Mohave Pottery Part 6

SUMMARY OF DESIGN NAMES

Designs are named most frequently after animals or their parts, once after a leaf. Next most frequent are names derived from patterns of face painting or tattooing. A few are descriptive, like "patches," "zigzag."

_Animals or parts._

Fish (back)bone: 3,_c_, 3,_g_, 4,_o_, 4,_q_, 5,_g_, 6,_a_ outside

Fish tail (?): 2,_h_ outside

Coyote teeth: 2,_d_, 4,_l_, 4,_q_

Racc.o.o.n hand: 6,_a_, 6,_b_, 4,_p_

Yellowhammer belly: 1,_a_

Tortoise: 3,_j_, 6,_e_ outside

Spider: 2,_h_, 3,_i_, 6,_d_ outside

b.u.t.terfly: 2,_f_; "in mouth," 4,_d_

_Plant parts._

(Cottonwood) leaves: 3,_d_, 8,_e_

Of these, coyote teeth, yellow-hammer belly, b.u.t.terfly, and (atalyka) leaf occur also as names of face paintings (Handbook, p. 732, fig.

61,_b_-_e_).

The Handbook (p. 738) mentions a few additional names for pottery designs: rain, rainbow (this also a face painting), melon markings.

_Face paintings or tattoo._

t.i.t?ok: 3,_d_, 5,_a_. This seems to denote an element in what I have called the forked-and-angled pattern of plate 1. Also recorded as t.i.tgok.

hotahpave, "halter": 2,_f_, 5,_e_. It seems to refer to paired crossing lines as part of hourgla.s.s figures. In Handbook (fig.

61,_i_-_j_) it appears as point-to-point chevrons on the cheeks.

ta-tsirqa-tsirqa: 1,_d_. In Handbook (fig. 61,_k_, _l_) it appears as sharp points under the eyes (cf. ibid., fig. 61,_g_, _h_, "ha-tsira-tsirk," a vertical line down from the eye).

ta-skilye-skilye: 5,_d_. Reference is to a column of horizontal points at the edge of one style of women's chin tattoo. (See Handbook, p. 521, fig. 46,_q_.)

iya-m-tupe(r)t(a): 2,_g_. Iya is the mouth; tupeta, to hold back or cover.

_"Adjectivally" descriptive._

ta-hlame-hlame, "patches": 1,_b_, 4,_d_

kyauelkyau, "angled, zigzag": 4,_g_

kan'u (?), "patterned": 2,_b_

It is evident that there is no deeper symbolic significance in the pattern names. They are like our crow's foot, horseshoe, pigtail, fleur-de-lys, diamond, spade, wavy, broken--metaphorically or directly descriptive. The Mohave in addition have available a number of striking and familiar types of designs with which women ornament their faces.

In their actual, though of course transient, face decoration, the Mohave, though not quite the artistic equals of the Seri, paint with far more care, neatness, and precision than they bestow on their pottery. It is significant that it is the patterns of pottery that are named after those painted on their cheeks, not the reverse.

THE MOHAVE POTTERY STYLE

Mohave pottery was made in a culture which set little intrinsic value on anything technological and looked upon economic acquisition as in itself unworthy and fit only for dissipation. Artifacts were used but not prized; and they all perished upon their owner's death.

Certain qualities of Mohave pottery are expectable as a product of this atmosphere: lack of evenness and finish or precision, the appearance of haste or indifference in manufacture. Surfaces are not quite true or even, thicknesses variable, firing intensity somewhat spotty; diameters vary enough for the eye to see some lopsidedness from the round, or sway in the level of a rim. Particularly in the painted designs, which do not contribute to functional use, inequalities, crowding, wavering lines, departures from symmetry, are all conspicuous.

At the same time the ware is never incompetent. It has reasonable strength, toughness, hardness for its purpose. Its shapes are definite and well standardized. It never tries merely to get by. This is proved by the fact that, except for vessels like cook pots and parchers, where decoration would be wasted, painting is the rule, and mostly, painting on both sides. The execution of this painting is often enough slovenly; but it is firm in aim. There are a series of design patterns more or less fitted to the several shapes; there is considerable choice between these, and even more freedom of adaptation to shape of field. Timidity was not one of the earmarks of the Mohave potter; if her pattern came out neatly, well and good; if uneven or crowded, there was no harm done. Standards were not particularly high, especially not as regards exactness; but they called for vigor of approach. Emphasis is on the overall effect of pattern, not on its items. The continuous forked-and-angled design, the combinations of hourgla.s.s figures, of s.p.a.ced rhomboids or hexagons, even the simpler fishbone pattern--all have this total-field approach, with relative indifference to figure elements that got squeezed, stretched, or distorted.

Some of these patterns, especially the forked-and-angled continuous or interlocking one, are not easy to plan or apply with reference to a given field, whether circular or otherwise; yet they are attempted again and again with a slapdash gusto.

Elements like the triple line, or an extra line shadowing the edge of a solid area, or a row of dots following an inner or outer contour, or the filling either of figures or background with stippled spots, and the superabundant solid-filled angles--either opposite or apart--are simple enough to execute in themselves; but the frequency of their use, often of two or three of them at once, are evidence that the Mohave potter was at least not skimping her decoration, even though she was unworried if it came out skew or ragged. After all, these details might have simply been left out instead of being executed.

In fundamental form, the bowls, platters, parchers are pleasing; and in design and its relation to its field, vessels like 1,_b_, _c_, 2,_g_, 3,_a_, _b_--or 3,_c_, _e_, 5,_g_; or 4,_g_; _h_, _m_, _p_; or 3,_d_, 4,_r_--show concepts that in the hands of a more interested or aesthetically more experienced population would have had definite potentialities.

There is then a standard in the Mohave pottery art, and behind this a tradition. How this tradition grew will be gradually worked out as a corpus of published data on the ceramic wares of other tribes of the region becomes available, and especially as archaeological information acc.u.mulates. Personally, I have always a.s.sumed that Colorado River ware as represented by historic Yuma and Mohave pottery was a variant in a cotradition that includes also Hohokam, much of Sonora, and probably southern California. This seems also the basic view of Malcom Rogers, Schroeder, Treganza, Meighan, my present collaborator Harner, and the few others who have concerned themselves with Colorado Valley pottery.

But of course the full story is long and complex; and the present description and Harner's a.n.a.lysis are merely thresholds from which the problem can be really entered. Rogers' "Yuman Pottery Making" is a useful preliminary survey and stimulating. Meanwhile a Patayan tradition has been set up for the mountains and desert east of the Mohave habitat along the Colorado. But we have scant information on the Patayan development, and that little seems quite different from the historic Mohave one. So far as there may be resemblances, I hope that our present detailed contribution will induce those who know Patayan to point out in print such similarities as they discern.

APPENDIX I

MEMORANDA ON THE DESTROYED ACADEMY COLLECTION

The Mohave ethnological collection which was destroyed by fire at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in 1906 consisted of 67 items, according to a record preserved in my notebook 7. Of these 67, 32 were pottery vessels and 12 were ceramic ancillaries. The latter consisted of four paddles, three pebbles used as anvils, yellow pigment, two samples of potter's clay, one of clay pounded small, and a sample of fine-crushed rock for tempering.

The vessels comprised:

11 bowls, one of them of kwa?ki shape; mostly listed by me as "dishes"; they may include some platters

3 bowllike vessels, listed as: "kwa?ki, small pot"; "suyire, round dish"; "temative, pot with designs inside and out"

1 "dish, corrugated outside"

9 spoons

1 fire-blackened pot

1 cup, named as "kwa?ki aha-suraiti"