Classic Mimbres: the painted bowls of the Mogollon

The Mogollon culture, named after the Mogollon Mountains, was defined by Emil Haury after his excavations in 1931, 1933 and 1934 at the Harris Village in the Mimbres valley and at the Mogollon Village: brown pottery, deep pit-houses and distinctive ceremonial buildings set it apart from the Hohokam and the Ancestral Puebloans. In the Mimbres valley and on the upper Gila, people of the Three Circle phase (about 825–1000) lived in pit-house villages; in the Classic Mimbres phase they moved into above-ground pueblos, the largest beside well-watered floodplains suited to maize, with ceremonial rooms inside the room blocks and small square kivas. Water-control works are common at Mimbres sites of the 10th–12th centuries.

Mimbres potters painted their bowls in black on a white ground. Early bowls carry bold geometric designs; in the Classic style (Style III) refined linework frames figures of people and animals — turkeys catching insects, a man trapping birds in a garden, and fish, some of them marine species of the Gulf of California — and some images suggest ties with the cultures of northern and central Mexico. Bowls found in burials were often inverted over the face of the dead and pierced in the centre, but most bowls were not made for the grave: wear marks show that they were used in daily life. Their production ended around 1130–1150. The people of the valley were once thought to have vanished; more recent research shows that the valley lost much of its population, but some people stayed, and they and their neighbours took up the pottery and house styles of nearby regions.

The Classic bowls are among the best-known art of the ancient Southwest: designs from the Swarts Ruin, excavated in 1924–1927, were copied on the ‘Mimbreños’ dining-car china of the Santa Fe Railroad from 1936 to 1970, and from the 1960s collectors' demand led to widespread looting of graves.