Very Large and Very Deep Cochiti Pueblo Historic Pottery Dough Bowl [SOLD]

This is an exceptionally fine historic pottery dough bowl from Cochiti Pueblo, decorated in a white slip with black decoration.   It dates to circa 1920s and is typically Cochiti in all technical aspects: crystalline-rock temper in the paste, stone-polished bare paste underbody, black rim, rag-wiped bentonite slip and black guaco paint on exterior.  The interior of the bowl is stone polished, as is the exterior lower section below the design panel.

Cochiti, at the turn of the century, made very little pottery for local use, importing it instead from Acoma, Zuni and Zia Pueblos.  What pottery the potters were making was mostly limited to figurative type—effigy vessels and human and animal figurines.

The flat bottom of the bowl swells outward to a rounded body that just slightly curves inward at the rim. The design on the body of the bowl is typical Cochiti in execution—a pair of rain clouds attached to a pair of black lines.  Two of these feature the rain clouds in the middle of the lines and the other two have the clouds attached to the top of the air of black lines.

A band of designs, in chain-like connection, decorates the area just below the rim.  They are leaf-like ovals alternation in right leaning and left leaning. There are two framing lines at the rim, two more below the rim design, and two more below the design panel.  All the framing lines have a ceremonial break that splits the entire design.

The bowl is a fine example of Cochiti mastery and one of the few dough bowls from the pueblo from the early twentieth century, a time when most potters were busy making figurative pottery.

Condition: this Very Large and Very Deep Cochiti Pueblo Historic Pottery Dough Bowl is in very good condition with evidence of pueblo use

Provenance: from a gentleman from Kansas

Recommended Reading: A River Apart: The Pottery of Cochiti & Santo Domingo Pueblos by Valerie Verzuh

Relative Links:  Southwest Indian Pottery, Cochiti Pueblo, Historic Pottery