Ancestral Puebloan Pot Shard Pendant

Shard with a wavy black band and a row of stripes, hung from a hook.

This pot shard pendant in pottery, pigment and sterling silver is Ancestral Puebloan, from N America, and is ca. 1000. Pottery shards are fragments of broken vessels, and they are common across the Southwest, where ceramic traditions stretch back well over a thousand years. Standing here is a rounded, four sided fragment with a scalloped dark band across the middle and parallel stripes in the corner. The ground is cream and orange, with the reverse showing a rough reddish body. A bright metal loop runs through a drilled hole. It is 1.75 inches long, 0.25 deep and 1.5 high.

A vessel that ended up on a hook and seems fine with it.