Crafting History: I Made 7 Ancient Pot Replicas in Just One Year!

The 2024 Ancient Pottery Challenge began when I decided to highlight the diverse cultures and ancient pottery styles of the Colorado Plateau. We're going to take a virtual tour of the northern southwest. We're going to look at seven different cultural groups that lived up there and I'm going to pick seven different pots that I'm going to replicate this season. The Colorado Plateau is a huge plateau that encompasses a vast region of the northern southwestern United States. It sits right over what's known as the Four Corners area. That is where the four states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah come together. The plateau is characterized by these sedimentary deposits and so just as this sedimentary deposit has influenced the unique landscape that we see in the Colorado Plateau, it has also influenced the cultures and the pottery that developed there. The prehistoric culture of the Colorado Plateau is almost entirely, although not completely, what used to be called Anizazi and what is today known as Ancestral Puebloan. Archaeologists further divide them into smaller subgroups. So there's Cayenta and Cibola and Chaco and different regions within that. These are the seven pots I chose to recreate this season for the Ancient Pottery Challenge. Everyone representing a different cultural group in the Colorado Plateau. So the first one I made was that big Pinto Polychrome Bowl, actually the largest pot of the season in diameter. Pinto Polychrome was the first of the Salado Polychrome types. It was first created on the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau right around 1275 AD and being a Salado Polychrome type, it uses organic paint. So in order to get that organic paint to work, we need that special Smectite clay as a slip to hold that organic paint and make black designs in the firing. So I formed this whole pot using a gray body clay that I collected along the south edge of the Colorado Plateau. I slipped the inside with that white Smectite clay from the Colorado Plateau, slipped the outside with this nice yellow clay also from that southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, polished it, everything was coming along great, and then it broke. So of course I did what I had to do. I made a second one. And of course I only fired the second one. The first one ended up getting ground back up into clay and reused. Now here's my organic paint. This is organic paint made from mesquite beans and I'm painting those hated spirals. Those things really drive me crazy. This pot had two big ones. Long before the invention of Pinto Polychrome, at a time when redwares were just catching on, Mogollon potters began decorating redware pottery with black organic painted designs. This type, called Xolo Black on Red by archaeologists, was the very first oxidized organic painted pottery. And it was made in this area for hundreds of years, from about 1030 until the late 1200s. In the late 1200s, a new design style was sweeping the region, what archaeologists today call Pine Nail style. This combined the interplay between solid and hatched elements that we find in Ancestral Zuni Tularosa style and the stepped frets that we find in Ancestral Hopi Kayenta style. At first, potters applied this new style to the same red slip they had been using in the same organic paint they had been using and produced Pinto Black on Red, which technologically is almost identical to its predecessor Xolo Black on Red. Then somebody got the idea of using a white slip on the inside of the bowl instead of a red slip and Pinto Polychrome was born. Because of the problems I had with this project, breaking the pot midway through, this project took me almost a month to do. I started making the first pot December 8th, 2023 and I fired the second one January 6th, 2024. So here I am, January 6th, out there, late in the afternoon, getting this pot fired. And this is just a basic surface firing. Right on the surface, build a teepee of wood over it and fire it off. Pretty simple, but you need to, with these organic paints, keep the temperature low. And this one got out of hand. This one fired quite a bit hotter than I wanted it to. I was looking for somewhere in the 750 to 800 range. This firing got up around 850. So I think that's probably what is to blame with the designs being not so great. I mean, I didn't get good, good blacks, as you can see there. They're kind of grayish. They're a little washed out and I think it was a little too hot, probably a little too long. We had a good breeze going. So this is the one pot in the Ancient Pottery Challenge this year that I would like to redo in the next year or so. So the next pot on the list was that little Show Low Polychrome jar. As I worked my way around the Colorado Plateau counterclockwise. Show Low Polychrome is a beautiful type of polychrome pottery that was made in the southern part of the Colorado Plateau between about 1325 and 1400. Traditionally, Show Low Polychrome, being one of the White Mountain Redwares, would be made with a gray body clay from the Colorado Plateau. In this case, I used a reddish brown body clay from the southern southwest. So I was not completely authentic with this one. And the reason was that gray body clay that I had used on the previous pot has some soluble minerals in it. I don't know if they were salts or calcium or something. And they kind of, as the pot dried, it kind of left a coating, a thin residue of grayish white material on the outside. So my reds weren't really a bright red. They end up being pinkish colored. And I wanted the colors on this pot to be bright. So now that I've got the pot all formed, I'm ready to slip it. Now the slips are authentic. The white slip I'm using is from the same area where Show Low Polychrome was made on the Colorado Plateau. So was the yellow slip. In fact, the yellow and white come from very close to one another in the same area. And so these are authentic slips on a not authentic body clay. Once the pot's all covered with slips, you won't even see this brown clay unless you look down the neck of the jar. White Mountain Redware began to be made around 1050 AD in east central Arizona and west central New Mexico. So this general type of pottery had a long history by the time Show Low Polychrome started to be made. For over 200 years, the ancestors of today's Zuni people had been making redware decorated with black mineral paint and white clay. Then around 1300, in the far west of this region where White Mountain Redware was made, several new styles began to be made as the traditional Cibola designs were blended and combined with Kayenta designs from far northern Arizona. These new pottery types were based on the old style, but were also something completely new. Pinedale Polychrome, Cedar Creek Polychrome, Four Mile Polychrome, and the type I'm making here today, Show Low Polychrome, were born in this area near the Mogollon Rim and at the time around 1300 AD. These beautiful and innovative pottery styles only continued for about 100 years. Sometime between 1380 and 1400, this Mogollon Rim region was completely abandoned. Presumably these people moved east in the direction of Zuni Pueblo, but they did not continue to make these styles of pottery in their new homes, and the tradition of making White Mountain Redware died at that time. Another interesting thing to note about these late period White Mountain Redwares like Show Low Polychrome is that they're usually painted with a lead-based glaze paint. So not the slips, not this part, but the black designs that go on top of this are usually glazy. And I've done some experiments with that and I get mixed results. So when I go to do this one, I want it to come out decent. I'm not trying to get glaze. I'm just using manganese and copper and clay to make this paint. And so I know it's not going to go glazy, so it's not going to be an exact replica or not as close as it could be. Although from a distance, it will look the same. I love the final results of these White Mountain Redwares. They're so colorful and vibrant. The yellow slip, of course, fires red. The white stays white. Then you've got these black mineral painted designs, and then you've got these white outlines, which is just a white clay slip painted around them. It's very, very time consuming by the time you apply the slip and polish it and paint it and then do all the outlining. It took me about 20 days from the day I started the pot until firing day, just to give you some idea of the amount of labor involved. Now the firing I'm doing today is real similar to the one I did for the Pinto Polychrome Bowl previously. Just a surface firing. The difference here is I'm using cover shirts, pieces of fired ceramic to protect the pottery from the fuel. That way I don't get any fire clouds in it. No carbon blemishes on the pots. They come out nice and clean. The other pot in this firing was a Tucson Polychrome jar I had made. And they both came out pretty good. No cracks or anything like that. The black paint on the Xolo Polychrome had a few places where it was kind of flaking away, and I attribute that to the paint recipe. I think I added too much of that organic binder, that mesquite sap that I add to my mineral paint, but I'm just guessing. Okay, on to pot number three. This is the Tularosa Black on White Oya. This is the big boy of this season. So I'm starting with a slab. I'm going to place that in the Puki. In this case, I'm using a glass dome from Home Depot as my Puki, because I don't have a ceramic Puki big enough. And then I just got to kind of get it all cleaned up and trimmed down. So I've got an even disc with a little bit of overlap on the outside, and I'm to start adding coils. Tularosa Black on White was made in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico over a long period, from about 1150 to 1325 AD. That's like 175 years. That's kind of crazy. I mean, this wasn't just made now and again during that period. This was like the main decorated pottery they made during that period. This stuff was everywhere, and it was traded outside of that area as well. This was a very big deal over a period of 175 years. Compare that to our own culture, right? Like, what are we making here in America today the same as we did 175 years ago? That'd be what? 1849, right? So what's that like 20 years before the Civil War? Something like that. What in the world in America is made the same as it was in 1849? Nothing. Our food is different. Our way of transportation is different. Certainly our pottery is different. Everything has changed in that amount of time. Hard to imagine that these people were making the same pottery for 175 years. That is a very, very stable and conservative culture that stays the same that long. Anyway, this is the kind of pottery they were making up there. This gray body clay, a white slip, and black paint. But that black paint didn't go on black. It was reduced iron. So they had some special way of firing it to turn their red paint black in the firing. And that was always kind of the mystery, right? We were always trying to figure out how they reduced iron paint. But in the last few years, several people have been getting pretty good results doing reduced iron paint. Tularosa black on white is a type of Cibola whiteware. The Cibola branch of the Anasazi, or ancestral Puebloans, is considered by some to be the ancestors of today's Zuni Pueblo people. Mineral painted black on white pottery started being made in the Cibola region around 550 AD. By the year 1000, this had evolved into complex designs featuring interplay between solid and hatched elements. It was at this time that the precursor to Tularosa, called reserve black on white, was made. As time went on, the solid black areas and the hatched areas became more balanced and the overall design more refined. These changes led to the next type, Tularosa black on white, which began to be made around 1150 AD. Tularosa is considered by many to be among the finest of the prehistoric southwestern pottery types. It was made and widely traded for 175 years. Around 1325, the popularity of whitewares, which had been the mainstay in the Cibola region for over 700 years, began to wane, replaced by redwares. This period marked the end of Cibola whiteware manufacture and the end of Tularosa black on white. When this shift in pottery styles took place, the techniques used to make Cibola whiteware, such as that used to reduce the red iron paint to make So here I'm painting with a yucca brush. These are made out of yucca leaves, but you'll see as you watch me paint that I didn't do it entirely with yucca brushes. I did all the straight lines with yucca, but when it came to doing those spirals, I started out with yucca, but I wasn't happy with how they were working, and so I switched to commercial brushes for the spirals. Actually, the spirals drive me crazy. I'm just not good at spirals. At least I don't feel like I'm good at painting spirals. Now the cross hatching, that's time consuming and kind of mind-numbing, but they at least say it doesn't drive me crazy like the spirals. It's easy enough to do, you just got to take your time. A lot of time goes into painting a pot this size, but you know, I think it came out pretty good. I'm happy with the results. You know, when you look at the whole pot, the finished pot, it really feels good. When you're in the middle of it, you know, it's kind of hard to see the forest for the trees. When you're trying to reduce iron paint, you have to fire in a hole in the ground, because the whole key is to keep the oxygen away from the pot as it cools. So I'm digging a hole, I'm measuring the hole with the pot to make sure that it's big enough for the pot, plus the cover sherds, plus the fuel. Then once the pit's dug, I build a fire in the pit. I use that fire to preheat the pot, but also to build a bed of coals that will be the foundation of my firing. Once that's burned to coals, I put rocks in the pit, prop the pot up above the coals on those rocks, cover the pot with cover sherds that protects it from the fuel so it doesn't get those fire clouds on it, those carbon blemishes, and then stack the wood around it. So reducing iron is actually pretty easy in an open firing like this. The real trick is to keep it from re-oxidizing as the fire cools, and that involves smothering the fire once that wood has all burned down to coals, and then waiting about three hours for everything to cool down before you can open it up and find out how the pot came out. I think the pot came out pretty good. It's not as white as I'd like. There's a little bit of carbon in that white slip, so it makes it a little gray, at least in places. But the reduced iron came out pretty good. Everything's fairly black. I just wish it was a little whiter. No cracks or anything though, so actually very successful and looks pretty good. Looks a lot like the original in my opinion. The next project was the chaco cylinder jar, which starts out different right from the beginning in that I'm not using a puki. It doesn't have a round bottom, so I just start with a disc of clay on a board and coil straight up. Coiling a cylinder is not as easy as you might think. It's hard to keep those walls perpendicular. They tend to want to creep out or sometimes in, but almost never do. They just naturally want to go straight up and down. So that's kind of the trick. As you coil, you have to keep scraping it vertically with your scraper. Long scrapes across the whole surface, and then measuring once in a while to make sure that you're not creeping out a little. And if you are, you know, using that compression pinch to bring it in, and then more of that vertical scraping. Chaco black on white is the second oldest pottery type in the Ancient Pottery Challenge this season. It started being made in 1075, so it predates most of the others by quite a bit of margin. And it was made up until 1150, which was when the center of Chaco collapsed and people left that area. This project took me about a month to complete, a little over actually. I started on June 12th and I didn't fire until July 15th. Turns out most of these Ancient Pottery Challenge projects take about a month of production and filming. Chaco Canyon is an enigma in the American Southwest. Nothing else like it exists anywhere. Around 880 people began constructing these huge stone pueblo buildings, and construction continued off and on for over 300 years. These massive structures are called great houses by archaeologists. One of the most surprising things about Chacoan great houses, other than the sheer size and scale of them, is that archaeologists have found very little evidence of people living in them. Very few hearths and very little trash. So we think that these massive structures probably housed a very small number of people. One archaeologist, Stephen Lexen, compares them to palaces. Massive extravagant homes where a small family of people lived who ruled over a much larger area. One of the other unique things about Chaco Canyon was these cylinder jars that were found there. Archaeologists have found only 210 of these cylinder jars anywhere. And of that number, 173 of them were found in one single room in Pueblo Benito, the largest of the great houses in Chaco Canyon, in room number 28. In 1896, George Pepper and Richard Wetherill dug room number 28 in Pueblo Benito and found this massive cache of ceramic cylinders in a burned room. That was unusual enough that it made other archaeologists think more about it over the years. And in 2013, Patricia Crown, an archaeologist with University of New Mexico, got permission to re-examine room 28 to find out just what was going on there. She learned through residue analysis that people had been drinking chocolate from these jars. Now the nearest source of chocolate was central Mexico, 1,200 miles away from Chaco Canyon. She also found that the room that had held these pots was probably ritually burned, thereby ending the ritual use of these vessels sometime around 1100 AD. Interestingly, the end of the cylinder jars was not the end of chocolate consumption. The Chacoans continued to consume chocolate in mugs after that time. And coincidentally, my next project in the Ancient Pottery Challenge will be one of those mugs. So now we know that the Chacoans had some connection to Mexico through the chocolate trade. What else might they have learned from Mexico? Well, it turns out that the ancient Mayans also drank their chocolate from cylinder jars at around the same time in history. We don't know what that means though. Was it just a strange coincidence, or was there some connection between these two very different civilizations, one in the jungle and the other in the desert, separated by over 3,000 miles of distance? Another interesting thing about these jars is a lot of them, not all, have these little loop handles around the outside near the top. And some of them are like this, kind of diagonal, some of them come straight out. And some people have speculated that these loops were for tying on, there were stone discs that were found in the same room where all these burned Chaco cylinder jars were. And some people think that they were tying on those stone discs to serve as lids. The materials I'm using here on this pot are all authentic from the Colorado Plateau, although they might not be from the Chaco Canyon area. Most of that country is either Park Service or Navajo Nation, where you can't collect clay, but they are at least from the same general area. So they're very similar to the types of clays that the Chaco potters were using. So you build it out of a gray clay, you slip it with a white clay, and then burnish it. And then when it's fully dry, it's ready for painting. Chaco black on white is decorated in a very similar way to the way that Tularosa black on white was done last. So it's using that same red iron oxide paint, which is just red iron oxide, or hematite is the stone, mixed about 50-50 with red clay. So I'm just painting that on, and fortunately there's no spirals on this pot, so I'm using a yucca brush for all of it. You'll notice that this firing is very similar to the Tularosa firing, again because it's reduction firing, it's reduced iron paint. The pit isn't as deep, but that's just because the pots aren't as large. You just want the top of those pots just at or below the surface, so with smaller pots you don't need as deep of a pit. And then I'm firing two cylinders here, the one I made in this project, and then one that I'd made a few months earlier as part of the Ancient Potters Club. And then cover sherds again to protect the pots from that carbon, and then stack the wood teepee style over it, just like I've done on all these firings. Now one thing I'm doing different on this firing that I didn't do on the Tularosa one, is I'm putting cover sherds over the hot coals, that way there's a layer of sherds between the coals and the dirt. I'm thinking this might prevent some of that smoking, some of that carbon staining, but I'm not really sure if it helped or not. But I'm trying it out. And then, smother it and wait several hours before you can come back, open it up and see how the pots came out. But when you're done waiting and it's time to open it up, it's like opening up a present from a weird uncle. You never know what you're going to get. It might be something terrible, and it might be something great. And in this case, it was perfect. Well, all right. This looks great, huh? Look at that. Clean as a whistle. Clean as a whistle. Look at that. Isn't that beautiful? Good blacks, good whites. That's the best reduction firing ever. Fired nice and hard. The next project was that little Mesa Verde mug. And it was interesting to me, because the previous four projects had each taken about a month to complete, if this was going to do the same. But I got this done in 13 days, so I guess I don't need a month for each of these projects necessarily. The mug is the smallest project in the Ancient Pottery Challenge this season. So the first part of building this mug is almost the same as building that chaco cylinder. Start with a flat disc, build straight up, work really hard to keep those walls perpendicular with those vertical strokes on the gourd scraper. But once you get it built, once you get it to the right height, then it becomes a little different. Because in the end, you don't want your mug to be a straight cylinder. Well, sometimes you do. But in this case, the mug I'm recreating is a little more rounded in shape. And so, as you see, I'm starting to get inside with my gourd scraper and push out those walls into that desired rounded shape, especially at the bottom. So you can see me pushing it out here quite a bit. And then once I get the bottom pushed out the way I want it, I need to trim and smooth off the rim. And then I'm going to let it sit and dry for quite a while, firm up, before I put the handle on. In this Ancient Pottery Challenge for Season 5, I am recreating 7 ancient pots from the Northern Southwest. These 7 beautiful pots were all made by people in the culture formerly known as Anasazi. This mug is the 5th of the 7 pots. The previous 2 black on white pots I made as part of the Ancient Pottery Challenge this season were decorated with mineral paint. But mineral paint only accounts for a portion of the Anasazi black on white pottery made in ancient times. Much of this pottery was decorated with organic paint, that is to say, paint that is made by boiling down plants into a thick syrup. If this organic paint is applied to the right type of clay, smectite, and fired in the right way, with a minimum of oxygen present, then it will result in black carbon designs on the pot when it's done. The Mesa Verde area has a long history with black on white pottery, starting around 550 AD. But at first, it was almost entirely decorated with mineral paint, similar to the way I made the Tularosa and Chaco black on white pots earlier. But by 1100 AD, the Mesa Verde potters had mostly switched over to using organic paint on their black on white pots. Organic paint has certain advantages in that it's relatively easy to make with local materials, while mineral paint is often dependent on acquiring certain minerals through trade. However, organic paint can be harder to get right because it requires that the potter have access to a white smectite clay slip and that the pottery be fired in just the right way. Fortunately, these white smectite clays are not uncommon on the Colorado Plateau, where the Mesa Verde region is located. And the Mesa Verde potters definitely had the skills to successfully fire these organic painted pots. In fact, a number of these potters would get together to fire massive trench kilns full of their black on white pottery, a display of technical skills unequaled in ancient America. Okay, so this is after it's had a chance to sit and firm up for an hour or two. Now that it's a little firmer, I'm coming back and I'm trimming off a lot of that excess at the bottom. I'm just using my needle tool to kind of clean that up and give that nice rounded edge at the bottom of the mug. A lot of these ancient Mesa Verde mugs had the handles attached through the rivet method. So that's what I'm doing here. Rivet attaching a handle is just cutting a hole through the wall of the pot, passing that handle through the wall, and smoothing it off on the inside. It's really the strongest handle attachment possible. And for these earthenware mugs, which are relatively soft, it's good to have a nice strong attachment. In one way, this Mesa Verde pot is different from the other black on white pots I've made this season. The previous two black on white pots, the Tularosa black on white and the Chaco black on white, were both painted with mineral paint. Mesa Verde black on white is painted with organic paint. So again, we're back to that Smectite clay slip. This is Cannonball white. This is a clay that comes from southwestern Colorado. So right in that Mesa Verde area, this could be one of the clays that some of them actually used on this. So same drill as before, paint it with a thin layer of the slip, let it dry and firm up, then polish it. Finally, let it continue to dry all the way up, and then you can start painting on that organic paint. This organic paint is made from Rocky Mountain Bee Plant, which is found there in that Mesa Verde area. So it again is likely something they were using. Once you get it all painted, you're ready to fire it. But this is where this project goes off the rails. I'd never made Mesa Verde black on white pottery before. I've never made smothered organic paint pottery before. So this was new for me. And yet, the mug so far was coming out really nice for something I'd never done. This Kiva jar was also a Mesa Verde black on white type that I had made in the Ancient Potters Club not too long before. So this was a great opportunity to fire both of them together. And here's where I think I made my first mistake. The hole was a little too deep. It needs to be really close to the surface, like the top should be right at the surface. So obviously this is too deep. And then I put on too many cover sherds, so I couldn't get any air in there. And that prevented oxygen from getting in and cleaning up those white surfaces. Oh, son of a gun! There's the cover sherds right there. Oh, the mug blew up, definitely. Oh, the mug blew up, and it is dark. It is very dark. It's toast. I'll show you that closer in a minute. Oh my gosh. The Kiva jar also exploded, and it is also quite dark. Okay, mug first. I have no idea why it exploded. I really felt like I preheated this good, but obviously that was the big explosion we heard. And in places, like towards the handle, it's a little whiter, but it's still pretty dark. And the organic paint didn't do much in those areas. I'll get it. I'll show you a cleaned up version at the end of the video, but it doesn't look like the organic paint did much, even in places where it isn't black. There are places in here where I didn't even burn off all the organic paint, so it didn't oxidize enough down in there. Like I said, quite deep, way too much cover sherds. It was in this little bubble in there. It needs to oxidize. So, showing my lack of experience with this Mesa Verde style, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make another one of these real fast. I'll bring it to the Kiln Conference, and I'll have the experts fire it, so you can see how it's actually done if you watch that video, which will come out, you know, a month, month and a half from now. So, I remade the mug, and I brought it to the Kiln Conference. Here it is on the morning of the firing. Okay, it is Saturday morning at the Southwest Kiln Conference, and it is a hive of activity out here. There's all these people here to watch, and over here we have a bunch of fires getting started. And then there's a big pile of firewood on the far end of the firing area here, and this is the big trench kiln. This is where they're going to be firing all that smothered organic paint pottery here. There's only a couple pots here now, but there's going to be a bunch. So, here they are loading all the pottery into that big trench kiln, and then within the next hour or so, here they are firing that big trench kiln. It took a lot of fuel to do this, and then the next day they open it up. This is the next morning, and they dig all the soil off the top, and start digging out all the pots, of which mine is in there somewhere. And so, here it is. It's a little dark. It's got a bit of carbon in it, kind of like what I said about my Tularosa. Not clean, not bright whites like those Chaco cylinders, but good. Not cracked or anything. The blacks are all good black. I'm happy with it. I'm ready to move on to my next project. Last time on Ancient Pottery Challenge, disaster ensued when my pottery firing exploded. Now, with five of the Ancient Pottery Challenge pots made, and only two to go, can I come back with a win on the next project, which is this beautiful Ancient Toussillon Polychrome Bowl? Keep watching to the end to find out in this action-packed episode of Ancient Pottery Challenge. Okay, we're making progress. We're down to two more pots to get the Ancient Pottery Challenge finished up for the season. This is that Toussillon Polychrome Bowl, and again, another type I've never tried to make before. The biggest difficulty to me, at least starting out, was that orange color. Toussillon Polychrome has this beautiful orange colored body clay. That's the clay the pot's made out of. It's not a slip, and I didn't have anything that I thought would fire that color. So, the clay I ended up using, I just thought about the color. I looked at pictures of the color. I thought about what I had that would fire similarly, and I ended up mixing two clays. The majority of this is a clay that comes from down here by Tucson, so far away from where this type of pottery was made, and I mixed that with a little bit of this gray clay I get up on the Mogollon Rim, so much closer to where it comes from. Still not exactly the right area. Thinking that it would come out the right shade of orange in the firing, and actually, I nailed it pretty close. The color of the fired clay was pretty close to the original, and it was just a lot of guesswork. The Kayenta region exists in far north central Arizona. There, ancestors of the Hopis lived from earliest times. The first decorated pottery they made was black on white painted with organic paint, which they started making around 600 AD. In fact, organic painted pottery may have originated with the Kayenta. For over 400 years, they made and perfected their beautiful black on white pottery. Then, around 1050, something happened, and redware started to be made in the Kayenta region. This redware, called by archaeologists Segi Orangeware, closely resembles the redware that had previously been made in southeastern Utah, which archaeologists call San Juan Redware. Oddly, San Juan Redware stopped being made at the exact moment that Segi Orangeware started to be made, leading archaeologists to believe that the people who had made it packed up at that time and moved 100 miles southwest into the Kayenta region. So who were these mysterious redware makers from Utah? Just as the San Juan Redware had suddenly stopped being made around 1050, it had also started to be made there just as suddenly around 750, as though the redware makers had moved there, lived for about 300 years, and then moved on. This region in southeast Utah, like the Kayenta region, had an older gray and white pottery tradition. So where did this technology for making oxidized red and orange pottery come from? The technology itself is harder to track to a specific area, although the Hohokam and Mogollon cultures to the south, where oxidized pottery was common, are a likely source. The designs, however, that were used on early San Juan Redware hold clues about who these people were. In 1946, an archaeologist named John Brew noticed that the designs on the earliest forms of San Juan Redware were very similar to those found on Mogollon red and brown pottery from southeastern Arizona, 500 miles to the south. So it seems plausible that these people were originally Mogollon, who, for some unknown reason, picked up and moved far to the north to live among the Anasazi, making their traditional redware pottery. When things got tough in southeastern Utah, they moved again, south into the Kayenta region, where they lived for around 250 more years. Then, around 1300 things got bad in the Kayenta area and they moved a third time. This is the most surprising of the moves these people made. Instead of going to a nearby group, they moved far to the south and settled back in southeastern Arizona, in the same area where their ancestors had ostensibly come from over 500 years before. Coincidence? Who can say? But to me, it looks like this group of Mogollons made a 500-year, 900-mile round trip across the southwest, all the time clinging tenaciously to their pottery traditions. I often tell my students that a bowl can be a lot more work than a jar. Even though the jar might be larger or have more surface area on the outside, the bowl has to be finished on both the inside and the outside, so there's a lot more smoothing, polishing, painting, burnishing on a bowl like this. Because, again, you have the inside and the outside, whereas with a jar you have just the outside. And yet, I started this project on September 1st, and I fired the pot on September 12th. So, of all seven of these Ancient Pottery Challenge pots this season, this one took the least time of any, even though it's far from the smallest project. And, again, it is a bowl. The yellow slip I'm using here is that same yellow clay that I used on previous projects in the Ancient Pottery Challenge this season. And this black paint is that same black mineral paint I used on previous projects as well. This is made from manganese, copper, and clay. And I'm painting this on with yucca brushes. Again, no spirals here, thank goodness, so that doesn't complicate matters. It's nice to have a yucca brush when you're drawing straight lines. And this design is almost entirely straight lines. This is just your standard run-of-the-mill surface firing, like you've seen me do several times already in this video. I'm also firing it with this little St. John's black-on-red pot that I made. So, just the two pots together. And the weather was really perfect this day. Just the perfect day for firing. The wood was dry. The weather was really comfortable. Everything burned really good and hot. But no wind, no breeze at all. Just a really great day for firing. And, you know, like I said, the firing went off without a hitch. So, at this point, I'm ready to open it up. The fire's all burned to ashes. See how the pots are doing. There it is. Not a crack in it. Now, at this stage, the irons haven't matured yet. So, what you'll find is your browns, your reds will be really dark at first. And then, as they cool, they will oxidize. They will turn brighter, the colors will. So, even though, like, that little pot right there looks really brown right now, it comes out pretty red in the end. The same with these colors here. They oxidize. And there it is. Finished pot. This one was among the best of the season, for sure. I'm down to the last project of the Ancient Pottery Challenge. And that is this SoSi black-on-white pitcher. So, again, this one took me almost a month to do. I started this on November 3rd and I finished it on November 29th. So, just about a month, like most of them. In this case, I wanted a gray clay from the Colorado Plateau. I had the same one that I'd used on, like, the Tularosa and the Chaco, which I could have used. But I had just collected this new clay up on the Mogollon Rim back in September. And I really wanted to try it. So, this was really my first pot made out of this new clay as an experiment. And it turned out pretty good. Although, it's a little softer than I'm used to. I mean, it tends to want to slump and you've got to give it breaks so it can firm up. It is a good clay and I'm happy with it. I'm going to use it again. It was kind of fun, you know, trying a new clay while I was making this project for the Ancient Pottery Challenge. Now, I'm going to put on a handle. Handle's the hard part on all of these. Always a little more time consuming than a lot of other parts. So, again, like I did earlier, I'm doing a rivet attachment like I did on the mug. And in this case, I'm only going to rivet attach the top of the handle. Because down inside the jar, it would be very hard for me to get my hand in there and smooth it out. So, I'm just going to attach the bottom. I'm just using my needle tool there to kind of scarify it so that it can, you know, grip the surface a little better. Because I let it dry quite a bit before I attached the handle. And then I just put a big glob of slip on there. I'm using that to attach it. And then just using these little balls of clay to fill in those gaps. Make it nice and smooth and even. Over most of the American Southwest, we know little to nothing about how the ancient people fired their pottery. Because archaeologists have found almost no kilns or other evidence of firings. The only evidence we have of pottery firings in most areas is the pottery itself. Which is abundant enough to make the lack of firing features seem odd. The one outstanding exception is in the Four Corners region, where the Mesa Verde potters were using stone-lined trench kilns. Hundreds of which have been identified. These simple kilns run about two to four feet wide and from five to 25 feet long. Can you imagine the quantity of pottery it took to fill a trench that was 25 feet long? That's why we think that these were communal kilns where several potters fired their work together. Another interesting fact about these trench kilns is that they were located far away from settlements. Sometimes miles away from the nearest village. Maybe this is because firewood was more abundant out there. Or maybe these kilns were located where the airflow was just right for a successful firing. This also brings up the question of whether they carried all their unfired pottery all the way out to these remote kilns. Or perhaps they were making the pottery out there near the kilns. Although these sorts of features had been known to archaeology for years, it wasn't until the early 1980s that they were positively identified as kilns. But knowing what they are does not equal knowing how they work to produce reduced whiteware pottery. So in 1991, pottery replicators and archaeologists came together at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado to try to figure out how to fire a trench kiln in a first-of-its-kind event called the Kiln Conference. By 1993, the code had been cracked by replicator Clint Swink and he published his findings and outlined his now-famous four-step process for firing a trench kiln. Today, the Southwest Kiln Conference, as an outgrowth of that original Kiln Conference, is still going strong and firing pottery every year using Swink's four-step process. The Southwest Kiln Conference is where I went to get my mug fired by the experts this year and hopefully where I picked up enough information that I can successfully fire this pitcher when it's done. Because Sosie Black on White was painted with organic paint, then I have to apply a spectite clay slip here. So this is the cannonball slip from Colorado, the same slip that I used on that mug earlier. And you can see it's coming off in places. I had a real problem with this. It just kept kind of flaking off and I really don't know what to attribute that to. I'm thinking maybe that cannonball doesn't get along with this gray body clay. I don't know, but it was a real problem here. Eventually, I just stopped polishing and went ahead with the painting because I realized the problem was just going to happen and there was nothing I could do about it. And so this is the same organic paint I used on the mug. This is that Rocky Mountain Bee Plant material. Sosie Black on White is actually the oldest of the pottery types I recreated in this challenge. Most of those pottery types I recreated here are from, say, the 1200s, 1300s time period. So towards the end of the ancestral Puebloan time period. Whereas this Sosie, it starts in about 1050. So it dates from 1050 to 1150. That makes it about 25 years older than the Chaco Black on White, which would be the second oldest. This is just my basic pit fire technique. This is very similar to what I tried to do on the mug when it didn't go so well. Also not that different from what I did with the Chaco Cylinder jars. But I made a big mistake with this firing. There was a pretty good breeze going on, as you can see, and I was concerned that the upwind wood wasn't really getting lit on fire and that it wasn't all going to burn to coals at the same time, which is one of my goals as I'm firing. And so I'm trying to move these pieces on the upwind side kind of in closer to the fire so they'll start burning. And I actually tipped over the whole stack. That is the pot down inside there and the cover shirt that was on top of it and all the wood kind of tipped onto their side. And what that does is that not only kind of smothers the side of the pot that's against the wood on the bottom, but it also leaves the top of the pot very exposed, kind of sticking out of the fuel. As you can see here, it just kept getting worse. The more I tried to cover it with coals, the worse it got. And so the danger here, because this is organic paint, is that the part that's exposed is A, going to be gray. It's not going to be really white because it's going to be too cool to burn off all the carbon. And if it does burn out the carbon, that it might burn out the paint because, you know, it's oxidizing real well at this point. So I was afraid. In fact, I was 90% certain that this firing was going to be a disaster and this wasn't going to turn out. I was pleasantly surprised. All right, we're going to see what we got. It's been in here for close to three hours. There's the top of the pot right there. Yeah, might be surprised. It looks like it might actually be not as bad as I thought. You can see we've got good black. So it actually came out pretty good. Actually one of the better pots in the whole challenge, despite the weird and, you know, horrible firing. So I don't know why it came out so good, but I'll take it. The day after I fired that last pot, I took all seven of the pots out into the mountains for a little photo shoot. So here's the results from that. All seven of the pots together. Once I got their pictures together, I put them up for sale on my website. So I'd been holding on to them so I could get these group pictures before I started getting rid of them. So that's it. It was a fun year-long project. Glad I did it. I don't know if I'll do it again. Definitely learned a lot. A lot of these pots were things I'd never done before, being that my focus is the southern southwest and these were from the northern southwest. The one I want to try again, the one I want to do better on, is that pinto polychrome bowl. So I might be doing that within the next year. Stay tuned for that. Thanks for watching.