Pigments and Paints in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists working in the Southwest have consistently recovered examples of prepared paints, and the pigments used to make them, during excavation. These materials are usually present in relatively small quantities, though, so they tend to get noted in field reports and then lost within the archaeological literature. In this paper, I consider the distribution of pigments and prepared paints in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest, drawing on excavation and field reports from the late 1800s through the present day. Taken together, these records indicate that pigments and prepared paints were both ubiquitous and highly valued in the Southwest, occurring frequently in burial contexts from Basketmaker sites up to early historic villages such as Hawikku and Awatovi. The literature also suggests that there is considerable continuity between ethnographically documented paint recipes, including a complicated copper resinate made from malachite and pinyon pitch, and paints prepared as much as a thousand years ago in Chaco Canyon.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23377