Painted by a Distant Hand: Mimbres Pottery from the American Southwest (Peabody Museum Collections Series) by Steven A. LeBlanc (Author), Hillel S. Burger (Photographer), Rubie Watson (Foreword) (Peabody Museum Press)

Of all prehistoric Southwestern pottery I am familiar with, the most aesthetically appealing is that of the Mimbres. As a people, the Mimbres do not have the "name recognition" of their neighbors to the north, the Anasazi. While they did not leave impressive masonry ruins as the Anasazi did at places like Chaco and Mesa Verde, they did leave remarkable pots buried beneath their villages along the Mimbres River in the southwestern corner of New Mexico.

PAINTED BY A DISTANT HAND is an excellent introduction to Mimbres pottery. The first part of the book is an essay by archaeologist Steven A. LeBlanc, divided into short, informative chapters such as "A Brief History of the Mimbres People", "Mimbres Daily Life", and "Who Painted the Bowls?" (The consensus answer to that question is, for any given Mimbres village at any one time, only a few select artists -- who most likely were women, recognized for the quality of their work and, because they were few in number, able to follow and develop sophisticated design styles.) LeBlanc's text is intelligent and lucid, and, I believe, based on sound archaeology and anthropology. That text sets the stage for appreciation of the twenty-five Mimbres pots that are meticulously photographed in full color and presented in the second half of the volume. Brief textual commentary accompanies each of these twenty-five photographed pots, as well as, for some of them, photographs of similarly designed pots that very well may have been painted by the same artist.

Some of the decorations on these pots are geometrical in nature and incredibly intricate. Others are figurative, and astonishingly "modern" -- bringing to mind Picasso and Matisse. While it is nigh impossible to describe what makes Mimbres pottery special, PAINTED BY A DISTANT HAND should convey the notion.

All of the pots in this book are in Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and most of them come from one site in the Mimbres Valley, the Swarts Ruin (excavated between 1924 and 1927). Of course, looking at a book cannot be anything like seeing and handling such artifacts in person, but rarely have I come across a book that does as good a job as this one at giving a feel for the museum pieces it presents. PAINTED BY A DISTANT HAND is one of a series of books, the "Peabody Museum Collections Series", and if other entries present their subject as well as this one does, I have a few other books to add to my library and enjoy.