Artist Unknown, Pitcher

Written by USU student Daniel Johnson

May 13, 2016

This remarkably well-made, gray earthenware pitcher best represents Fremont or Anasazi pottery. These groups lived and prospered in overlapping shared territories in the area that is now the North American Southwest. The Fremont people occupied nearly all of present day Utah, as well as a small bit of Colorado and Nevada. The Anasazi people occupied the upper halves of Arizona and New Mexico, in addition to the “four corners” area of southern Utah and Southern Colorado.

Artifacts of these two cultures, which both made gray earthenware pottery, have been found in a range that spans southern Idaho, eastern Nevada, western Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Unfortunately, important information about this earthenware pitcher, where it was found and who found it, is not available for clarification needs. If we want to clearly place this artifact in time and space, it needs to be radiometrically dated and analyzed by an archaeologist, whose expertise is in ancient, southwestern, ceramics.

This pitcher was formed by pinching or pressing long coils of clay together using thumbs, fingers and small hand-held tools. Coil building techniques like this often leave behind indentation patterns which are usually referred to as corrugations. Also, these repeated indentations are commonly emphasized and used as an appealing decoration. While this pitcher was being formed, the inside was simultaneously being carefully smoothed with a specially chosen tool. This tool could have been anything, but, often times was a rock, a bone or a piece of wood that had been carefully chosen for working with and smoothing clay.

Smoothing the inside of a coil pot not only increases the overall strength, but also the utility of the pot, allowing contents to be poured or scooped out easily. We can determine, by the form and the design, that this pitcher was a common utilitarian pot that would have been used for cooking and storing liquids and foods.