Hundreds of years ago, indigenous Puebloan women sculpted clay pots and used them to collect water. When commentator Scott Thybony found a potsherd near Wupatki National Monument, it transported him back in time and inspired this month's Canyon Commentary.
A single potsherd stood out against the black cinders in the Strawberry Crater Wilderness north of Flagstaff. Something about the design looked familiar, and I picked it up. The repetitive pattern of white triangles with black dots had a geometric simplicity as steady as drumbeats. And I remembered seeing the same design on a beautiful prehistoric bowl being curated at the Museum of Northern Arizona. It had come from Wupatki National Monument, a few miles from where I stood holding a similar fragment.
In the summer of 2013 a series of heavy storms hit the park, dumping 3 to 4 times the normal amount of rain. The runoff carved an arroyo into the cinders near Wupatki Pueblo, uncovering sandstone slabs set upright with others placed on top as a lid. It was a prehistoric cache. Erosion had caused one end of the sandstone cist to collapse and reveal a ceramic bowl, an extremely rare find in itself.
Normally the Park Service would have left everything in place, but an inspection raised an alarm. The structural integrity of the cist had been compromised, and before it could collapse and crush whatever remained inside, they decided to act. An emergency evacuation began, and park archaeologist Kelly Stehman gently removed the visible pot. Then she discovered a cache of 6 more vessels in the cinder fill behind it. One bowl was found nested inside another, a third bowl was inverted over the mouth of a pot, and two seed jars rested nearby. The cache of ceramic vessels had remained hidden for 800 years.
The pottery hinted at a story anchored to a particular moment in time. Based on different styles, early Puebloan people had built the stone cist near Wupatki Pueblo sometime between AD 1125 and 1200. They placed within it a mixture of vessels from plainware for everyday use to finely decorated bowls for special occasions. Archaeologists could tell the pottery had come to Wupatki from areas to the northeast, southeast, and south, indicating these people were part of a far-reaching trade network. But much of the story remains untold, waiting further study. The Friends of Flagstaff National Monuments have begun raising funds so scientists will be able to study the contents of the vessels and identify any botanical remains. Eventually the Park Service plans to put the ceramics on public display.
The concentric bands painted on the interior of the piece I had seen at the museum resembled ripples spreading outward in a pool of water. It brought to mind novelist Willa Cather, who in 1912 explored the cliff houses of Walnut Canyon, 25 miles south of Wupatki. The broken pottery scattered along an ancient water trail connected her to the women who - centuries before - had walked the same path carrying what she called "the precious element". Traditionally, women in Pueblo society made the jars used to hold water and were the ones responsible for collecting it.
Cather recognized the essential relationship between women and water, between the making of pottery and art itself. "What was any art but an effort to make a sheath," she wrote in The Song of the Lark, "a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?"
Standing on the lava flow of Strawberry Crater, I placed the potsherd back on the dry cinders and kept walking.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU, Arizona Public Radio.
