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All auctions / Porcelain & Pottery / 18th-19th C. Arikara Pottery Jar - Twin Handles, Missouri River


Native American, Great Plains, Arikara (Sahnish). A globular earthenware jar built by hand from local Missouri River clay, its smoke-darkened surface ranging from charcoal to dusky gray. The full, rounded body narrows to a constricted neck and an everted, gently scalloped rim. A pair of robust loop handles rises from the shoulder, flanking the vessel symmetrically, while two modest knobs punctuate the shoulder between them, perhaps lugs for suspension or purely decorative accents. The matte, lightly burnished body shows the soot patina of utilitarian cooking and storage. Among the village-dwelling Arikara, sometimes called Sahnish, such jars served the daily rhythms of a maize-growing people settled in earth-lodge towns along the upper Missouri. Sturdy and unadorned, the form prizes function: a workhorse vessel shaped for the hearth and the storage pit. The Arikara, who call themselves Sahnish, were a Caddoan-speaking, semi-sedentary people whose fortified earth-lodge villages lined the upper Missouri River through present-day South Dakota. Skilled horticulturalists, they cultivated maize, beans, squash, and sunflower on the river bottoms and traded surplus crops to nomadic Plains neighbors. Twin-handled jars of this type are a hallmark of historic-era Arikara ceramics; the loop handles and shoulder knobs distinguish their wares from the predominantly handleless pottery of many Plains groups. This example was reportedly recovered near Chamberlain, South Dakota, a stretch of the Missouri long associated with Arikara settlement before the smallpox epidemics and displacement of the nineteenth century scattered the surviving population northward. Item # 203160
Estimate:£170.26
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Estimate:
£170.26

OCT 17 | 10:00 PM

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