CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image: Pitcher

Pueblo ceramic vessels, such as the pitcher pictured above, are regarded as living objects. This pitcher, manufactured by women of the Zuni tribe ca. 1880, has some unusual features--a crenellated rim more commonly found on prayer meal bowls, a raised meander on the handle, and painted motifs that appear to be more decorative than symbolic.

The John Wesley Powell Collection was acquired in the mid-1880s as a permanent loan from the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. At the time Powell, a professor of natural sciences at Illinois Wesleyan University from 1865-1868, was serving as the Bureau’s first director. Artifacts from the collection are on display in the John Wesley Powell Rotunda on the entry level of the Ames Library. Dates, cultural affiliations and descriptions accompanying the pieces were researched and compiled by Illinois State Museum Curator of Anthropology Jonathan Reyman. Tate Archives & Special Collections has curatorial responsibility for the collection.

The digital collection, containing more than 100 specimens of pottery and a few wooden and basketry objects, may be browsed by tribe (e.g., Acoma) or object type (e.g., animal figurine).

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