Caddo Blakely Engraved Bottle

Native American, Arkansas, Caddo. A globular ceramic bottle swelling to a full spherical belly, then drawn up into a tall, slightly flaring neck that finishes in a rolled lip. The coil-built, pebble-burnished wall carries the smoky grays, umbers, and cloudy blooms of a reduced pit firing, speckled throughout with pale temper. Ornament is deliberately spare: sets of fine vertical and gently curving engraved lines, cut into leather-hard clay before firing, drop from the shoulder and quarter the body into broad open panels. Long-necked bottles of this class belong to the Caddo tradition of the Ouachita and Red River drainages, where they served to hold and pour liquids and were commonly interred as grave furniture. The engraved fields are generally read as encoding cosmological divisions rather than functioning as simple decoration. Caddo potters of the Trans-Mississippi South rank among the most technically accomplished ceramicists north of Mexico. Working without the wheel, they coiled and scraped vessels to walls of remarkable thinness, burnished them with a smooth pebble to a soft sheen, then fired them in oxygen-starved conditions to produce the dark gray to black fabric characteristic of the tradition. Engraving, executed after the clay had dried to leather hardness, permits a crispness of line that trailing or incising on wetter clay cannot achieve. Named types such as Blakely Engraved were defined by mid-twentieth-century archaeologists working the Ouachita River valley of southwestern Arkansas, and those designations remain the standard shorthand for chronology and regional interaction in Caddo archaeology. Clark County sits squarely within that research area, and its sites along the Ouachita have long supplied the reference assemblages against which such bottles are typed. Item # 202249

估價:$350

查看所有物品來自Artemis Fine Arts或Ethnographic