McDonald Corrugated

This large bowl was likely used for serving food at feasts. It is massive in size, features decoration on only the exterior and even has a textured exterior to ease handling. Such large bowls seem to become more common after CE 1300, when large Fourmile Polychrome feasting bowls with more complex exterior designs are a common element of Mountain Mogollon ceramic assemblages. This pattern is likely an element of new, inclusive social systems created in the aftermath of migration to ease the tensions in newly multi-ethnic communities. Feasting seems to have been part of these new systems (see Potter 2000; Dean 2001; Mills 2007 for discussion of these patterns). Similar patterns have also been noted to the south, in the Upper Gila and San Pedro River Valley where late Salado Polychromes show some of the best examples of decoration on the elaborately painted exteriors of large bowls.

McDonald Corrugated is part of a horizon of white-on-red/brown ceramics that occurs across the Mountain Transition Zone and extreme southern Colorado Plateau in what is now Arizona. Dating is messy and published dates seem to range from CE 1100-1350, however it seems it is mostly produced during a very narrow window around CE 1200-1250 (Hays-Gilpin and van Hartesveldt 1998:149). This matches the early dates for other types in the horizon, including Salado White-on-Red, Tuzigoot White-on-Red and Turkey Hill White-on-Red.

References Cited

Dean, Rebecca M.
2001 Social Change and Hunting during the Pueblo III to Pueblo IV Transition, East-Central Arizona. Journal of Field Archaeology 28(3-4):271-285.

Hays-Gilpin, Kelley and Eric van Hartesveldt
1998 Prehistoric Ceramics of the Puerco Valley, Arizona: The 1995 Chambers-Sanders Trust Lands Ceramic Conference. Museum of Northern Arizona Ceramic Series No. 7. The Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff.

Mills, Barbara J.
2007 Performing the Feast: Visual Display and Suprahousehold Commensalism in the Puebloan Southwest. American Antiquity 72(2):210-239.

Potter, James M.
2000 Pots, Parties, and Politics: Communal Feasting in the American Southwest. American Antiquity 65(3):471-492.