A River Apart: the Pottery of Cochiti & Santo Domingo Pueblos edited by Valerie K. Verzuh SOLD OUT/Please locate another source to purchase

Neighboring Pueblo villages on the banks of the Rio Grande – just a river apart – Cochiti and Santo Domingo share a Puebloan ceramic tradition extending back some 1,500 years. Between 1800 and 1850, the pottery of the two villages was virtually indistinguishable. But beginning with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, increasing with New Mexico’s incorporation as a U.S. territory, and culminating with the arrival of the transcontinental railroad after 1880, the pressure towards modernity was on. Traditional forms of pottery survived and even thrived, but the manner in which Cochiti, not directly served by the rail line, and Santo Domingo, bordered by it, exhibited transformation and renewal in response to the outside world is one of the subjects of this fascinating study.

Drawing on the extensive collections of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, this publication examines the story of Cochiti and Santo Domingo pottery traditions from multiple interpretive viewpoints: artistic, anthropological, historical, as well as curatorial, cultural, and personal. The reader is given the opportunity to experience the world of Pueblo pottery on many levels, and through many avenues of experience, and provided with some interpretive tools with which to critique generally accepted authorities and assumptions about Pueblo pottery. A River Apart positions the ceramic traditions of these villages side by side: geographically, temporally, taxonomically, and artistically.

Multivocality is an approach to interpreting material culture in a manner which seeks to reconcile contested meanings. By examining the constructed meanings associated with museum objects over time and space, we render transparent the political, culturally relative, and historically specific nature of voice. And, by moving the heretofore peripheral into the center of contemporary cultural theory, this book examines the cultural and scholarly diversity that emerges from the reciprocal traffic of ideas and influences.  

Museum of New Mexico Press, 2008.
Hardcover, 185 pages.