The Life and Times of Tijeras Utility Ware

The Tijeras Pueblo Ceramic Project has analyzed over 12,000 fragments of utility ware pottery from the fourteenth century village site of Tijeras Pueblo (LA 581) in the Central Rio Grande region of New Mexico (Figure 1). These analyses suggest that Tijeras Utility Ware, which is commonly found throughout the Albuquerque district of the Central Rio Grande, shares some technological and stylistic affi nities to both western Mogollon Brown Wares as well as contemporaneous Northern Rio Grande Gray Wares. However, a unique feature of the utility wares from Tijeras Pueblo is the bimodal distribution of bowl sizes and, in particular, the relatively high frequency of large bowls (> 25 cm diameter). Large bowls are common among various red- and yellow-slipped and polychrome ceramic types found throughout the Southwest and are generally assumed to have been associated with the spread of new religious practices and communal feasting activities during the Pueblo IV period (A.D. 1275-1425) (Crown 1994; Duff 2002; Mills 2007; Potter 2000; Spielmann 1998, 2002). The presence of large utility ware “feast bowls” at Tijeras Pueblo, in association with large local and imported glaze-painted red-slipped and polychrome pottery bowls, indicates that Tijeras Utility Ware vessels may have functioned within a broader range of domestic and ritual contexts than was typical either in the Northern Rio Grande or the Western Pueblo regions during the fourteenth century. Thus, the production, circulation and use of these utility ware vessels likely played a larger role in the social transformation of the Ancestral Eastern Pueblo World during the early Pueblo IV period than has previously been recognized