The Importance of Pottery Sherds to Native People

While visiting Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, I saw this brochure in one of the information centers. It reads:

The Importance of Pottery Sherds to Native People
Native People of the Southwest believe that their ancestors deliberately left pot sherds as evidence of their lives, their migrations, and their continued presence. Hopi people call pot sherds "the footprints of the ancestors." As migrating families left one settlement for another, they broke their old pottery to leave behind as a testimony to their passing, and made new pottery to take with them to their new village.

Pueblo potters today refer to clay as the flesh of Grandmother clay. When they gather clay to make pottery, they offer corn meal to her and promise to make her beautiful. They enter into a reciprocal relationship with her. Because Grandmother Clay is in pottery, it is sacred. Because potters put something of themselves into their creations, pots are intimately connected with their makers. Native people ask visitors to leave pot sherds and other ancestral "footprints" in place so these connections between present and past peoples and the land can continue.