Caddo Pot Fragments

About 1,200 years ago, the Caddo people began making pottery that is still recognizably Caddoan. Today, their descendants, like famed Caddo potter Jeri Redcorn, continue to make pottery in traditional, ancestral styles.

Ancestral Caddo pottery was so well made that it was a sought-after trade good across the Southwest. The Caddo were pottery specialists, making pottery not only for themselves but also for the sole purpose of trading it for other goods. The styles and decorations they used would have been well known in the region, letting people know the pottery was Caddoan and therefore high quality.

Particularly characteristic of Caddo pottery were carinated vessels, or bottles and bowls that flare out from the base and then sharply turn inward at the neck or rim. They made their pottery using a coil technique. Locally-sourced clay was rolled into thin ropes that were coiled and layered on top of one another to form the shape of the vessel and then smoothed together. They used this technique to make both coarse wares and fine wares, as archaeologists call them. Coarse wares are utilitarian, everyday vessels used for things like cooking and storage. Fine wares, as the name implies, are highly decorative and finely made vessels reserved for special occasions.

Due to forces of colonization and assimilation, the tradition of pottery making was lost for several generations. After seeing ancestral Caddoan pottery in a museum, Jeri Redcorn, a Caddo Nation citizen who was then in her mid-50s, taught herself the traditional methods that had been lost, reviving Caddo pottery. She uses traditional tools to decorate her coiled clay pots with ancestral incised designs and fires them in a traditional pit oven rather than a kiln. Redcorn has inspired other Caddo Nation citizens to become potters, continuing a tradition that started more than 1,000 years ago.

Learn more about Jeri Redcorn and the pottery making process in this video on the Bullock Museum YouTube channel.