Peublo Pottery

I've been drawn to the black on black pottery since I first saw it on the shelves at Parson's Indian Trading Post in the Wisconsin Dells many years ago. Tucked onto the shleves behind dusty cases filled with arrowheads and sacred pipes, alongside rows of Dells kitsch, my eye was drawn to the shiny black pots inscribed with geometric patterns. It was on my first visit to Santa Fe, scouring the shops along San Francisco Street with Bruce Rigdon, that I got the first inkling that this was not just a pretty object designed to separate tourists from their money. Bruce was in search of a small pot to bring home to his wife as a birthday present, and that day I heard the name of Maria Martinez, though to be honest it did not sink in. The pottery that bore her name was far more expensive than many of the other pieces, and Bruce explained that Maria was one of the finest artists in the genre. She had died in 1980, and her work was valued by collectors. It added up in my mind to "expensive pretty pot."

But this time to Santa Fe, with a little more time to explore beyond the old city of Santa Fe, I had the opportunity to learn more. We were headed back from Los Alamos (a posting for another day!) and had our eyes open for a peublo that we might be able to knock around in a bit, to taste a little bit of the modern Native American culture after climbing about in the ruins of their ancestors at Bandalier National Monument. Denise had read about San Ildefonso, and when we saw the sign, it seemed worth the detour.

We arrived at a little bit before four in the afternoon, and at the museum and cultural center I saw those familiar pieces of pottery, and the name of Maria Montoya Martinez, and the pieces started to link together. The pueblo was closed to visitors at 5, and so we had to decide whether it was worth the investment for so short a time. A few of the shops might still be open, the woman behind the counter said,and our flight left early enough the next day that we knew it was now or never. Plunking down our money, we got a map and started on our way.

The streets and common areas were mostly deserted, and a beautiful church commanded the center of the scene. Valenti-Hein vacations tend to be drawn to cemeteries, and at the front of the church was a quiet place of repose for former residents of the village, with crosses, mounds, and colorful carvings. We made our way around the corner, and into one of the shops that was open...more a room off the kitchen of the artist than a studio, really. And there, on the table, six or seven pieces, several a deep orange-red, and the rest black.

The gentle man in attendance encouraged us to look. They were to be fired the next day, if we wanted to come back and see. The reddish orange pots were the color of the clay, and the black would be created by firing the pots with horse manure. He showed us the piece of obsidian that was used to laboriously buff the pots to their high gloss, and explained how the designs, that looked like bas relief, were drawn on with a fresh slurry of clay, painting in what to my eye was the background.

It was after I got home that I started to scratch the itch of my curiosity. The pottery, it seems, was first discovered in archeological digs in the early part of the 20th century. Edgar Lee Hewitt, a professor of archeology, had found shards of black on black pottery dating to the neolithic era. Hewitt wanted to reconstruct the pottery for a museum exhibition, and heard about San Ildefenso and the artists who worked there. He brought them the challenge--to not only create the pots, but to try to understand how neolithic people could have acomplished such fine artistry.

Enter Maria Martinez, at the time a young potter who spent the rest of her life trying to understand and recreate the work of her ancient ancestors. She knew about the red clay, and her traditions had preserved the cave-like geometric drawings, but how is it that such a fine luster, and a deep black color were archieved before the alchemy of modern pottery?

Smoke was the obvious answer, but it took years of experimentation to find the right temperatures and mixture of heat and manure to fire the pot just so. The neolithic dating gave away the most likely process of burnishing the pots to their lush gloss: stone on stone! And so, for hours on end the pots were rubbed stone on stone, then set into fires banked with manure in order to produce what the Native people of the pueblos had done before recorded time.

So, it seems, my new little pot is a resurrection story of sorts...an art that grew in the villages tucked into the valleys beneath those dwellings I had crouched into earlier in the day. Stone against stone produced the luster that caught the archeologist's eyes, and a modern artist working away in a modest pueblo while not thirty miles away some of the greatest scientific minds in the world were gathered in Los Alamos working their own alchemy with atoms and isotopes in order to unleash a devastation on the face of the earth that would end the war with a force that would for a generation threaten to end the planet.

Why is it striking to me that the critical ingredient was horse manure? That it was out of a smouldering fire, smoking away on the remains of the horse's day, that such beauty would emerge? That at the same time that Western science was unleashing unconcievable devastation, Maria Martinez and her husband were squatting around the fire behind their pueblo in order to bring back to this earth the pottery of a forgotten age?

We live in a world of contrasts, I decided as I unwrapped that black pot I brought safe home--a world in which beauty is the result of hard labor, saving all the parts, smothering the fire with manure, laying fresh slurry in delicate lines that end up looking like the background.

Such, I suppose, is our lives: shaped and shined, colored by what we might otherwise bury and avoid. In its simplest beauty we find ourselves really only trying to reclaim the traditions lost as we stumbled into "modernity" with a ferocity and pride that really can consume us.

If I head back to New Mexico, I'm not sure I want to see Los Alamos again, but trust me, I will want to see San Ildefenso. I might even spring for the photography permit, and I suppose if I really wanted to be the best steward of my gifts, I would make the investment in one of those pots, still rubbed and fired as they were thousands of years ago. Maybe it's in the sheen of that black on black pottery that we learn the most about our humanness.