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Lot 124
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Caddo Incised Earthenware Jar with Vertical Striations
Caddo Incised Earthenware Jar with Vertical Striations
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Native American, Caddo, ca. 1200–1600 CE. A tall, ovoid earthenware jar rising from a rounded base to a softly everted rim, its surface combed with dense vertical incisions that fall from shoulder to belly like rain across the body. Just beneath the lip runs a narrow band of fine punctate dots, a quiet horizontal counterpoint to the rhythmic verticals below. The clay fires in mottled tones of buff and smoky carbon-black, the kind of variegated bloom that comes of open-pit firing and gives Caddo wares their characteristic atmospheric surface.

Vessels of this form belong to the ceramic traditions of the Caddo, whose villages and mound centers spanned the Red River and Arkansas River basins across what is now eastern Texas, southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and southeastern Oklahoma. Closely combed or brushed wares in this tapered jar shape are typically associated with utilitarian and mortuary contexts of the Middle to Late Caddo periods, the parallel striations produced by drawing a multi-toothed tool down the leather-hard surface before firing. The disciplined verticality of the design, contained between the punctate collar and the resolved curve of the base, reflects a potter's idiom in which restraint and repetition carry as much weight as figural ornament does elsewhere in the Mississippian world.

Likely employed for storage or for the transport and serving of foodstuffs, such jars also accompanied the dead in ancestral Caddo cemeteries, where ceramic offerings expressed both household identity and cosmological order. Size: 5.8" D x 7.7" H (14.7 cm D x 19.6 cm H).

Provenance: private Colorado, USA Collection; ex-private Denver, Colorado, USA collection; ex-private Flushing, New York and Ridgeway, Colorado, USA collection

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Item # 203021

  • Condition: Very Good. Some stable hairline fissures in areas, as well as chip to rim and nicks and abrasions to surface, all commensurate with age. Otherwise, intact and excellent with good remaining detail and scattered earthen deposits.

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by Artemis Fine Arts
June 25, 2026 9:00 AM MDT
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

Artemis Fine Arts

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Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $299 $25
$300 $999 $50
$1,000 $1,999 $100
$2,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $199,999 $10,000
$200,000 + $20,000