Overview and Cautions
Rio Grande Glaze Ware was first made about AD 1315 (based on tree-ring dating at Tijeras Pueblo). It partly displaced an earlier tradition of black-on-white pottery and was inspired by the White Mountain Red Ware tradition (Carlson 1970) centered on the upper Little Colorado drainage of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico. The apparent ancestral type for Rio Grande Glaze Ware, Los Padillas Polychrome, was a local variant on a White Mountain Red Ware type, Heshotauthla Polychrome (Wilson 2005:43). Los Padillas is found at sites dominated by black-on-white decorated pottery (Mera 1935:33), a pattern predating the glazeware tradition, and Wilson (2005:43) dates Los Padillas from AD 1175 to 1300. Habicht-Mauche (1993, Table 2) dates it from AD 1300 to 1350, however. The type is sometimes called Los Padillas Glaze Polychrome.
Rio Grande Glaze Ware was fired in an oxygen rich atmosphere. The lead-based pigment yielded a black glazing paint despite the presence of oxygen, while iron-based, non-glazing pigment yielded a matte red paint. Red design elements were most often outlined in black. On most pots, background colors ranged from red to olive to yellow, achieved with clay slips containing iron. A white slip was sometimes achieved by using slip clay imported from the Acoma-Zuni region to the west.
Rio Grande Glaze Ware was no longer made after 1700, because the Spanish cut off Pueblo access to the lead ore used in making the glaze paint (Wilson 1995:10). The Pueblos continued to make polychrome pottery but used all matte paints (Harlow 1973), as they do today.
The ware was made in the Rio Grande Valley and adjacent valleys, from roughly Santa Fe south to the north end of Elephant Butte Reservoir, and from the Rio Puerco east and northeast to the upper Pecos River. Unlike Old World glazed pottery and its derivatives, Rio Grande Glaze Ware used the glaze material as part of a decorative scheme, never to coat and waterproof the entire vessel.
Spielmann (1998) argues that the new pottery was part of changing religious practices among the New Mexico Pueblos, and specifically that "large glaze ware bowls were used ... for communal feasting, with each household contributing to the feast. The smaller white ware bowls continued to function as vessels for domestic food consumption. During the fifteenth century, white ware bowls were replaced by a smaller form of the Rio Grande glaze ware bowl, and thus glaze ware bowls came to be used in both ceremonial feasting (large size bowl) and domestic food consumption (small size bowl)" (Spielmann 1998:258).
Archaeologists divide Rio Grande Glaze Ware into a number of types, primarily to estimate the age of a site (based on what pottery types were found there). In this article the first approach to the named types begins with rim profiles. It is followed by a breakdown that begins with paint styles. Both approaches can be useful in understanding why a specific piece of pottery was assigned to a specific type. What follows is not an exhaustive typology (those can be found in the references provided). Rather, it is just extensive enough to allow non-specialists to understand the existing named distinctions.
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