Ceramics of Indigenous peoples of the Americas


Ceramics of Indigenous peoples of the Americas is an art form with at least a 7500-year history in the Americas. Pottery is fired ceramics with clay as a component. Ceramics are used for utilitarian cooking vessels, serving and storage vessels, pipes, funerary urns, censers, musical instruments, ceremonial items, masks, toys, sculptures, and a myriad of other art forms.
Due to their resilience, ceramics have been key to learning more about pre-Columbian Indigenous cultures.

Materials and techniques

The clay body is a necessary component of pottery. Clay must be mined and purified in an often laborious process, and certain tribes have ceremonial protocols to gathering clay. Different tribes have different processes for processing clay, which can include drying in the sun, soaking in water for days, and repeatedly running through a screen or sieve. Acoma and other Pueblo pottery traditionally pound dry clay into a powder and then remove impurities by hand, then running the dry powder through a screen, mixing it with a dry temper, and then mixing water to create a plastic paste. In preparing the clay, potters spend hours wedging it to remove air pockets and humidity that could easily cause it to explode during firing. The clay then needs to "cure" over time.
Coiling is the most common means of shaping ceramics in the Americas. In coiling, the clay is rolled into a long, thin strands that are coiled upon each other to build up the shape of the pottery. While the potter builds the coils up, she also blends them together until there was no trace of the ropes of clay entwined to form the pot, no deviation in the thickness of the walls, and therefore no weaknesses. Potter's wheels were not used prior to European contact and are only used today by a limited number of Native American artists. Pinch pots and other small clay objects could be formed directly by hand. Hohokam potters and their descendants in the American Southwest employed the paddle-and-anvil technique, in which the interior clay wall of a pot was supported by an anvil, while the exterior was beaten with a paddle, smoothing the surface. In precontact South America, ceramics were mass-produced using molds.
Slip is a liquid clay suspension of mineral pigments applied to the ceramics before firing. Slips are typically red, buff, white, and black; however, Nazca culture ceramic artists in Peru perfected 13 distinct colors of slips. They also used a hand-rotated turntable that allowed all sides of a ceramic piece to be painted with ease. These were first used in 500 BCE and continue to be used today. Slips can be applied overall in washes, creating large color fields, often with cloth, or they can be painted in fine detail with brushes. Yucca leaves, chewed slightly to loosen fibers, make excellent brushes that are still in use today in the American Southwest. Negative painting is a technique employed by precontact Mississippian potters in the Eastern Woodlands, Mayan potters in Mesoamerica, and others, which involves covering the ceramic piece in beeswax or another resist, incising a design in the resist, then soaking the piece with a slip. In the firing process the resists melts away, leaving the colored design.
While still green, pottery can be incised with designs. Cords, textiles, baskets, and corncobs have been rolled over wet clay, both as a decoration and to improve heat dispersion in cooking pots. Carved wood or ceramic stamping paddles are used throughout the Southeastern Woodlands to create repeating designs. Clay can also be added to the main ceramic structure to build up designs.
Before firing, ceramics can be burnished or polished to a fine sheen with a smooth instrument, usually a stone. Glazes are seldom used by Indigenous American ceramic artists. Grease can be rubbed onto the pot as well.
Prior to contact, pottery was usually open-air fired or pit fired; precontact Indigenous peoples of Mexico used kilns extensively. Today many Native American ceramic artists use kilns. In pit-firing, the pot is placed in a shallow pit dug into the earth along with other unfired pottery, covered with wood and brush, or dung, then set on fire whereupon it can harden at temperatures of 1400 degrees or more. Finally, the ceramics surface is often polished with smooth stones.

Tempers

Tempers are non-plastic materials added to clay to prevent shrinkage and cracking during drying and firing of vessels made from the clay. Tempers may include:
  • Bone;
  • Chaff;
  • Charcoal;
  • Wood ash ;
  • Grit;
  • Sand, crushed sandstone;
  • Crushed limestone;
  • Crushed igneous rocks, such as volcanic rock, feldspar, or mica;
  • Grog;
  • Plant fiber;
  • Mollusc shells, freshwater and marine, crushed;
  • Freshwater sponge spicules.
Not all Indigenous American pottery requires added tempers; some Hopi potters use pure kaolin clay that does not require tempering. Some clays naturally contain enough temper that they do not required additional tempers. This includes mica or sand in clays used in some Taos Pueblo, Picuris Pueblo, and Hopi pottery, and sponge spicules in the clay used to produce the "chalky ware" of the St. Johns culture.
Ceramics are often used to identify archaeological cultures. The type of temper used helps to distinguish the ceramics produced by different cultures during particular time periods. For example, the Hohokam used schist containing silver mica as a temper in their plainware; the shiny particles of the mica gave the pottery a mystical shimmer. Grog, sand, and sandstone were all used by Ancestral Pueblo people and other Southwestern cultures. Crushed bone was used as temper in at least some ceramics at a number of sites in Texas. In the Southeastern United States, the earliest ceramics were tempered with fiber such as Spanish moss and palmetto leaves. In Louisiana, fiber as tempering was replaced first by grog and later by shell. In peninsular Florida and coastal Georgia sand replaced fiber as tempering. Still later, freshwater sponge spicules became an important temper in the "chalky ware" of the St. Johns culture in northeastern Florida. Locally produced ceramics of the Lucayan people in the Bahamas were characterized by crushed conch shell tempering, as opposed to the quartz sand-tempered ware imported from Hispaniola.
The choice of temper used in ceramics was constrained by what was available, but changes in the choice of temper can provide clues to influence and trade relations between groups. Shell-tempered ware was produced sporadically in various places across the eastern United States, but in the late Woodland and early Mississippian periods it became the predominant temper used across much of the Mississippi Valley and middle Gulf coast, and a major defining characteristic of Mississippian culture pottery.

Origin and spread

The earliest ceramics known from the Americas have been found in the lower Amazon Basin. Ceramics from the Caverna da Pedra Pintada, near Santarém, Brazil, have been dated to between 7,500 and 5,000 years ago. Ceramics from Taperinha, also near Santarém, have been dated to 8,000 to 7,000 years ago. Some of the sherds at Taperinho were shell-tempered, which allowed the sherds themselves to be radiocarbon dated. These first ceramics-making cultures were fishers and shellfish-gatherers.
Ceramics appeared next across northern South America and then down the western side of South America and northward through Mesoamerica. Ceramics of the Alaka culture in Guyana have been dated to 6,000 to 4,500 years ago. Ceramics of the San Jacinto culture in Colombia have been dated to about 4530 BCE, and at Puerto Hormiga, also in Colombia, to about 3794 BCE. Ceramics appeared in the Valdivia culture in Ecuador around 3200 BCE, and in the Pandanche culture in Peru around 2460 BCE.
The spread of ceramics in Mesoamerica came later. Ceramics from Monagrillo in Panama have been dated to around 2140 BCE, from Tronadora in Costa Rica to around 1890 BCE, and from Barra in the Soconusco of Chiapas to around 1900 BCE. Ceramics of the Purrón tradition in southcentral Mexico have been dated to around 1805 BCE, and from the Chajil tradition of northcentral Mexico, to around 1600 BCE.
The appearance of ceramics in the Southeastern United States does not fit the above pattern. Ceramics from the middle Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina have been dated to about 2888 BCE, and ceramics of the Orange and Norwood cultures in northern Florida to around 2460 BCE . Ceramics appeared later elsewhere in North America. Ceramics reached southern Florida by 4000 BP, Nebo Hill by 3700 BP, and Poverty Point by 3400 BP.

Cultural regions

North America

Arctic

Several Inuit groups, such as the Netsilik, Sadlermiut, Utkuhiksalingmiut, and Caribou Inuit created utilitarian pottery in historic times, primarily to store food. In Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Canada, when the mine that employed much of the community closed down, the national government created the Rankin Inlet Ceramics Project, whose wares were successfully exhibited in Toronto in 1967. The project foundered but a local gallery revived interest in Inuit ceramics in the 1990s.

Eastern Woodlands

  • Hopewell pottery is the ceramic tradition of the various local cultures involved in the Hopewell tradition and are found as artifacts in archeological sites in the American Midwest and Southeast.
  • Mississippian culture pottery is the ceramic tradition of the Mississippian culture found as artifacts in archaeological sites in the American Midwest and Southeast.

    Southeastern Woodlands

Geological studies show that certain areas of the southeastern portion of North America are rich in kaolins and ball clays, the types of plastic clays best suited for pottery. Clay beds which still produce ceramic clays are from primary and secondary deposits formed in the Late Paleocene and Early Miocene Epochs in formations that formed the Gulf Coastal Plain. According to all geological surveys the entire southeastern portion of the continent has abundant clay deposits, with the exception of all of south Florida and a portion of western central Florida .
Fiber-tempered ceramics associated with shell middens left by Late Archaic hunter-fisher-gatherers appeared in the Atlantic coastal plain of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina starting in 2500 BC. The earliest attested pottery is in the Stallings culture area, around the middle Savannah River. Fiber-tempered pottery of the Orange culture in northeast Florida has been dated to 2000 BC or a bit earlier. Fiber-tempered pottery of very similar form spread along coasts and river valleys of the Southeastern United States from the Atlantic coast into Alabama, reaching northwestern Florida and the Gulf coast by 1300 BC, the interior Middle South by 1100, and Poverty Point by 1000 BC.
Thoms Creek ceramics closely resembled Stallings ceramics, but used more sand and less fiber as temper than Stalling or Orange ware. Thoms Creek ceramics were largely contemporary with Stalling and Orange ceramics, although no Thoms Creek ceramics have been found that are as early as the earliest Stallings. Thoms Creek ceramics overlapped Stallings ceramics in northern Georgia and southern South Carolina, but were the dominant tradition north of the Santee River into North Carolina.
The similarities of the Stallings series ceramics to the earlier Puerto Hormiga ceramics of Colombia, which were both associated with shell rings, and the presence of winds and ocean currents favoring journeys from South America to the Southeastern United States, led James A. Ford, among other archaeologists, to offer the hypothesis that the two areas had connections, and that the technology of fiber-tempered ceramics in the southeastern United States had been imported from Colombia. Other archaeologists have noted that there are no known archaeological sites between Colombia and Florida that are of a type or age consistent with such connections, and that the cultural traditions of the Southeastern United States show no significant changes associated with the appearance of ceramics, indicating that there was no migration or people, and no transfer of technology or other elements of culture, other than the appearance of ceramics.
Later significant developments in ceramics in the Southeastern Woodlands included Mississippian culture pottery in the Mississippi River valley, and Weedon Island pottery, a style of pottery used primarily in ceremonial contexts and high status burials, produced and traded along the Gulf of Mexico coast from southwestern Florida to the Florida panhandle.
  • Swift Creek and Santa Rosa culture pottery post Deptford, northwest Florida, ceremonial decorative pottery, 1000 A.D.
  • Glade and Belle Glade culture pottery fiber or sand-tempered crude pottery, south Florida to central Florida, 500 BCE until 1700 A.D., reference four periods I, II, III and IV
  • Alachua culture pottery northeast, north central Florida, protohistoric period
  • Plaquemine culture pottery, ceramics of the Natchez people, a historic tribe known also to be one of the last of the Plaquemine culture chiefdoms in southwestern Mississippi
  • Fort Walton culture pottery distinctively Mississippi culture in Florida panhandle, developed out of the Weedon Island culture 1000 A.D.