Some Thoughts about Mimbres Pottery and Mortuary Customs

Abstract

This essay considers a broader social context for the interpretation of ancient Mimbres pottery bowls from the American Southwest. Predominately black-on-white, hemispherical Mimbres bowls recovered from Mimbres burials, constitute one of the most distinctive and popular forms of ancient pottery associated with the Ancestral Puebloan tradition of the southwest. Frequently decorated with complex geometric or highly figurative imagery, the bowls are also widely celebrated for the frequent occurrence of post-fired holes intentionally punched, pecked, or even drilled in the bottom, often referred to as “kill-holes”, and the common practice of placing inverted bowls over the heads of the deceased in Mimbres burials. Based on a collection of bowls recovered from excavations conducted at the NAN Ranch Site in southern New Mexico, the author argues that the distinct nature of Mimbres pottery can be symbolically linked to wider-spread Puebloan beliefs regarding both the function and form of Mimbres funerary practices and related architectural forms reflected in historic ethnographic studies.