What’s in a Pot? Lessons from Native American Pottery By: Bob Genheimer, George Rieveschl Curator of Archaeology Because most Native American pottery we discover through excavations or surface collections is broken into small pieces called sherds, people often ask us “what can those pieces tell us?” As it turns out quite a lot! By focusing on clues such as what’s on the surface, what part of the entire pot it is, how it is tempered and even how it broke, archaeologists can learn quite a bit. The first thing that a ceramic analyst looks at is the temper material. Most fired clay pottery requires the use of a tempering agent (small, solid pieces of material) to mitigate the effects of heat and shrinkage on the clay. Native Americans used a variety of tempering materials during the roughly two millennia that they fired clay vessels. […]

Archaeology is complex, multifaceted and diverse. Items of material culture are no exception as a nearly countless suite of artifacts were manufactured by prehistoric native Americans through the addition, combination and subtraction of raw materials such as stone, clay, bone, shell, wood and plant fibers.

Mesa Verde is a large National Park that includes around 600 cliff dwellings which are rock and adobe structures that are built into an eroded portion of a cliff with incredible indigenous architecture and amazing landscape.

Their yellow colors were bright and cheerful, a sharp contrast to their dull sanitary and kitchenware predecessors – redwares and stonewares. Nineteenth-century American yellow wares, earthenwares with a buff paste and a clear glaze, were both functional and inexpensive. In most cases, they were the product of an assembly line process – a system that attempted to standardize output using relatively cheap raw materials and labor.