Southwestern US, Mimbres Valley, New Mexico, ca. 1000 to 1250 CE. This is a large round bowl painted in the Mimbres Black-on-White Geometric style. This is part of the Mimbres (and larger Mogollon) tradition of iron-based, mineral-painted, decorated pottery. This piece combines a distinctive Mimbres zoomorphic decoration with limited geometric decoration. Size: 7.45" W x 3" H (18.9 cm x 7.6 cm)

The centipede painted in the bottom of the bowl is abstract but also instantly recognizable to those with knowledge of the desert's creatures. To the modern Hopi, as well as seemingly to the ancient Mimbres people, the centipede is symbolic of the journey between the spirit world and the physical world, perhaps associated by its shape to the shape of the ladders that connected rooms in cliff dwellings. Fascinatingly, Mimbres geometric designs seem to have been inspired by Southwestern landscape imagery. For example, the stepped pyrmaid designs here might echo the jagged geologic formations on the desert. The Mimbres people occupied the mountain and river valleys of southwestern New Mexico; the name we know them by is from the Spanish word for the willows that grew alongside the river valleys. The artists responsible for creating pottery vessels like this were women, and many Mimbres women have been found in burials accompanied by pottery making tools.

Provenance: Ex-Private Orange County, CA collection

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#118296

Repaired from multiple pieces