When
A free, in-person presentation by Dr. Suzanne L. Eckert, ASM's Head of Collections.
At Whiskey Del Bac (2106 Forbes Blvd, Suite 103).
Registration link coming soon.
Color on Ancestral Pueblo pottery is much more than the designs they portray. In this talk, I will use a selection of pots from ASM’s extensive collection to discuss various types of color patterns that have been identified on Ancestral Pueblo pottery. In the American Southwest, color combinations on pottery have been recognized for a long time as important to dating pottery, but archaeologists need to expand how we think about colors and color combinations to include questions about why potters may have made their color decisions and how Ancestral Puebloans may have viewed those colors. In addition, we should assume that things we don’t understand may be a mistake in our seeing, and not a mistake in their making.
Suzanne Eckert is the Head of Collections at the Arizona State Museum and a professor in the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona. She earned her doctorate in 2003 from the Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University. Dr. Eckert’s research focuses on how pre-colonial and colonial cultures organized ceramic technology, and how this technology integrated with other aspects of society, including migration, religious practice, ideology, gender, and ethnicity. Her current project is focused in the Lion Mountain region of the Cibola National Forest in New Mexico. When not doing archaeology, Dr. Eckert can be found quilting, reading, hiking, baking, or eating tacos. She prefers to work and play bare-footed.