Adobe Gallery Blog
Historic Zuni Pueblo Olla with an Upside Down Deer - C3804A
Assigning a date to Zuni Pueblo historic pottery is facilitated by the very large number of Zuni vessels collected for the Bureau of American Ethnology between 1879 and 1885, and by those collected for the American Museum of Natural History between 1899 and 1912.
Sometime before 1870, potters began to paint their vessels' underbodies and the interiors of their necks black. In early cases, black was applied over the interior's red neck paint. In those vessels, the red is faintly visible through the black. Of course, a change of this nature did not occur overnight but may have occurred over several decades. It is believed that the change on the neck interior was completed by 1865. It was not until around 1900 that the underbody caught up with the neck.