Hopi Pottery
Pottery was being made in the area of the Hopi mesas before migrants from the central Mexico area first arrived around 650 CE. Those migrants, though, they brought a much better ceramic technology with them. They also brought a whole new design vocabulary and better seeds. They spread out across the Southwest between the Virgin River and the Rio Grande, from the Chihuahua and Sonora deserts north to the Great Salt Lake, and they multiplied. The weather of this new countryside was fickle, and they learned how to store food and keep it good for years. The best tool for that was pottery. They decorated their pottery with their prayers for the seed within and for the survival of their people.
For hundreds of years those designs were repetitive geometrics. Then, in the south, figures in black-on-white were introduced. Then came figures and designs in red and black on white. Then came figures and designs in various combinations of red, black and white on various backgrounds. Each step in the development of decorative and color schemes is reflective of experiential religious developments within one clan or another. While a lot of what flowered into Sikyátki style and design was developed in bits and pieces along the rim of Antelope Mesa, it took the experience of Sikyátki to put it all together. Just as the design palette of Sikyátki reached its peak, the village’s chief determined they had strayed too far from the traditionally conservative Hopi path and they needed to die for it. He arranged with the elders of Walpi and other villages to have the deed done and sometime in 1625 it was done: everyone was killed except for a few ritual specialists saved for their spiritual value.
The styles and designs of Sikyátki lived on in Awatovi pottery for a few years but the quality and variety disappeared after the Spanish arrived in 1629. San Bernardo Polychrome, a seriously inferior product, came into production immediately. Hopi ceramics entered a virtual Dark Age for more than 200 years.
By the mid-1800s the Hopi pottery tradition had been almost completely abandoned, its utilitarian purposes being taken over by cheap enamelware brought in by Anglo traders. Hopi pottery production sputtered along until the 1890s when one woman, Nampeyo of Hano, almost single-handedly revived it. Nampeyo lived in Hano on First Mesa and was inspired by pot sherds found among the nearby ruins of the ancient village of Sikyátki. Today credit is given to Nampeyo for fully reviving the Sikyátki style. She was so good that Jesse Walter Fewkes, the first archaeologist to formally excavate Sikyátki, was concerned that her creations would shortly become confused with those made hundreds of years previously.
Sikyátki pottery shapes are very distinctive: flattened jars with wide shoulders; low, open serving bowls decorated inside; seed jars with small openings and flat tops; painting methods of splattering and stippling and very distinctive designs. The Sikyátki style seems to have evolved as various Zuni-, Keres- and Towa-speaking potters came together with Water Clan potters from the Hohokam areas of southern Arizona and northern Mexico and they began working with clays found in the Jeddito area. Over the years other clans came to the area and made their own contributions to what we now know as “Sikyátki Polychrome.” According to Jesse Walter Fewkes, that merging of styles, techniques and designs created some of the finest ceramics ever produced in prehistoric North America.
Hopi pottery is unmistakable in its shapes, colors and designs. The Hopis are blessed with multiple excellent clay sources, each offering a different deep color after polishing and firing. Most Hopi pottery uses a buff, red, white or yellow clay body. Some kachina carvers make pottery and sometimes carve and etch their surfaces. Most Hopi potters, though, form their pieces and paint their decorations using colors derived from boiled-down plants, watered-down clay and from crushed minerals.
Much of the symbology painted on Hopi pottery is themed with “bird elements:” eagle tails, feathers, beaks and wings, and with katsinam and migration patterns. Many Hopi, Hopi-Tewa and Tewa potters are members of the Corn Clan and their annual religious cycle revolves around the seasons of corn. The vast majority of today’s Hopi pottery shapes and the designs painted on them are obvious descendants of the work of Sikyátki and Awatovi potters.