Mimbres Painted Pottery [cont.]

Iconography. The original intended meanings of any Mimbres Phase painting are obscure at best. Some geometric motifs suggest clouds, lightning, stars, flowers, butterflies, or other natural forms that may be associated with rainfall, and, by extension, with fertility. Similar motifs used in recent times by Pueblo potters are sometimes named for one or another natural form, but there is little evidence that they are usually intended to convey any specific message or that they are, strictly speaking, symbols. Instead, the names seem often to be suggested by the forms themselves; some are given different names by different makers and different users, and most of the names, if not all, appear to be generic and suggestive rather than specific in meaning [Bunzel 1929]

On a different level, quartered compositions suggest the representation of the four world quarters that are so important an element of Native American cosmogony, particularly in the Southwest and Middle America . . . . However, these suggestions cannot be proven and may be incorrect. [p. 200] Quartering systems are common Mimbres Phase pottery art but were used proportionally far more often in preceding phases. Mimbres Phase potters were as likely to divide a vessel into units of two, three, or five as into units of four, and there is not hint that any one patterning system carried special meaning not shared by the others.

Whether or not Mimbres geometrical compositions and motifs were given particular meaning cannot be determined, but there is no doubt that representational paintings were made at the very least to commemorate the real or imagined existence of a being or thing. Most single-figure paintings can be read as emblems. Many are of easily identified animals, suggesting the possibility of their use as the logo for clan or personal names. Again, the conjecture is unsupported, and more often than not, pictures of several different animals are on the vessels buried with a single person [Bradfield 1931; Cosgrove 1932]. Animals may have been associated with year, month, or society names or with such cosmic features as the sun, stars, or moon. The ancient middle American identification of the rabbit with the moon may also have been applied by the Mimbreños, for many rabbit pictures have lunate forms associated with that animal. Other iconographic details lend support to this assumption. In Middle America the crane may have been associated with lunar eclipses, and several Mimbres paintings show a bird eating a rabbit, which may confirm lunar meanings [David Kelley 1975: a personal communication; Linda Schele 1976: personal communication]. Even if so, there is still no way of knowing if a rabbit picture referred to the moon, to an individual, real or mythic, named for the moon, or even to a verbal-visual pun. If "rabbit" meant "moon," a picture of a rabbit could refer to a word that sounded like the Mimbres word for ñmoonî but meant something else. Or it could refer to all or none of these potential meanings.

More complex figurative paintings, simply because they are more complex, carry greater potential for interpretation than do most single-figure pictures. Those that describe group or daily activities--hunting, fishing, gathering wood, or trapping birds--seemingly inform about aspects of Mimbres life that are otherwise shadowy. But we can never know whether what we see is a picture of an observed event or an imaginary one. Considering the many fantasies drawn by Mimbres artists and their penchant for visual puns, there can be no assurance about the genre nature of any Mimbres painting. A picture that seems to depict the trapping of birds may instead--or also--be depicting a mythical event, wherein a culture hero saves the stars by trapping the crows that were [p. 201] eating them [David Kelley 1975: personal communication].

The genre like pictures lend support to but hardly confirm conjectures about the communal nature of Mimbres life and details concerning the forms and decoration of other Mimbres manufactured items such as baskets, arrow quivers, shields, and costume. We can assume but not know that everyday dress was simple and minimal, and that elaboration of costume, body ornament, and hair style for ceremonial and ritual events also tended to be minimal. Details concerning motor habits are perhaps more certain. How people sat, walked, danced, carried things, used tools, bore children, trained animals, are all described by Mimbres artists, and often these pictures carry the apparent stamp of observed reality. [The activities and objects may represent no more than useful elements contributing to kinds of experience through relationships evolving pictorial composition--and these elements may be more or less representational of existing or evolving elements in experience or imagination--or the relationship between experience and imagination . . . . ]

Numbers of paintings simulate reality but for one reason or another are fantastic or even, apparently, whimsical. Siamese-twinned fish or bird-tailed or rabbit-headed insects could refer to anything from proverbial folklore to private fantasy, from frivolous cartooning to awesome representations of supernatural beings. It has been suggested [but without supporting evidence] that composite figures are clan emblems [Kabotie 1949]. It may be safe to assume that, when fantastic forms were repeated and perhaps made in different communities, they had social meaning beyond idiosyncrasy and related to a rich and imaginative oral literature. But whether the pictures were intended to be mnemonic, emblematic, illustrative, or proverbial cannot be known.

Some of the more complicated narrative paintings suggest folkloric illustration and other seems to be a type of genre picture that records some ceremonial event rather than a more mundane activity. Among the former are many depicting cranes and fish and several showing confrontations between groups of men and a gigantic fish. A number of vignettes that portray man-beast interactions or composite figures may record ceremonial rather than mythic events, with humans in animal costumes portrayed. Other, more easily perceived masks were also painted and, although it is not known when masking came to be used by the Mimbreños, it was certainly a well-developed trait by the time of the Mimbres Phase--even animals used animal masks. Only a few paintings of Mimbres masks or costumes suggest those of the modern Pueblos and, even though most are of animal subjects, the animals most commonly used in Pueblo masquerades, such as deer, antelope, mountain sheep, and bison, seem not to have been a major part of the Mimbres masking system. [p. 203]

Other masks suggest both Mexico and the Southwest. Those of horned serpents may be identified with the Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, sometimes depicted also as Ehecatl, the Wind God. At least one Mimbres painting of a mask may be identified with the Mexican rain god Tlaloc [Di Peso, Rinaldo, and Fenner 1974: 566, 714 n. 103]. Much altered and in a variety of manifestation, these Mesoamerican deities became important to late Anasazi and historic Pueblo people. However, the difficultly in deriving original Mimbreöo meanings from any of these well-established identities is manifested by examining one of the more dramatic Mimbres paintings that depicts a horned serpent mask. The decapitation scene is one of two known versions that are alike in formal and iconographic detail. They were found in separate localities and differ enough in draftsmanship to make it reasonably certain that they were painted by different artists, perhaps at separate times and places. For that reason it can be assumed that the theme was a traditional one with obvious social meaning to the Mimbreños. However, information based on well-documented Pueblo and Mesoamerican sources provides at least three different and equally plausible interpretations: 1) It represents a human sacrifice made in time of draught by a local priest. This is supported by analogy with reported Hopi and Zuni practices of the nineteenth century and earlier [Kabotie 1949]. 2) It represents the ritual decapitation of a Mimbres prisoner by a Casas Grandes warrior. This is supported by analogy with contemporary and earlier Mesoamerican practices [Di Peso, Rinalsdo, and Fenner 1974: 150, 707 n. 21]. 3) It illustrates the Mimbres version of a Classic Mayan myth as recorded in the Popol Vuh, in which one twin culture hero decapitates his brother as part of a scheme to trap and kill the Lords of the Underworld [Coe 1973: 12-13]. The only certain iconographic message that survives is that there were historic relationships between Mesoamerica and the Mimbres valley.

The funerary contexts in which so many of the Mimbres representational paintings are found deserves emphasis in this context. The Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh conquer the Underworld Lords, the fearful masters of the worlds where dead souls must wander on their hazardous journey to a final resting place. The houses and gardens of the Underworld Lords are guarded by different birds, by jaguars, and by bats. All of these animals or their near relatives figure prominently in Mimbres iconography, occasionally with details surprisingly close to those of Mayan iconography. Thus, the Mayan "Killer Bats" of the Underworld are depicted with crossed long bones [p. 206] on their wings. Mimbreöos bats with crosses shown on their wings are not dissimilar.

Other death-related beings and events that figure in Middle America and Mesoamerica and also occur on Mimbres funerary pottery include armadillo, owl, centipede, and stilt dances performed by the Twins in the Underworld. Mortuary iconography also includes dogs, flying insects, water birds, frogs, a fish god, deer, and rabbit, and the celestial signs associated with the Twins and their father and uncle--the sun, the moon, Venus as both the morning and the evening star, and death's-heads with drilled teeth. Morning and evening stars are sometimes shown as four-pointed stars in historic Pueblo ritual art and some, at least, of the four-pointed figures of Mimbres art may be representations of Venus. The catalog of similarities is impressive and suggests that the pictures on many vessels the Mimbreöos sacrificed to their dead referred to a complex mythology of death. [p. 207]

Ideological relationships to Middle America and Mesoamerica were manifested in many ways and seem to have been intermittently active from time immemorial. They are specified and humanized by the Mimbreños paintings cited and also by others such as pictures of large treelike staffs that may relate to the "tree of life" of volador ritual [J. Charles Kelley 1974], birds and serpents, and by representations of the sipapu, the place of emergence from the Underworld of the basic southwestern and Mesoamerican origin legend. Several Mimbres variations of this theme are known, and all are basically similar but different in detail from any recorded southwestern version of the legend. In one, a group of men is shown in a spiralate composition, crawling through a tunnellike structure and climbing upward [Fewkes 1923]. In another, an underground world is more clearly indicated in which a single man is chopping his way out of a womblike cave and into a tunnel filled with birds. At the other end of the tunnel is a gigantic bird seemingly enclosed within another cave.

Similarities to the religious iconography of both the Pueblos and Mesoamerica seem to be clear, but Mimbreño use of these common themes was unique. The suggestions must be made first that some aspects of the ideology pictured were basic and ancient, and second that the Mimbreños were exposed to Mexican ritual ideas and characteristically adapted them to their own style. For whatever reason, this style was submerged in later times just as the Mimbreños themselves lost every vestige of a particular identity after the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Some of the southern-inspired iconographic themes appear as early as the tenth century on Mangas [p. 209] Black-on-white pottery, but most made their initial appearance no earlier than the eleventh century. This was during the time that Casas Grandes was growing in importance as a trade center and as the northern outpost of a kind of Mesoamerican cultural imperialism [Di Peso, Rinaldo, and Fenner 1974]. At about that time, also, similar influences were being absorbed at Chaco Canyon [Jennings 1956]; J. Charles Kelley 1960, 1966] and there may have been an influx of people from the south into the Hohokam region as well [Doyle 1974; Schroeder 1960]. The peculiar iconography of the Mimbreöos suggests that their adaptation of foreign concepts was independent of both the Anasazi and the Hohokam.

That they did adapt what appears to have been a demanding religious complex fortifies the belief that their world was troubled. Many of the iconographic evidences of this new religious complex can refer to fertility as well as death, a theme suggested also by phallic subject matter that seems to occur late in Mimbres art. The duality is in keeping with the contrast of oppositions that is so characteristic of Mimbreño art. Pragmatism, novelty, fertility, demanding ritual--all combine to suggest that the focus of the Mimbres problems was economic and related to food production, and that the new rituals and the new art were different but related means for coping with the new problems. [p. 200-210]

The original utility of Mimbres Painted Pottery. The utility of the vessels on which Mimbres paintings were made is obvious. They were containers for food, water, ritual objects, and a great variety of other things, and many were ultimately used as mortuary offerings. The utility of the paintings is not so easily assumed or demonstrated . . . . [p. 211] If the Mimbres used their paintings for sensual and emotive purposes, then their art functioned as art to its makers and their audiences. The pots served physical functions; the paintings on them served psychic and social ones. Among these last functions, two should be looked at with some care. First was the use of paintings as self-conscious symbols of the Mimbres community, and second was their use as imaginative attempts to "classify out [p. 212] the universe" or invent a form of what Lévi-Strauss [1963] has called "objective coding." [p. 211-213]

Mimbres Painting as Community Identification. The southwestern pueblos must serve to illustrate the first of these functions, the use of paintings as self-conscious community symbols. Among the more conservative pueblos, painted pottery is the one art that expresses individuality and strength. In some of the upper Rio Grande towns and at Acoma, Zuni, Zia, and Hopi, wherever there are strong decorative traditions deeply rooted in the past, these are consciously considered as a sign of the integrity, vitality, and quality of the group [Bunzel 1929; Maxwell Museum 1974]. In most of these places interpersonal rivalries and competition between potters tend to create community tensions, but they also serve to maintain standards of craftsmanship and to stimulate decorative invention. Competition between communities acts as an integrative bonding within each while promoting the spread of regional craft and decorative ideals. Assurance of technical and decorative equality or superiority, even when personified in the work of an individual craftsperson, becomes important to the self-image of each community. As much as any other factor this may account for the viability of the craft and the revivalism that periodically occurs in those pueblos where pottery-making traditions have died. [p. 213]

The Mimbres community was much larger than that of any modern pueblo, including as it did several hundred towns . . . . Differences in design between any two contemporary pueblos are much more apparent than those that existed between any two Mimbres towns, but that does not affect the analogy. Intensification of these differences is a relatively recent phenomenon partly resulting from the enormous population losses of the last four centuries. Reduction of the number of villages meant that design traditions that had once been widespread and shared by tens or hundreds of towns became focused on the few that survived. To a greater or lesser degree, each of the modern pueblos is a shrunken vestige of a much larger group of communities that was in every way comparable to that of the Mimbres.

Other factors have further intensified differences during the last three or four generations. The Pueblo Indians are surrounded and dominated by alien people and have become a relatively powerless minority in their own land. Their internal need to assert identity in opposition to immigration of new populations is obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is that economic domination of the painted pottery market by alien consumers has meant that the Pueblo people must now accept some new aesthetic values. The new consumers insist on being able to identify individual artists and individual communities, and this insistence further reinforces tendencies toward visual distinction. Because of these internal and external pressures, pottery art now proclaims identification and the self-worth of a particular community or of an individual member of it. [p. 214] . . . . The fact remains that we identify the Mimbres by their pottery art and almost certainly this was one of the means that they used to identify themselves. That there was some need to assert self-identity is evident, given that their communities did not survive.

Painting as a means of proclaiming the Mimbres regional identity is more easily demonstrated than the use of the art for a similar purpose by towns and individuals within the region.

. . . . Patterning systems and design values were similar throughout the region, and certain motifs that have the appearance of being individualistic seem also to have been used anywhere. It should be remembered that the specifics that defined individuality within the Zuni pottery-painting system were invisible to outside observers because it was not motifs but their patterned distribution that expressed idiosyncrasy [Bunzel 1929]

. . . . Even when provenience is known and the paintings are only a few generations removed form the historical present, it is hardly possible to define those visual characteristics that proclaim either individual or town identity. We are left, then, with the belief, but no evidence, that the Mimbres tradition could not have intensified to the degree that it did in the absence of some comparative system for making highly critical social judgments about the quality of painted pottery. If comparative judgments were also made at the local and personal levels, then they must inevitably have led to creation of locally recognized painting modes that served to identify particular places and perhaps, people. [p. 213-214]

Mimbres Art as Metaphor. There are several dimensions to the postulated second social function--to "classify out the universe" --of Mimbres Phase painting. This art, like any other, was a metaphorical ordering or classifying of phenomena, a kind of taxonomy used to create order in a disorderly universe. Thus our own [p. 215] classification of it into two genera, the representational and the nonrepresentational, recognizes a distinction that was in fact made by the Mimbres. In their system certain kinds of natural and imagined natural phenomena, especially animals, are pictured as existing in one kind of visual space, while other, invented and nonfigurative forms are made to fit in another. [p. 215-216] Paintings are imaginative artifacts that have the intrinsic capability of being reused for purposes that could not have been imagined by their makers. Resurrection in a new context may be an obscenity or a sacrilege, but misuse can be prevented only by the timely destruction of a picture when its original [p. 219] meanings become obscure. To the pragmatists able to discover new values in old artifacts, considerations of obsolescence are meaningless, but the new values can have social authenticity only if their novelty is acknowledged. To do otherwise simply makes over the past in the image of a present whose values must be judged by the future as ethnocentric. There is no escaping the limitations, for the symbolic and expressive meanings of the imaginative product must change as it interacts with new times, places, and people. [p. 219-220]

New Uses for Old Art. In the context of southwestern archaeology at the turn of the century, the rediscovery of Mimbres paintings was startling. The nonfigurative metaphors could be understood on an intuitive level; they were unique but still fitted the model based on experience of what prehistoric southwestern painted pottery should be. But nothing discovered earlier, not even the figurative paintings of the Sikyatki tradition, could have prepared any observer for the realism of Mimbres figurative paintings. The novelty was not so much in their imagery as in their concern for perceptual reality. A parallel to the illusionism of familiar European picture making was apparent and the "naturalism" or "realism" of Mimbres figurative painting, at once familiar and alien, called for a kind of understanding that went beyond intuition but was impossible to achieve. In their new context these paintings were considered more as the key to a code than as imaginative artifacts that existed independent of their own past.

Resurrected by people mostly interested in their historical and ethnographic values, and then confined to institutions committed to investigation of these problems, Mimbres paintings naturally enough had little impact as, or on, any twentieth-century art. Most analyses have concentrated on their iconographic specifics and documentary potentials and have been more or less frustrated by inability to crack the code. Because the art cannot reveal any timeless messages, investigations are shelved and the pictures are set aside as curiosities to be looked at later.

Almost their only modern use has been as models for some Pueblo potters and easel painters. The concern of these painters most often has also been with ideogrammatic rather than structural or metaphoric potentials, but for different reasons. Whether Mimbres painters were directly, indirectly, or [p. 220] not at all ancestral to any of the modern Pueblo people, they were indisputably ancient and southwestern. All Mimbres motifs have current symbolic value for all the Pueblos as a sign of legitimacy and antiquity. They are selected not for any specific ancient meanings but, practically, because they fit particular formal and decorative requirements, and metaphorically because rightly or wrongly they are identified with antique independence. [p. 220-221]

It is the stereotyping that destroys the humanity of an art object and converts it into a natural one. Concentration on supposed ideogrammatic meanings divert attention from the structural ones intended to "classify out the universe," and the art object becomes a found object, made by as well as belonging to the finder. As the structural metaphors and the original makers both become more familiar, the modern-made myths dissolve and the resurrected art can become rehumanized. Full realization that the art artifact was made by human hands comes with the knowledge that it served its makers as art. Only when there is certainly that Mimbres paintings were made to function as imaginative products, that they are metaphorical even if they were ideogrammatic, will they begin to serve the same function to new audiences. But never, until due respect is given to the humanity of the makers, can the imaginative artifacts serve their original purpose in unimagined new ways to unimaginable new audiences. [p. 227]

Mimbres Influence on Later Wares. . . . neither representational nor nonrepresentational Mimbres painting seems to have had any but the most modest effects on contemporary or later southwestern pictorial traditions . . . . The importance of the Mimbres tradition to any later pottery paintng in the Southwest is at best vague and speculative. The Mimbres Phase overlapped spatially and temporally with Casas Grandes, and at least some Casas Grandes potters were familiar with Mimbres painting. The pictorial and visual problems of the two traditions were quite different, and any Mimbres influence on Casas Grandes painting was at most incidental and peripheral to its main themes. The same can be said with even greater certainly of all later polychrome painting traditions of the Southwest. Following the population movements of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the dramatic changes in all aspects of daily life, radical changes also occurred in ceramic techniques and, even more, in the problems and principles of pottery painting. The visual language of the Mimbres tradition seems to have had little value or meaning to any of these later people.

From beginning to end that tradition was historically, technically, and stylistically a part of the larger painted-pottery tradition of the greater Southwest. It was at one time or another deeply or superficially affected by the technical and aesthetic developments that took place among neighboring peoples. At the beginning and for a long time thereafter it was a relatively minor art, derivative, involving few people, and with a low level of production. The florescence of the unique aesthetic of the Mimbres Phase was less an event than a process. A generation in the lifetime of a group that existed for fifteen hundred years is no time at all, and from a certain perspective Mimbres Phase art appears as a sudden development. But for an [p. 113] individual a generation may be all the time there is, and maturing of the at over the course of several generations was, from an individual point of view, a lengthy process.

It took place at a time when the Mimbreños may have been crossing a demographic threshold and, in conjunction with other activities that tell of a burgeoning population, searching for means to control a variety of growth inspired pressures. But correlation is not explanation, and nowhere is there a hint to explain why the Mimbreños alone of all southwestern people, chose to devote so much of their creative energy to that particular art in that particular way. [p. 113-114]