Pottery Mound

On the desolate banks of the Rio Puerco ("Pig "or "Dirty" River), a tributary of the Rio Grande in central New Mexico, is an archaeological site known as Pottery Mound, so named for the profusion of ancient pottery fragments scattered about the ground over several acres (in fact it is hardly possible to take a step on the site without treading on shards of ancient decorated pottery). Here in the late 1950's and early 60's the Archaeological Field School of the University of New Mexico, under the direction of archaeologist Dr. Frank Hibben, excavated a series of subterranean rooms or kivas upon whose walls were a found a remarkable series of murals depicting the life and ceremonies of a long-vanished people. The one-time inhabitants of Pottery Mound are classified as a prehistoric or Stone Age culture because no evidence of writing or metals have been found there. They lived in crude communal apartment complexes constructed of adobe mud. These were a farming people in a semi-desert land, whose religion was oriented toward the bringing of precious rain to their crops of corn, beans, squash, and possibly also the cotton from which their textiles were woven. There is evidence in some of the murals of ritual human sacrifice, and some have also interpreted the fragmentary human bone scattered about the mound as evidence of cannibalism (see my painting Anasazi Kitchen). Pottery Mound was a thriving community from about AD 1200 to 1475, but had been abandoned by the time Europeans (Spanish) first entered the area in 1540.


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