Nampeyo of Hano Historic Hopi Flat Top Seed Style Black on Yellow Pottery Jar

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A unique historic Hopi flat-top “seed” style black-on-yellow pottery jar by Nampeyo, c.1905

This is a unique and wonderful jar with an extraordinary and extremely low-profile shape. You can’t make a jar much lower than this and only the most skilled of potters such as the great Hopi pottery Matriarch Nampeyo of Hano (1858-1942) would even attempt to make such a daring piece.

The antecedents for a piece such as this are in the prehistoric ancestral Hopi Kayenta type “flat-top” ceramic jars with no raised rims made in the Tsegi Canyon complex some 125 miles north of the present day Hopi villages in far northern Arizona in the 13th and14th Centuries; “Tusayan Black on White” and “Keet Seel Polychrome” as shown below, but Nampeyo took these shapes one giant step further lowering the jar’s profile to an almost wafer-thin level. Shards of these prehistoric vessels are very commonly found in the ruins of ancient Hopi villages of Sikyatki, Awatovi, Kokopynama and others where they were brought by ancestral Hopi clans migrating south to their present day Hopi mesa villages from the Tsegi canyon complex. In fact, some years ago, one of our Hopi friends found a completely intact 14th Century Kayenta Flat top seed jar no far from their home. Nampeyo would have surely come across these Tsegi Canyon type shards and/or vessels in her frequent explorations of these old ruined villages and clearly found artistic inspiration in them. These low-profile Nampeyo flat jar shapes with or without rims inspired by ancestral Hopi ceramics were sometimes referred to as “flying saucers”. The Fred Harvey Company Fine Arts department which sold quite a few of these pieces over the years always called them “discs.”

These low-profile type of flat jars are most commonly called “seed” jars today, but that is more a prosaic term

than an indication of any actual modern-day function. The ancient versions of seed jars were probably actually used

to store seeds or nuts or other fragile organic materials such as cotton bolls for weaving with the flat top opening covered by a flat rock, but these modern revival versions by Nampeyo and others are essentially decorative sculptural pieces made for the pure joy of making and potentially selling them than for any functional reason. Too, a small-to-medium sized jar such as this would have been easily transportable back home by an early visitor

to Hopi who came on the Santa Fe railroad and/or by Fred Harvey Company touring car.

At the turn of the 2oth century Hopi was experiencing a tourist boom due to the promotional efforts of the Santa

Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company and a jar such as this would have been a perfect “souvenir”. The generally excellent condition this 120 or so year old vessel is in is a testament to how well this cherished memento was valued and cared for, essentially brought home and displayed on a shelf or table for decades to come. The design is quite spare, but fully indicative of Nampeyo’s design sensibility with the ultra low form of the vessel very nicely accentuated by two horizontally-opposed paired asymmetrical, somewhat freeform designs incorporating stylized feather tips, foliate leaves, figurative spider-like motifs and possibly Kachina mask designs.

Tsegi Canyon

The remote Tsegi Canyon system in far Northern Arizona near the present-day Utah border is the ancestral home

of some modern-day Hopi clans who migrated southwards some 125 miles from the Tsegi area to the Hopi Mesas in the

13th and 14th centuries. The Tsegi Canyon system is home to the great ruined ancestral Pueblo villages of Betatakin,

Inscription House and Keet Seel which is pictured above at top center.

Top center photo of Keet Seel Ruin source and © Arizona Highways Magazine. Lower left photo source and © dreamstime. Lower right photo source and © Flickr.

Below, far left, near left and far right photo source and © "Anasazi Painted Pottery" by Paul S. Martin, originally published in 1940 by The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL and re-printed

by Ethnographic Arts Publications, Mill Valley, CA. Near right photo source and © "Painted Ceramics of the Western Mound of Awatovi" by Watson Smith, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1952.

The jar also features Nampeyo’s characteristic outstanding all-over stone polishing and the beautiful creamy

light yellow to orange firing blushes indicative of a high-temperature firing with Lignite coal, an ancient Hopi pottery-making technique which Nampeyo revived and was a master of. Interestingly, the jar is done in Black-on-Yellow only, another stylistic nod to ancient Hopi pottery types such as Jeddito Black-on Yellow. There is no red paint at all in the design. The jar measures 9 1/4" in diameter and is an ultra-low profile 3" in height at its highest center point.

As stated previously, the jar is in generally excellent original condition with no cracks and no significant chips. There is some degree of paint fading to the painted design, particularly around the vessel’s shoulder, but this is very likely

a product of the original firing. The organic Hopi black paint is known to be fugitive in nature and sometimes fires unevenly. A thorough examination of the vessel under Ultraviolet light reveals no evidence at all

of any restoration or overpainting.

This jar is a rare and unique early prize from the talented hands and infinitely creative mind of one of Native America’s greatest ever pottery artists, a piece to be valued and cherished for the next century to come and beyond.

Price $3,750

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Two Fred Harvey Company sales outlets where this jar might have originally been purchased. At left, The Fred Harvey Company's Indian Building Trading Post at The Hotel Alvarafdo, Albuquerque, NM, c. 1906. At right, the old J.L. Hubbell Trading Post in Winslow, AZ.