Blanding Red Ware Project (BRWPRJCT)
Archaeologist have long suspected that a distinctive red ware pottery found throughout the Four Corners area of American Southwest during the Pueblo I period (700 - 900 A.D.) was manufactured in the Blanding, Utah area. In the year 2000 we began fieldwork dedicated to matching the temper and clay combinations in red ware sherds with resource locations exhibiting matching temper and clay types. The goal of our research is to identify the specific geographic locales where Pueblo I potters lived and exploited their ceramic resource base for the production of this distinctive pottery.
Four years of fieldwork in the Blanding area have resulted in the development and refinement of fieldwork and field laboratory procedures for gathering the necessary data from archaeological sites and resource locations, the creation of a computerized data base and an intimate familiarity with the cultural landscape of ceramic resource variability. We know that Pueblo I red ware potters consistently combined crushed diorite (an igneous rock widely available from river cobbles washed down from the Abajo Mountains to the north) with two different iron rich red clays from the Morrison Formation. We have located the probable source of the darker red clay type in Alkaki Canyon, which is located west of Blanding and directly adjacent to the large Pueblo I site known as Alkali Ridge, excavated by J.O. Brew for the Peabody Museum prior to World War II.
Due to a lack of funding support we have been unable to conduct fieldwork since 2003, but it is our hope to return to the Alkali Canyon locale to verify that it was a center of Pueblo I red ware production. In particular, we hope to find the kiln features that would have been necessarily associated with intensve and long-term ceramic production. We also hope to identify other production locales, especially those who used the second, less red clay type. We have documented several matching clay outcrops but have yet to identify associated habitation sites where the potters would have lived.
The identification of specific geographic locales where red ware pottery was manufactured is the first (and necessary) step to accomplish the primary goal of our research, which is the investigation of the nature of exchange and interaction during the Pueblo I period. Because red ware is found in sites in across a broad area, it undoutedly was an integral part of the exchange system that served to support and integrate the dispersed farming populations. Knowing exactly where any piece of pottery was made is necessary for reconstruction of exchange, which requires knowledge of how much pottery was moved how far (different exchange systems have different fall-off patterns). If our fieldwork is sucessful, we will have developed an unambiguous indicator of exchange relationships during the Pueblo I period.
To view the fieldwork reports of the Blanding Red Ware Project click on Fieldwork Reports in the left hand pane.