Expressive Beautiful And Celebrated Bowls Created By Mimbres Artisans From Distant Past

A. Sutherland  - AncientPages.com - For nearly 1100 years, in the area of the present state of New Mexico, in the mountains of Mogollon, lived a tribe of the Ancestral Mogollon people (Mimbres), one of the significant prehistoric Southwestern cultural divisions, whose lands stretched north of the Gila forest, west into Arizona, and south into northern Mexico.

Mimbres sub-group pot with geometric design. Zürich, Museum Rietberg - Public Domain

Among the Mogollon— even among contemporary Native artists - Mimbres pottery is considered the best and most impressive.
Generally, "Mimbres culture" refers to people who lived in the region and created Mimbres Black-on-white pottery and flourished from c. 200 CE to 1450 or 1540 CE, when the Spanish arrived. Also, historians have named the cultural period from 1000 to 1130 CE " Mimbres ".

"People have called the mountains, rolling hills, wide valleys, and broad desert plains of southwestern New Mexico home for at least ten thousand years. When they began to farm a little more than two thousand years ago, they settled near the rich soils in the river flood plains. Then, around 900 CE, the people of this region burned all of their kivas and started gathering in large villages with small ritual spaces and open plazas. Between about 900 and 1100 CE, they also made intricately painted geometric and figurative bowls in a style called Mimbres, their best-known legacy today. In the 1130s, they stopped making this pottery and drifted out of villages to more dispersed settlements..."

The book "Mimbres Lives and Landscapes" written by Margaret C. Nelson & Michelle
Hegmon contributes with answers to important questions regarding the ancient Native American culture of the Mimbres.

The Mimbres - Amazing Artists

The Mimbres (in Spanish: “willows”) are most famous for their specific and very beautiful pottery. A thousand years ago, village farmers in the Mimbres Valley of what is now southwestern New Mexico created stunning black-on-white pottery.
The talented artisans of Mimbres decorated their ceramic items with imaginative designs of birds, insects, fishes, and various animals, from omnipresent rabbits to mythical creatures, geometric lines, and scenes of everyday life.

Mimbres bowls at Stanford University. Mimbres pottery, New Mexico, U.S.
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts Image credit: 2006 David Monniaux - CC BY-SA 3.0

Intricately painted geometric and figurative bowls represent the best-known legacy of these Native Americans, who left the most vivid graphic record of their religious beliefs and spiritual visions on stone and ceramic surfaces.
This art has contributed with a fascinating, ever-lasting accent to southwestern archaeology.

Ritual Of "Killing The Bowl" And Beautiful Pottery

The Mimbres left, but their cave houses remained, where, according to the ancient Native American tradition, they used to hide their deceased under the floor. The practice was to bury the dead in the fetal position with a bowl placed above the head of the deceased. Before the bowl was placed in the prescribed place (commonly found covering the face of the interred person), the so-called ritual of "killing the bowl" occurred by punching a small hole.
Almost all Mimbres bowls found have such holes. Further archaeological evidence showed that many pottery items were not buried with the dead as funerary goods and used for other purposes.

The bowls of Mimbres were decorated with geometric patterns, dark on a pale background. Unfortunately, it is not precisely known what they were supposed to symbolize.

Mimbres bowls - undoubtedly the most perfect examples of prehistoric American ceramics. Image source

On some bowls, we see people turning into animals or animals turning into people. On the other, Mimbres bowls are painted fantastic beasts. One example would be strange mammals with the tail of a fish or the wings of a bird.
The Mogollons did not use a potter's wheel. They shaped the bowls, overlapping one on top of the other - twisted braids of wet clay, then smoothed the whole thing by tucking gourds. Only the interiors of the bowls were decorated with brushes made of yucca fibers. Because Mimbres bowls - undoubtedly the most perfect examples of prehistoric American ceramics - are trendy among the collectors.

Abandoning Of Mimbres

The western Mogollon peoples began abandoning their communities in several areas in southeastern Arizona and southwestern Mexico early in the 12th century. They had left the Mimbres area by the 13th century.

The fact remains that after 1300, the Mogollons disappeared, which is difficult to explain.
Did the Mogollons emigrate because of drought?
Or did they become extinct due to devastating wars or some terrible calamity? Many archaeologists also suggested other reasons like warfare, disease, resource exhaustion, religious system collapse, greener grazing areas, or even a mixture of these reasons.

In the 1130s, they stopped making beautiful pottery and drifted out of villages. Some stayed until the early 15th century. Most probably, many of them joined the western pueblos which existed into historic times, for instance, those of the Hopi and Zuni.

Written by – A. Sutherland  - AncientPages.com Senior Staff Writer

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