Mojave Pottery, Mojave People

Book excerpt: Despite the centrality of ceramics to Mojave culture, Mojave pottery is virtually unknown today. Museums have mostly small, unrepresentative, and largely undocumented collections, and the works have received little attention from scholars and collectors.This comprehensive volume brings to light the wondrously inventive clay people, mythological creatures, and effigy vessels of the Mojave people, recording this Southwest Indian ceramic art in more than 50 full-color plates, 25 color and black-and-white illustrations, and a complete catalog of the Dillingham Collection of Mojave Ceramics, one of the largest and most complete Mojave assemblages in the world, at the Indian Arts Research Center of the School of American Research. Jill Leslie Furst takes an ethnohistorical approach here, drawing on written literature about the tribe that ranges from seventeenth-century Spanish documents to ethnographic accounts from the 1970s.The stories of the Mojaves-along with descriptions of family life, gender roles, subsistence activities, clothing and personal adornment, shamanism, and the afterlife-form the context for Furst's exploration of the Mojave ceramic tradition.