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Bowl with parrot
[This is a] Fourmile ceramic bowl produced in the fourteenth century in what is today east-central Arizona. Exceptional for its condition and divergence from the more common geometric designs of the same period, the bowl depicts a highly stylized yet still easily discernible parrot, likely a macaw, with its distinctive hooked beak. Macaws and other parrots are not native to the American Southwest, yet archaeological evidence demonstrates a vibrant long distance trade in live tropical birds in the early centuries of the second millennium, presumably facilitated by the Aztec's extensive trade network. The Aztec coordinated the exchange of tropical birds and feathers, as well as chocolate, from the tropical lowlands of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America and of turquoise from the American Southwest. The Fourmile bowl highlights this trade, as does Princeton's important collection of Aztec jewelry incorporating turquoise, which was prized throughout Mesoamerica.
Fourmile polychrome is the most sophisticated style of polychrome ceramic painting known from the ancient Southwest. A late phase in the tradition known as White Mountain Red Ware, from the Cibola region of north-central Arizona, Fourmile pottery typically presents an interior decoration of abstract, geometric designs outlined in white kaolin slip on an orange-red slip ground, with forms then filled in with a distinctive, glittery (slightly vitrified) black slip comprised of lead, copper, and some manganese. Simple decoration of the same technique is typically applied to the exterior in a band just below the lip. Tree-ring dating provides excellent chronological controls, indicating that the Fourmile style was produced from about a.d. 1325 to 1400, contemporaneous with the establishment of the Aztec empire in central Mexico.
Fourmile polychrome is the most sophisticated style of polychrome ceramic painting known from the ancient Southwest. A late phase in the tradition known as White Mountain Red Ware, from the Cibola region of north-central Arizona, Fourmile pottery typically presents an interior decoration of abstract, geometric designs outlined in white kaolin slip on an orange-red slip ground, with forms then filled in with a distinctive, glittery (slightly vitrified) black slip comprised of lead, copper, and some manganese. Simple decoration of the same technique is typically applied to the exterior in a band just below the lip. Tree-ring dating provides excellent chronological controls, indicating that the Fourmile style was produced from about a.d. 1325 to 1400, contemporaneous with the establishment of the Aztec empire in central Mexico.
