Bowl with Geometric Design, Warped (Three-part Design) Southwest, New Mexico, Cameron Creek village, Mimbres, Mogollon

Bowl with Geometric Design, Warped (Three-part Design)

1000–1130

Southwest, New Mexico, Cameron Creek village, Mimbres, Mogollon

Overall: 15.5 x 24 cm (6 1/8 x 9 7/16 in.)

Charles W. Harkness Endowment Fund 1930.36

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Did You Know?

Mimbres painters achieved controlled lines with brushes made of the chewed ends of yucca leaves.

Description

The Mogollon of New Mexico’s Mimbres region created thousands of hemispheric bowls painted with black-and-white designs on their interiors. The designs range from elegant geometric motifs to abstract humans and animals. Meaning may have dwelled in part in the domed shape of the bowls, which often were ritually punctured before they were placed over the heads of the deceased in graves. (This example comes from a non-funerary context.) Perhaps, like the modern Pueblo peoples who descend from them, the Mimbres believed that the sky is a dome pierced to allow passage between worlds, such as between the realms of the living and the dead.