The Pottery of the Southern Paiute

Abstract

Although southwestern archaeologists have for years been greatly interested in the classification and description of pottery, their investigations have been primarily centered on the pottery of the Pueblos and other sedentary groups, and comparatively little attention was given to the ceramics of the nomadic or semi-nomadic southwestern groups. Within recent years some studies have been made on Navaho and Western Apache pottery, but as yet there have been no detailed studies of the pottery of such peripheral nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes as the Ute and Southern Paiute. Therefore, it seems well worthwhile at this time to present the following brief notes concerning the results of several years of archaeological field work in the Southern Paiute area.

Dating Paiute-Shoshoni Expansion in the Great Basin

“…Three variants of Paiute-Shoshoni ceramics have been described both ethnographically and archaeologically: Shoshoni pottery (Steward 1941(Steward , 1943, Southern Paiute pottery (Baldwin 1950), and Owens Valley Brown (Riddell 1951). The distribution of these variants generally follows known ethnographic distribu-…”