"Sparkling
flecks of mica occur naturally in clay deposits in many parts
of the world. In the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico,
the ancient roots of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains contain
63-million-year-old warped and twisted rocks that were pushed
up by the earth’s forces at the end of the dinosaur age.
Several of the minerals in these deposits -including the micas-
weather to produce clay when they are exposed at the surface.
Over the eons numerous deposits of clay, known as primary deposits,
have developed in the mountains. In areas around Taos and Picuris
Pueblos, many of these deposits contain significant amounts
of mica; 
hence
the clay is “micaceous .” There are also secondary
deposits of clay, made up of clay particles that have been transported,
usually by water, from a source in the nearby mountains. Both
primary and secondary sources were used by Indians in the northern
Rio Grande region as far back as AD 1300.
When micaceous
pottery first appears in the archaeological record among the
northern Rio Grande pueblos, it is only one of several varieties
of pottery in use, including polychrome, black-on-white, and
polished blackwares and rcdwares made of nonmicaceous clays.
By AD 1500 various groups of Apaches were moving into the area
from the high plains to the east. One ancestral Apache group,
the Dismal River culture of eastern Colorado, southwestern Nebraska,
and western Kansas, made micaceous pottery, along with other
types, but it appears to have been tempered with mica rather
than made from mica-rich clay. Tempering was done by grinding
up rocks containing mica and mixing the material into nonmicaceous
clay. One group of Apaches, the Jicarillas, eventually settled
near Taos Pueblo. Over time they shared many ceramic traits
with the people of Taos; by the mid-1800s, their wares were
almost indistinguishable.
The Spanish
entrada in 1540 marked the beginning of a new era for the Native
peoples of the Southwest. Indian villages across what is now
Arizona and New Mexico were ravaged, exploited, and even destroyed,
their inhabitants removed, enslaved, and killed in the name
of God and the King of Spain. Given the intense pressure over
almost five centuries of Spanish and United States domination,
it is a wonder that significant portions of Native languages,
religions, and cultures have endured into the present. But the
very fact of Indian survival has given rise to some serious
misconceptions. I have watched tourists at the Santa Fe Indian
Market gazing in awe at pottery from Acoma Pueblo displayed
in plastic wrap and marveling at the continuity of culture from
ancient times. What they don’t realize is that many precontact
traditions died out completely, others changed radically, and
still others were created, some rather recently.
A primary
cause of the decline in the arts among the pueblo villages in
the nineteenth century was the influx of manufactured goods
from the eastern United States after the Santa Fe Trail opened
in 1821. Metal pots and pans began to replace traditional Pueblo
pottery wares. To some extent the Pueblo people themselves started
using the imported items; more significantly, the Hispanic peoples
for whom the Pueblos had supplied pottery from as early as 1600
increased their use of manufactured wares. This loss of trade
had a profound negative effect on both the quantity and the
quality of pottery wares produced in the pueblos.
Given the
many changes that have taken place in Pueblo pottery in the
last 150 years, it is remarkable that one tradition remained
relatively free of outside influences. At the pueblos of Taos,
Picuris, Nambe, Tesuque, Santa Clara, Pojoaque, and San Juan,
certain culinary wares made of mica-rich clay were produced
along with painted and black ware types. Neither the tourists
nor the Indians themselves seem to have regarded these micaceous
wares, which included sparsely decorated jars, bowls, pitchers,
and other utilitarian forms, as art. This does not imply that
aesthetic values were unimportant to the Indians or that they
were not expressed in micaceous wares; they most assuredly were.
A few examples were collected by museums, but these were neither
well documented nor given extensive coverage in publications.
James
Stevenson collected seriously for the Smithsonian Institution
in 1879 and 1880 and sent nearly three thousand pottery vessels
back to Washington, but his lengthy catalog, published in 1883,
listed only ten micaceous pieces from Tesuque and one each from
Pojoaque and Santa Clara (he did not go to Taos and Picuris);
only three micaceous pots were illustrated. Ruth Bunzel’s
The Pueblo Potter does not even mention micaceous pottery. Presumably
such pieces were regarded merely as cooking pots. Micaceous
pots and other vessels were sold in curio shops as early as
1880 but were never afforded the same aesthetic value by scholars
and tourists as the Pueblo painted wares. Center stage was occupied
by the revived painted pottery styles, eventually joined by
polished redwares and the celebrated blackwares of Santa Clara
and San Ildefonso.
At Taos
and Picuris, the two northernmost Pueblo villages, painted wares
had died out long before anthropologists and traders began encouraging
the revival of Indian arts and crafts at the beginning of the
twentieth century, but micaceous wares were retained for their
superior cooking and heating qualities. Traditional blackwares
continued in use for serving and storing food until some time
in the mid-nineteenth century, but by 1900 only micaceous pottery
was actually being produced at these two pueblos. Micaceous
cooking pots were so durable and so popular among the northern
Pueblos and their Hispanic neighbors that they were used alongside
the metal pots and pans coming in by way of the Santa Fe Trail,
and later on the railroad.
The Jicarilla
Apaches, mountain neighbors to the west of Taos and Picuris,
also made micaceous pottery. Given the nomadic tendencies and
relative isolation of the Jicarillas, it comes as no surprise
that their pottery was neither collected nor encouraged by anthropologists
as "art." Stevenson's 1883 catalog lists only twenty-three
items, obtained through a third party, that were thought to
be of Jicarilla Apache origin. Micaceous pottery has continued
to be used among the Jicarillas; the craft went into serious
decline in the 1970s, but is being revived by Feljpe Ortega
and Lydia Pesata and her family.
Even today
you can visit the homes of Taos, Picuris, and Jicarilla Apache
families and find a pot of beans simmering on the wood or gas
stove in a micaceous pot ("The beans taste better!"
says Felipe Ortega). Teakettles, pitchers, cups, and other micaceous
pieces are also used regularly, as they have been for more than
two hundred years. If you bought a pot directly from a Taos
Pueblo potter in the last twenty years or so, chances are you
received instructions on how to use it on a wood fire or gas
stove or in the oven. In the 1990s microwaving instructions
are commonly provided as well.
I
first visited Picuris Pueblo in 1963 with a group of Pecos Conference
attendees on a field trip to Herbert W. Dick’s excavations
in Old Picuris. Local pottcr Virginia Duran presented a micaceous
pottery-making demonstration for our group and showed us how
the sparkling slip was applied. I was impressed with the appearance
of the pottery, but two dollars seemed a high price for a college
student to pay. I returned to Picuris two years later and bought
a medium-sized jar with a rope fillet design on the neck for
five dollars. During the 1960s Herb Dick encouraged Duran and
others to continue with their traditional crafts, but I am sure
that back then no one thought of Duran’s pottery as being
on a par with the prizewinning polychromes and polished blackwares
and redwares that work being exhibited at the Santa Fe Indian
Market.
Thirty
years later, when I came back to live in the Southwest, I was
amazed by the transformation micaceous pottery was undergoing.
At the 1993 Santa Fe Indian Market I admired a large micaceous
pot in Lonnie Vigil’s booth. I asked Lonnie, whom I had
not met previously, what the price was, and was shocked by his
reply- “Five thousand dollars or a pickup truck.”
I had no idea a micaceous pot could be so beautiful or so expensive!
I quickly learned that the micaceous potter tradition was changing
rapidly. Pots were winning prizes as “art” at the
Indian markets, they were being sold in galleries, and they
were fetching increasingly handsome prices."
All
indented text by Duane Anderson is excerpt from his book All
That Glitters: The Emergence of Native American Micaceous Art Pottery
in Northern New Mexico.. Published by the School of American
Research Press, Sante Fe, New Mexico. Copyright 1999 by the School
of American Research. Photography by Addison Doty. 