Unknown Santa Ana Potter

Pottery was made in the environs of today’s Santa Ana Pueblo more than one thousand years ago, but that was the “Tiguex” people, as Coronado referred to them. When Coronado arrived in the area, he counted 14 or 15 Tiguex Pueblos in the middle Rio Grande area, and over the course of one winter he and his men attacked and looted every one of them.

Within about 50 years, those middle Rio Grande pueblos were wiped out by European diseases and the land was pretty well left open for the Eastern Keres Santa Ana people to move downstream further along the Jemez River and occupy some beautiful agricultural land at the meeting of the Jemez with the Rio Grande. However, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and its aftermath almost ended what little was left of Santa Ana Pueblo’s pottery tradition. And with their relative abundance of productive arable land, they were able to trade agricultural products for pottery, usually with their Zia Pueblo neighbors.

There are a very few potters working to resurrect the Santa Ana traditions but their design vocabulary borrows heavily from the Zia design library. Like most other pueblos, no one signed any of their pottery until the 1950s.