone-bowl-like, but not itself either gourd, or skin, or stone, then invention has begun, and an art is born which demands on each occasion of its exercise a fresh effort of imagination to devise, and of intellect to give effect to, a literally new thing. It is a fortunate accident that the material in question, once fixed in the given form by exposure to fire, is by that very process made so brittle that its prospect of utility is short; consequently the demand for replacement is persistent. The only group of industries which can compare with potmaking in intellectual importance is that of the textile fabrics; basketry and weaving. But whereas basket-work and all forms of matting and cloth are perishable and will burn, broken pottery is almost indestructible, just because, once broken, it is so useless. It follows that evidence so permanent, so copious, and so plastic, that is to say so infinitely sensitive a register of the changes of the artists mood, as the potsherds on an ancient site, is among the most valuable that we can ever have, for tracing the dawn of culture. Myres wrote of arid Egypt, and in many ways conditions in the likewise arid Southwest, where a primitive people were also building up for themselves through agriculture a new type of civilization, closely parallel those of the Nile Valley in{2} predynastic times. And the analogy, naturally enough, holds good in the matter of archaeological methods. The rise and spread of the predynastic cultures of Egypt are being traced out in large part by studies of ceramic types and of their stratigraphic relation one to another. The same methods are applicable, and indeed are now beginning to be applied, to the problems of the Southwest. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 67221
Author: Guthe, Carl E. (Carl Eugen)
Release Date: Jan 22, 2022
Format: eBook
Language: English
Publisher: Yale Univ Press
Publication Date: 1925
Publisher Country: United States