Pottery Paint and Other Uses of Rocky Mountain Beeweed (Cleome SerrulataPursh) in the Southwestern United States: Ethnographic Data, Archæological Record, and Elemental Composition

Abstract

The Rocky Mountain beeweed plant (Cleome serrulata Pursh) has had a variety of uses for Native Americans in the Southwestern United States from ancient times to the present and, within historic time, has been used to some extent by Mexican-Americans. This paper reviews the scientific taxonomy, common nomenclature, ethnographic uses, and archaeological occurrences of Rocky Mountain beeweed, or guaco. Particular attention is given to the question of how it works as a pigmenting agent for black painted pottery, such as that occurring on ancestral and modem Pueblo ceramics. While the blackness of residual carbon is the generally accepted explanation, we refer briefly to a hypothesis we propose elsewhere that the carbon may act as a strong reducing agent causing black magnetite to form in the surrounding pottery clay matrix. Another suggestion, that reduced iron from the beeweed causes the coloration, is evaluated chemically and provisionally rejected.

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