Zia Pueblo Pottery

Pottery was a mainstay of Zia trade for at least two hundred years. The balance of trade was food from Santa Ana, Jemez and San Felipe in return for pottery from Zia. There isn’t so much trade with the other pueblos now but pottery still remains Zia’s largest home-grown cash crop.

Zia pottery has a Keresan heritage and, as such, shares design characteristics with other important Keresan pottery, especially Acoma and Laguna ware. They all have their favorite geometric patterns, stylized birds, rainbows and flowers, but each maintains its own individual images and colors.

Where Acoma and Laguna’s bird is a parrot, Zia’s is a roadrunner. Acoma’s black and orange on stark white is contrasted by Zia’s dark brown and brownish red on creamy white. Further, Acoma’s hard, paper-thin, white clay ollas differ greatly from Zia’s sturdy, slightly granular, basalt-tempered red clay jars. Because of their unique local clay and their traditional designs and shapes, Zia pottery is unique and easily distinguished from the pottery of other pueblos.

When New Mexico became a territory (and then a state), some of the symbols involved were sourced from Zia Pueblo. The roadrunner often pictured on Zia pottery became the official New Mexico state bird and the Zia sun symbol (a circle with four parallel lines in four groups pointing in the four directions) became a state symbol depicted in many places, including the state flag.