Ácoma, the sky city

Since the Ácoma potters are justly famous, a brief discussion of the ceramic art as practised by the Pueblo peoples is here introduced. In the determination of areas of material culture on the western continent, the cultivation of maize is particularly significant and widespread. Coextensive with maize growing is found some form of pottery. Since botanical evidence makes certain that the art of maize cultivation arose south of the Rio Grande,[255] we are safe in assuming that the art of pottery also originated beyond that region.

No account of Indian civilization can be attempted without some mention, however brief, of an art through which much of the development and kinship of the tribes may be traced. The sketch which I shall attempt to make here is largely based on the laborious and distinguished researches of Mr. F. H. Cushing and Dr. W. H. Holmes, which are to be found for the most part in the “Annual Reports” of the Bureau of Ethnology. It is regrettable that such valuable aids to study are not accessible in other form. The study of the pottery of the prehistoric pueblos, as I have said, furnishes one of the best clues to their inter-relationships, and the first idea of students was that it must also throw much light upon their racial origins. Further investigation, however, taught that

At the period of their discovery by Spain the Village Indians were living in the stone age, and they used, for the most part, stone tools; their religious symbols are therefore found on axes and knives as well as on pottery, or interwoven in baskets and blankets.

There are three groups of pottery accepted as existing in North America in the pre-Columbian era. These are the crude stone implements of the nomadic tribes of the Atlantic coast, the earthenware vessels found in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, and the advanced ceramics of the Pueblo peoples in the Southwest. Though we cannot here discuss the first two varieties, it is worth while, in passing, to note that the Mound Builders left behind them a vast number of pipes for smoking. These were made from a single piece of the hardest procurable stone carved to represent certain birds and animals. Moreover, their pipe sculpture betrays an art so superior to all else that they did that it makes evident how great an importance was probably attached to these pipes.

Smoking is an essential preliminary to, and element of, every ritual. Hence it follows, naturally enough, that

In the arid regions of the Southwest, water was so precious a commodity that the Pueblo peoples very early acquired skill in making receptacles for its transport and conservation and became, as Powell says, “the potters par excellence of aboriginal America.” Just as the first incentive toward the art of pottery grew out of the need of utensils for the preparation of foods, so to-day it is the most general and important motive for its creation. Profoundly influenced by the earlier art of basketry, pottery is always found in close relationship with its sister art wherever the two industries occur together. The nomad tribes would naturally prefer the basket because so much more easily transported from place to place, and they showed extraordinary skill in making cooking vessels of wicker that are not only water-tight but are of such beauty that they are to-day accounted almost priceless by collectors.

Of the more advanced pottery, Dr. Boas says, that of the Rio Grande pueblos was “a good deal behind the Peruvians artistically but second to none mechanically.” The Pueblo people have always dwelt in a land of cañons and high plateaus, rising from great stretches of sand that touch at last the far blue horizon. Here they were provided by nature with an inexhaustible supply of material suitable for pottery. Clay of a consistency perfectly adapted for this purpose is left by the sudden storms that wash through the deep arroyos and deposit therein a valuable sediment. The self-taught potters were not long in learning through experience just what admixture of sand would make this clay malleable and more durable. The colors of the stratified sandstone and clay taught them harmony as well as contrast, and the ochres and other mineral deposits provided them with the pigments they desired for the varied decoration of their jars. Thus was built up an art and a culture which deserves our admiration and should forever set at rest the careless assumption that the original Americans were a savage people at the time of the white invasion.

Gradually certain vessels came to be set aside for purposes of religious or Shamanistic ceremonials. Mortuary jars for a long time were apparently no other than those used by the departed one in life, but eventually, like those dedicated to other ritualistic necessities, funeral and grave jars were differentiated and set aside as something to be especially reverenced and never otherwise employed. Imperfect tinajas, or the still larger jars intended for storage, are much used for the chimneys of pueblo houses, being built up one upon another till the requisite height is attained, when a coating of adobe-mortar fills in all chinks and makes a smooth outer surface; but it is believed that this occurred only after Spanish influence was introduced. Before this innovation the smoke escaped through the hatchway. At first, all vessels were probably moulded by the fingers of the potter from a lump of material; then, copying the wicker coils of the basket-maker, the potter rolled in the hands long ropes of clay, mobile and easy to build up spirally into any desired form. Nothing resembling a potter’s wheel has ever been employed in the pueblos, but a shallow foot of wicker, or a piece of a gourd often serves as a temporary support in order that the jar may be revolved by a touch of the artist’s fingers, without injury to the clay coil. We find, of course, that most enviable characteristic of all hand-work—the slight variations in modelling and in decoration that are lost when more mechanical processes are employed. The quality of the material varied somewhat according to the use to be made of the jars. Those for storage, either of grain or of water, or those for dyeing wool where weaving is a local industry, are of coarse clay and are plainer and heavier than the small receptacles made for daily use. After the modelling would come the question whether the irregularities of surface were to be left ribbed or made smooth by scraping with the sharp edge of a bit of gourd, or of a broken shard, or fragment of obsidian. Jars are found with the roughnesses of the coils inside, and the outer surface carefully smoothed, but the commoner practice was the reverse of this, and indeed the Pueblo people showed at a very early stage their love of ornament by using a great variety of devices in the spiral coils. Thumb-nail indentations in regular patterns probably made one of the first of such decorative adjuncts. Sometimes the coil is crimped throughout the whole surface, and again the body of the vessel will be smoothed and the coils left only upon the shoulder and collar. More and more elaborate patterns, wave-like or of incised lines, or overlapping in scale design, were invented and varied in a multitude of ways. The next innovation was modelling in relief, and this was soon followed by painting. Black appears to have been the first pigment discovered, and the black-and-white pottery is considered the oldest; but it could not be long before an artist living in a land of color would wish to use color on the light surface of jars, and would begin to reproduce designs familiar in natural objects. Such ornament followed closely in the footsteps of basketry and textiles. Meander patterns and geometric adaptations of rectilinear outlines were employed in both arts in an infinite variety of designs.[258] Dr. Holmes thinks that very little decoration was invented outright and that, like the forms of pottery, it originated in copying natural objects such as the exquisite shells, whose surfaces are “embellished with ribs, spines, nodes and colors.” “Clay,” he says, “is so mobile it can be made to record or echo a vast deal of nature and of co-existent art.”[259] The conch-shell may have suggested, to the imaginative mind of the native artist, spiral forms of vessels, as well as the convenient addition of handles, and also must have helped the painter to adapt rectilinear lines to the curved surfaces of the jars.

Colors were always used symbolically as well as decoratively on every kind of vessel, whatever its material. While watching a potter at Ácoma I was interested to notice that the first delicate hair-lines around the lip of a jar were never quite closed together. The space left was so tiny it would not be noticed as an imperfection, and it was most illuminating afterward to read that Cushing was told by a Zuñi woman that this little unfilled space was “the exit trail of life and being.” Cushing goes on to say that when at length a pot is dried, polished, and decorated,

This vague feeling that any and all jars have some sort of personality is further illustrated by the belief that the noise made when a pot is struck is the voice of the spirit within, and the louder note of a pot when broken is similarly the cry of the spirit escaping from the imprisoning clay.

The superstition that to close completely an ornament is unlucky must be as widely diffused as any primitive belief, for it is a well-known fact that, among the weavers and embroiderers and painters of Greece and the Balkans, no design is ever quite joined. A tiny bit that does not mar the effect is always left unfinished.

The extent and variety of ways in which the Indian depicts his idea of the source or breath of life is vividly illustrated by Cushing in his “Decorative Symbolism.”[261] For example, clouds or many another “phenomenon of nature held sacred and mysterious” by the Indian are conventionalized by the potter for decorative purposes. Thus the terraced or stepped rim of a round bowl is the symbol of the horizon whence rise the clouds. The painted decoration on jars conveys the same idea, and the pendant drops from many an ornament represent the falling rain. The art of ornament is everywhere a conservative one and depends greatly upon the general development of culture in the nation practising it; or, as Dr. Holmes puts it: “The character of ornamentation does not depend so much upon the age of the art, as upon the acquirements of the potter and his people in other arts.”

Though the work of all pueblo potters is free-hand, it is never haphazard. The Indian friend whom we watched through a long day of work at Ácoma had no pattern, no visible rule, nor did she measure out any spaces for her most elaborate designs. Though she did not tell us how many more she knew than the ten designs we saw, she did say that she knew exactly from the starting of each what the whole would become. The brush used is very limber, being made from two or three strands of yucca fibre about three inches in length. With this flexible tool she adapted her pattern to the curved surfaces, without embarrassment or erasures, and with as little difficulty as one might have in tracing a flat drawing in a book. It is no doubt a convenience to restrict the preparation of colors for any one particular time, and on that day she used only black, yellow, and brown colors.

After the decoration is completed there is the process of firing. The chalk-white clay acquires a mellow tint, varied according to the fuel used. Age, and especially daily use over the fire, deepen and beautify this surface tone so that the older a jar, the more delightful is it to possess. In the museum at Santa Fé a large case of jars, all marked as coming from Ácoma, shows that the modern potters are using old designs, often mingled with those believed to have originated at Sía. In earlier days many kinds of fuel were used for the firing process, such as very dry greasewood, sagebrush, or piñon, though wherever cannel coal was found it was given preference. The worst method ever employed was burying the green pot under hot ashes and encircling it with a blazing fire. The better and more usual practice is to dig a little kiln in the ground, or, as is perforce the only way at Ácoma, to hollow out a space in the rock. This is lined with dried cakes of sheep dung—now the universal and almost exclusive fuel in all pueblos. The jars are fitted into this shallow kiln and a dome-like structure of dung is built above, after which the whole is slowly fired. The dung is thought by the Indians to bake the ware more evenly than the resinous woods, but Cushing thinks this fuel so inferior that to its use in great measure can be attributed the deterioration of modern ceramics in the pueblos. Resinous woods cannot be used where the color is the important thing, but the

No principle of true glaze is now known to the pueblo potters, but in early days a genuine glaze was used purely for decoration. Being spread over only a part of the surface, it added nothing toward making a jar water-tight.

I have found no indication that the Ácomas ever followed any other art than that of pottery, but it is quite possible this may be only their share of the partitioning of the industries agreed upon by the pueblos in comparatively recent time. However, since to-day the sole artistic occupation of the Ácomas appears to be in ceramics, I have omitted, in the consideration of Pueblo arts, both textiles and basketry. With regard to the pottery, Dr. Fewkes says that, in the absence of more definite insight,

Though the pottery of the Ácomas is less durable than that of the Zuñis, its designs have much more variety—trees and leaves, birds and flowers, being introduced along with geometrical patterns. There are specific reds and grays used in the Ácoma and Zuñi pottery; and a bright green pigment applied in circular blotches before firing, that gives something approaching a glaze afterwards, is found at both Ácoma and Laguna.

Among those pueblos where pottery and earthenware utensils form a conspicuous feature of their civilization, Mr. James Stevenson[263] mentions Ácoma and the great similarity of its pottery to that of Laguna, though the Laguna potters use more colors. He calls some of the designs at Ácoma “very spirited.” Many of the jars in the Santa Fé museum have combinations of Ácoma and Sía designs—the bird of each pueblo being quite distinct.

We may briefly summarize here the value of our knowledge concerning ceramics to the other forms of cultural development of any people and find it applicable to the inter-relationships of those American Indians who practised the art. Since it can never be known when the modelling of clay was first practised, there is fascination in the suggestion that it came in some long-past day when a man walking on clay softened by rain noticed his own footprints. The rudest savage may well have discovered with what ease he could fashion a crude but useful vessel from moist earth, but the first baking of such a utensil probably occurred through some happy accident. We know that sun-dried bricks were used in early building, but no clay cups thus treated would have served to hold liquids.

The student searching for some standard by which to measure the creative attainment of a semi-civilized race has chosen as most universal the work of the early potters, and the interesting fact is disclosed that the first attempts in ceramics of all peoples are curiously alike in processes, in modes of decoration, and in adaptation to practical needs. There is in the decorative addition of painting to pottery something much more valuable than mere ornament, namely, a conventionalized representation, graphically expressed, of the mythology and the social habits of a race, so that even without written records it becomes possible for us to form a fairly clear idea of its cultural development. In short, the study of pottery has disclosed so much of race origins that it is now regarded as essential to an understanding of the history and mythology, and, in many countries, of the industries no less than of the arts, of ancient peoples.

The student of American ceramics accepts the theory prevailing to-day to the effect that the aborigines of this continent came from Asia, not all at once but in successive migrations, bringing with them customs and arts from many different sources at many different times; and our hope to-day is that the modifications brought about by the meeting and mingling of these various migratory streams will be finally made clear through the patient work of the experts as new ceramic “finds” are unearthed throughout the continent.