Self-Referentiality on Mimbres Painted Bowls

Summary

Drawing on George Kubler's theoretical treatise, The Shape of Time, as well as more recent epistemological reflections by art historians such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, this paper explores the potential for objects to contribute to their own interpretation. The imagery painted on Mimbres vessels often playfully responds to or incorporates their hemispherical shape. There are also instances where the imagery seems to resonate with the holes that were regularly punctured through the bowls’ bases at the time of their placement in burials. Rather than “killing” the vessels, this puncturing can be seen as emphasizing their material presence and symbolic value in excess of their functionality as bowls. I will argue that Mimbres artists occasionally chose imagery that, by anticipating this common ritual treatment, highlighted the objects’ extension through time while provoking reflection on the nature of the vessels' object-ness and the metaphoric potentials of their perforations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Understanding Visual Culture Without Textual Sources: What Are the Possibilities for Analysis?

Keywords

Spatial Coverage