Zuni Historic Pottery Jar

This jar has exquisite design, symmetry and form. The strong contrast between positive and negative is also something to be valued. As is true for most Zuni pots, the jar is relatively thin-walled. The clay has kaolin in it, a substance that is also in porcelain, and that gives strength to the pot, allowing the thinner walls. (Traditional Zuni pottery was coiled out of native clay and slip, smoothed with a smooth stone or gourd edge, painted with a yucca brush, and then fired over an outdoor fire made up of dried cakes of sheep dung and straw).

As Dwight Lanmon and Francis Harlow state in their book, The Pottery of Zuni Pueblo, there were still potters in Zuni during the 1920s-1930s who were making pottery equal in quality to that which was collected by Stephenson for the Smithsonian in the late 1800s. This jar is clearly an example of that quality.

We cannot make an attribution to a specific pottery because there aren’t enough documented jars from this period to use as reference.