Mortuary Practice and Iconography in Mimbres Mogollon Pottery (c. 1000-1150 CE)

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

I've been watching the Great Courses lecture series "Ancient Civilizations of North America" presented by Dr. Edwin Barnhart. In it he discusses the achievements of the Mogollon culture of the North American southwest including the development of their distinctive black and white pottery found on the heads or covering the faces of their dead.

I photographed all of these Mimbres bowls, dated between 1000-1130 CE, at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas.

The bowls shown here belong to the Mimbres branch of the Mogollon culture (Hegmon and Nelson 2002, 2010). Produced in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico between roughly 1000 and 1130 CE (Hegmon 2002; LeBlanc 1983) , these vessels are notable both for their refined geometric framing and for a varied repertoire of figural imagery, including rabbits, fish, turkeys, bighorn sheep, and human forms rendered with remarkable economy of line.

A defining feature of several bowls in this group is the presence of a deliberately punched perforation in the vessel's interior, commonly referred to as a "kill hole" (Robbins and Westmoreland 1991, 66; Hegmon et al. 2021, 28) . These holes were created through intentional, controlled breakage after the vessel's painted decoration was completed, and they appear with notable frequency on bowls recovered from burial contexts. Excavations at Mimbres sites have documented a consistent mortuary pattern in which such bowls were inverted and placed over the head or face of the deceased prior to interment (Shafer 1982, 2003; LeBlanc 1983) , typically within burial pits beneath the floors of residential rooms, reflecting the broader Southwestern practice of incorporating the dead into domestic space.

Examination of use-wear on recovered vessels has added a further dimension to this picture. Scrape marks and other wear patterns consistent with domestic use have been identified on the interior surfaces of some bowls subsequently placed in burials (Bray 1982; Lyle 1996; cited in Huston 2012, 17-18) , suggesting that these vessels were not produced solely for mortuary purposes but had served in household contexts, likely for food preparation or serving, prior to their incorporation into funerary ritual. This indicates that at least some bowls underwent a transformation in status, moving from everyday utilitarian objects into ritually significant items at the time of an individual's death, rather than being manufactured exclusively as grave goods. Such a pattern would suggest that the mortuary use of these vessels involved the repurposing of objects already embedded in the life of the household, potentially carrying personal or biographical associations with the deceased or their family.

The interpretive significance of the kill hole remains a subject of ongoing discussion among Southwestern archaeologists (Hegmon et al. 2021, 25-28) . Proposed explanations include the ritual "killing" or decommissioning of the vessel, thereby removing it from the realm of everyday use and marking its transition into a mortuary object; the symbolic release of a spirit, whether that of the vessel itself or of the deceased; and the physical termination of the bowl's "life cycle" as part of a broader Mimbres conceptual framework linking objects, individuals, and cosmological cycles. The evidence of prior domestic use lends some support to interpretations centered on biographical transformation and decommissioning, since these bowls appear to have had functional lives before their ritual repurposing, though these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and the practice likely carried multiple, layered meanings that may have varied across communities and over time.

The practice invites comparison with object "killing" rituals documented in mortuary traditions across the world, including the deliberate bending or destruction of swords, helmets, and other weapons placed in graves in ancient Greek and broader Iron Age European contexts (Brody 2004, 2011; LeBlanc 1983) . While no historical connection exists between these traditions, the recurrence of such practices across unrelated societies suggests a broadly shared mortuary logic: that objects closely associated with an individual may need to be ritually decommissioned, removed from circulation among the living, or otherwise transformed at the point of burial. The specific mechanisms differ considerably, and some Mimbres specialists have questioned whether the term "kill hole" itself imports interpretive assumptions that may not align with Mimbres conceptual frameworks. Nonetheless, the cross-cultural recurrence of object destruction in funerary contexts points to a recurring concern in human mortuary practice more generally: the management of an object's relationship to its owner after death.

The figural imagery on these bowls offers further avenues for interpretation, though caution is warranted in moving from iconography to meaning. The geometric scroll and stepped-frame motifs that often encircle or border figural scenes have been read by some scholars as referencing migration narratives, directional symbolism, or cosmological structuring principles (Brody 2005; Hegmon 2002; Robbins and Westmoreland 1991, 67-70; Huston 2012, 73-78) , though such readings remain provisional. Bowls depicting human figures in unusual postures, including the tumbling or inverted forms seen on some examples, have prompted suggestions that these may represent supernatural beings, ancestral figures, or imagery specifically tied to themes of death and transformation, rather than depictions of ordinary lived experience.

The specific placement of these bowls over the head or face of the deceased has also prompted interpretive discussion, though this aspect of the practice remains less thoroughly addressed than the kill hole itself. Some scholars have suggested that this placement reflects the particular ritual significance of the head as a locus of identity, breath, or vital essence, drawing on patterns documented among later Puebloan peoples, who are generally understood to be culturally related to Mimbres populations (Brody 2004; Hegmon 2002; Huston 2012) . Under this reading, the inverted bowl may have functioned as an enclosure or boundary at an especially significant point of the body, with its painted interior, often featuring geometric framing devices that have been read as cosmological or directional in character, oriented toward the deceased rather than toward living viewers. The sequence of inversion, placement, and perforation has further been interpreted as a coherent ritual action, in which the enclosure created by the bowl was subsequently opened through the kill hole, potentially in connection with ideas about the release of breath or spirit at the site of the head. These interpretations rely substantially on ethnographic analogy with later and partly distinct Puebloan communities, a methodological approach, sometimes termed the direct historical approach, that is widely used but also debated in Southwestern archaeology, since it involves projecting documented practices backward onto earlier populations whose own symbolic frameworks cannot be directly accessed. The specific significance of head and face placement in Mimbres mortuary practice should therefore be regarded as plausible but inferential.

Pottery production itself was a labor-intensive process, generally attributed to Mimbres women, involving coil-and-scrape construction, application of mineral or organic paints with fine yucca-fiber brushes, and firing in a reducing (oxygen-restricted) atmosphere to produce the characteristic black-on-white surface (Brody 2005; Hegmon 2002; LeBlanc 1983) . The skill evident in these vessels, both in the painted compositions and in the technical control required to produce them, underscores their importance not merely as utilitarian objects but as significant cultural and ritual artifacts.

Bibliography

Brody, J. J. 2004. Mimbres Painted Pottery in the Modern World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Brody, J. J. 2005. "Mimbres Painted Pottery: Meaning and Content." In The Archaeology of the Mimbres Region, edited by M. Hegmon, 45-62. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Bray, A. 1982. "Mimbres Black-on-White: A Ceramic Analysis." Master's thesis, University of Texas at Austin.

Hegmon, Michelle. 2002. "Recent Issues in the Archaeology of the Mimbres Region of the North American Southwest." Journal of Archaeological Research 10 (4): 307-357.

Hegmon, Michelle, and Margaret Nelson. 2010. "The Archaeology and Meaning of Mimbres." Archaeology Southwest Magazine 17 (4). Tucson: Archaeology Southwest.

Hegmon, Michelle, Will G. Russell, Kendall Baller, Matthew A. Peeples, and Sarah Striker. 2021. "The Social Significance of Mimbres Painted Pottery in the U.S. Southwest." American Antiquity 86 (1): 23-42.

Huston, Melyssa. 2012. "Metanarrative and Material Culture: A Visual Analysis of Mimbres Pottery and Jornada Rock Art." Master's thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

LeBlanc, Steven A. 1983. The Mimbres People: Ancient Pueblo Painters of the American Southwest. London: Thames and Hudson.

Lyle, L. 1996. "Use-Wear Analysis of Mimbres Classic Black-on-White Bowls from the NAN Ranch Ruin." Paper presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans.

Robbins, R. Robert, and Russell B. Westmoreland. 1991. "Astronomical Imagery and Numbers in Mimbres Pottery." The Astronomy Quarterly 8: 65-88.

Shafer, Harry J. 1982. "Classic Mimbres Phase Households and Room Use Patterns." KIVA 76 (2): 201-221.

Shafer, Harry J. 2003. Mimbres Archaeology at the NAN Ranch Ruin. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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