Basketmaker II Textile Designs as Precursors to Basketmaker III Pottery Motifs
Introduction
This report compares the designs on 41 Basketmaker II (BMII) artifacts with the nine Basketmaker III (BMIII) black-on-white bowl motifs described and illustrated elsewhere on this website. Most of the artifacts are textiles: 20 baskets, 13 sandals, six bags and one band; the non-textile artifact is an unfired painted bowl sherd. These items were recovered from dry caves and alcoves in three areas: northeast Arizona (White Dog Cave and Cave 11), southeast Utah (Greater Cedar Mesa Area), and southwest Utah (Cave du Pont). Together, the collections from these three areas offer evidence for the early stages of development of Motifs 1, 2, 7, 8 and 9 during the BMII period.
This report compares the designs on 41 Basketmaker II (BMII) artifacts with the nine Basketmaker III (BMIII) black-on-white bowl motifs described and illustrated elsewhere on this website. Most of the artifacts are textiles: 20 baskets, 13 sandals, six bags and one band; the non-textile artifact is an unfired painted bowl sherd. These items were recovered from dry caves and alcoves in three areas: northeast Arizona (White Dog Cave and Cave 11), southeast Utah (Greater Cedar Mesa Area), and southwest Utah (Cave du Pont). Together, the collections from these three areas offer evidence for the early stages of development of Motifs 1, 2, 7, 8 and 9 during the BMII period.
Map showing areas in northern Arizona and southern Utah containing Basketmaker II sites referenced in this report.
Background
This whole topic developed, somewhat unexpectedly, out of four strands of research that ended up tying together.
1. It began in 2015 when my on-going research suggested that at least some of the nine BMIII motifs had been developed prior to the invention of painted pottery, during either the pre-ceramic Basketmaker II or early Basketmaker III period (Honeycutt 2015).
2. This idea received support in 2016, when Sally Cole alerted me to the presence of an unfired painted sherd at Cave du Pont, a Basketmaker II site (Nusbaum 1922) dated by dendrochronology to 217 AD (Stallings 1941). The sherd displays a nice example of Motif 8. Along with the other artifacts recovered from the cave, it is curated at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which kindly granted me permission to use their photograph of this artifact.
3. Research on this topic picked up steam in 2017 when I found photographs of 17 textiles from White Dog Cave and Cave 11 on the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (PMAE) website (https://pmem.unix.fas.harvard.edu). White Dog and Cave 11 are two of 15 BMII sites excavated by PMAE in 1916-17 (Guernsey and Kidder 1921). These photos, together with published drawings (ibid.), provide good evidence that Motifs 1, 2, 8 and 9 were developed during the Basketmaker II period (Honeycutt 2017). Permission was generously granted by PMAE to use the photographs in this report.
4. And finally, also in 2017, I was invited to examine a trove of roughly 6,000 photographs of artifacts from the Greater Cedar Mesa Area (GCMA). These photographs, taken by Laurie Webster for her Cedar Mesa Perishables Project, document artifacts removed from caves and alcoves in Allen, Butler, Cottonwood, Grand Gulch and other canyons in the GCMA by collectors during the 1880s and 1890s (www.friendsofcedarmesa.org/perishablesproject/). From this massive collection documenting all types of perishables (fiber, wood, hide, feathers) dating from Basketmaker II through Pueblo III (200 BC - 1300 AD), I selected 21 photos of sandals, bags and baskets which display examples of Motifs 1, 2, 7 and 8. These artifacts are presently housed at three museums: American Museum of Natural History (AMNH); Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH); and Museum of Peoples and Culture (MPC), Brigham Young University. Because most of these items are from unprovenienced and/or undated sites, I relied on Laurie's expertise to ensure I didn't include non-BMII materials in my selection. In addition to generously allowing me to study her photographs, Laurie obtained permission from the museums for me to use them in this report.
