Adobe Gallery Blog

One wonders why there was so little study of the early 20^th century pottery of the pueblos when there was so much available.  Most likely the answer is two-fold.  Anthropologists were most interested in what could be excavated from buried sites and not what was available in the pueblo kitchen of the time.  Secondly, the Museum of New Mexico director, Edgar L. Hewett, was more interested in exploring the past rather than the current in the 1920s.

Some of the most amazing pottery was that seen in pueblo households in the late 1800s to early 1900s.  Representatives of the Smithsonian and other museums did collect from the pueblo home but they were seeing everything as ethnographic material and not as we view it today as art.  There was no attempt by these early collectors to describe and classify as art what they gathered, but only classified it as ethnographic material.

Read more about this historic pottery here.