Ceramic Scripture of Signs recording access links. First, video of the visual talk, followed by audio of the discussion / Q&A.

Video

Audio discussion.

Medieval Caddoan pot, from Arkansas or Louisiana.

Ceramic paintings are a reservoir of sacred signs, reflecting cultural philosophy, and can be windows into ancient women's dance, body-painting, and ceremony.

Incised and sculptured vessels are a legacy of female culture-makers, as creators of breastpots, motherpots ("female effigy vessels"), and animal pots, among other recurring global patterns.

This webcast surveys archaeological finds from Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Romania, China, Mexico, Greece, Brazil, Arkansas, Thailand, Iran, Arizona, Sudan, and Costa Rica, among many other countries.

We also look at recent and living traditions, from Pueblo and Caddo artists, Mangbetu potters of northern Congo, and Shipibo ceramic painters in the Peruvian Amazon.

Dates: Thurs 17 April 6 pm (California time) and
Sun 20 April at noon (California time)

I'll post links for these April webcasts here later, and also send out to the Veleda egroup.

Below, you can listen to an audio commentary on symbols as expressions of natural philosophies in Indigenous societies around the world.

Print version of my comments about the Ceramic Scripture of Signs show:

My study of archaeological patterns over 50 years has been a gradual uncovering of recurring patterns that occur over vast distances of time and space. In the Female Icons show, which some of you will have seen—or the Female Icons poster for that matter.

Some of these symbols appear on female figurines, but there, the focus is more on what women's embodiment and ceremony: paint-up (body and face paint), regalia, invocation, dance, women's potency. But there is a lot of overlap, especially in the theme of ancestral women.

The divine woman is among the common themes that we see in some of the painted and sculpted pottery. The painted or incised pottery is commonly intended for ritual use, not cooking pots or pottery for daily wash-up. Many of them are funerary, placed as offerings for the dead.

And because of that ceremonial context, they are rich in cosmic symbols. They depict growth, flow, the directions, earth waters, cycles of birth, death and rebirth.

But in the archaeological analysis, in the written scholarship, there's a trend toward the statistical, technical side of archaeology. And that analysis is often shadowed with old prejudices against aboriginality. They are impervious to the ways that Indigenous philosophies are expressed, not only in oral transmission, but throughs signs and stories, in song, dance, and in these symbols. They typically have dismissed symbolic language as "decoration" or "geometrical patterns" without considering what I'm calling here, a scripture of signs.

They often resist strenuously any suggestion that insights about cultural understandings being communicated by them, that these may tie in, in some cases with ceremonies, seasons, stories about the nature of the universe, the elements, cycles, patterns, vitality, movement, pathways. People or animals moving across the land.

And it boggles them even more to hear us state that women expressed philosophical principles in their pottery and weaving. This has really been off the table, still less the idea that women were actually directing intention through their creations in clay or in fibers. But when you study cultural names for symbols and patterns, especially here we're looking at indigenous cultures, you find that they had names and meanings for these symbols. The Igbo did, the Pueblo peoples do, and the Parikura in northern Brazil, among countless examples.

Many of these signs represent animals or plants, others rainfall, life force, or orientation to space, time. The problem is that with archaeological finds, it can be difficult or even impossible to recover original descriptions of meanings. The languages are long lost. We don't even know in many cases what language the people spoke.

There's no cultural testimony we can identify, with any security, as having come directly from them. Their descendants may speak Arabic or Hindi, Spanish or English. Very often language isn't the original language of the makers of those 5000 year old pots.

Still, that doesn't mean that the people in those places aren't actually descendants of those ancestors, the people that created that art, because the people remain on the land even under conditions of conquest and layers and layers upon patriarchy.

Anyway, striking parallels manifest themselves across the continents. And these recurrent symbols come out of the human imagination, in our relationship to nature, to land, to water, to the world around us, the kindreds of beings that we live amongst. And so in the case of these potters, it's women's imaginations who are portraying these things and commenting on them. I didn't include ceramics from cultures where men, professional classes, specialized manufacturers of pottery prevailed.

There's no way of knowing entirely, with certainty, when men made pots. But, for example, this was the pattern among the classical Maya, the dynastic Egyptians or Chinese, or the Iraqis of the Islamic period, medieval Europeans—I didn't include those in the presentation, because the overwhelming likelihood is that men made them. In a few cases, they may have been women working in workshops that were owned by their fathers, but they're invisible to us. And they're steps away from indigeneity as well, being created by specialized craftsmen for a market economy.

I would like to do another show on the motherpots, what archaeological archaeologists like to call "female effigy vessels." And that's a whole other category along with the ancient female icons. Several examples are included in the current presentation, especially the funerary urns, which these effigy vessels often are; or they are for libation to ancestors.

front and back of a motherpot from Fuente Quemado, Argentina

IThe Argentinian composer Atahualpa Yupanqui lauded this custom in a song called Vasijo de Barro. Hear it here.

Yo quiero que a mí me interrien / en un vasija de barro.

I want to be buried as my ancestors were.
In the dark cool bell of a clay pot.

This song is a direct reference to the motherpots that I show in the presentation, especially at the end.

Amazingly huge Pomo basket, circa 1925, held by Mrs. Ada Harry Waukell-Charles "(daughter of Harry Pecwan Waukell and Nettie Harry-Waukell, and wife of Robert Charles)". The article says "Yurok," a people much to the north, but the comments identify the basket as Pomo, whose baskets are world-famous, and the makers lived in Pomo country.

This comment by Natalie Smith is the reason I'm posting this here; she explains that the pattern had meaning.

"My great grandma and her husband thought of the design, before she started, it took one year to decide it would mean lightning and thunder in water, ( notice the cyclone) they are from Manchester, Mendocino County. The small string represents a small basket dangling to a big basket. These woman are just posing with the basket.The basket is not Yurok. It was entered in the San Francisco Panama Exhibition. Around 8 woman worked on it in 11 years."

I'm adding in some images that didn't make it into the show. First up are fragments of ceramics from Puerto Hormiga, Colombia, one of the earliest pottery traditions of South America. Only yesterday was I able to find color photos of them, faces that were attached to pots, in a style that persisted for thousands of years in the southern Caribbean and Antillas.

This one from the Puerto Chacho shellmound in Colombia (Depto de Bolívar) dates to 3,100 bce. Although I was tempted to see the protrusion as a nipple motif, it probably is a broken attachment like the ones above.

Next, a photo I wasn't able to identify through Google Image Search (Have at it, maybe one of you can). Could be Arizona or New Mexico, or then again Iran. The feathers atop the serpent make me lean to the former.

Now! because my net searches began to turn up results from Pinterest (which sometimes has very good photos, though no or deficient identifications of them), Pinterest began sending me notifications about more ancient ceramics. (This was a relief, since it had gotten stuck for some reason on sending Maya art, mostly of men.) Anyway, this next one came up (as usual with no geographic provenance), and I was able to track it down to the British Museum. It's a milk pot, Amazigh ("Berber") from the Rif mountains in Morocco. A distinctly different style than the Kabyle pots I showed, and glorious in its bold strokes.

Etruscan spiral pot, 5th century bce: