Ancestral Puebloan · Fourmile Polychrome bowl
Fourmile Polychrome is the late flowering of White Mountain Red Ware, made in east-central Arizona in the fourteenth century, and this open bowl carries the full painted vocabulary of the type. The ground is a polished red slip; the motifs are black, sharpened along every edge by a narrow white outline that lifts them off it. Inside, hatched panels and stepped F-hooks divide the field into high-contrast blocks. What makes the vessel worth a lesson is that the decoration does not stop at the rim — a white-outlined band runs the whole way round the exterior, so the design has to be read as one continuous program rather than an interior picture. It is the Academy’s second vessel lesson, and the first where the same painted logic has to be tracked across two rotations.