Seated male smoker effigy vessel with feathered and horned serpent leg markings, a feathered crossband and a shoulder wrap with dotted circles, 1280-1450. Casas Grandes; Ramos polychrome; 10 by 7 5/8 by 8 inches. Private collection.

Townsend, who arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago in1982, explains, “Before I came, I worked on Aztec sculpture andsacred landscape. With that foundation, I began to see similarthemes in other regions of the Americas. Overarching it all is anexploration of the aesthetics and symbolic relations of thesepeople to the natural environment in which they lived.

“These exhibitions help fulfill the educational mission of the Art Institute, whose collection strengths in the pre-Columbian area are primarily in Mesoamerican and ancient Peruvian art,” he says.

Townsend adds, “We have all been brought up with the idea of the untamed wilderness. Lo and behold, there are several thousand years of early occupation before European immigration. It’s important that we bring this out not just as indigenous heritage, but as the heritage of all humanity.”

The first to be intrigued by Casas Grandes was Adolph Bandelier, who explored the site in 1884. The Swiss-born archaeologist was followed in 1914 by ethnographer J. Walter Fewkes, who documented similarities between Mimbres and Casas Grandes pottery. In the late 1950s, major excavations were conducted by Charles C. DiPeso, who theorized that Paquime’s main role was as a trading center linking the American Southwest to Central Mexico.

Beginning in the 1970s and escalating through the 1990s, researchers increasingly suspected that Casas Grandes was more important than DiPeso had imagined. Scholars now theorize that between 1100 and 1200 drought and resulting social friction caused inhabitants of farming communities to abandon their villages in search of reliable sources of water along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, near the Hopi mesas in Arizona and along the Casas Grandes River, where the refugees settled between 1250 and 1300.

Jar with both a plumed serpent and a macaw-headed serpent, 1280-1450. Casas Grandes; Ramos polychrome; 8 3/4 by 9 1/2 inches. Private collection.

The abundance of new data and revised archaeological theoryprompted Townsend to organize the exhibition and accompanyingcatalog, which examines the ways in which styles, motifs and themescommon to early Southwestern people are reconfigured in CasasGrandes pottery, among the most visually distinctive of all NativeAmerican ceramics. Interestingly, Mesoamerican imagery obliquelyfinds its way into Casas Grandes pottery, as well, articulatedwithin the conventions of the Southwestern culture to which CasasGrandes belonged.

“Casas Grandes vessels rank high among those of the ancient Americas by virtue of their graphic inventiveness and distinctive iconography,” writes Townsend, noting the imagination and skill with which potters combined animal, human and abstract imagery into complex, interlocking, geometrical designs.

“No other ceramic art of the pre-Columbian world so masterfully succeeded in achieving a cohesive visual integration of such surprisingly varied components,” says the curator. The most common Casas Grandes vessel shape is a globular, tapered jar. Macaw heads and plumed serpents are favorite motifs. Elaborate vessels sometimes depict a human figure wearing a macaw headdress and costume, or being transformed into macaw, a kind of parrot indigenous to the Americas. Among geometric devices, the zigzag band is another Casas Grandes signature.

“The object of the exhibition is to show the context within which the Casas Grandes pieces were made,” says Townsend, who used large-scale photo murals to introduce to visitors the important archaeological sites of the ancient Southwest and blowups on scrims to illustrate the Casas Grandes design vocabulary.

“We want visitors to see these works of art as paintings, not just pottery. The challenge for Casas Grandes artists was to create patterns that wrap around the vessels in an intelligible way. The inventions that they came up with are just astonishing,” says the curator.

Jar with two horned and plumed serpents, macaw-head motifs and birds, 1280-1450. Casas Grandes; Ramos polychrome; 8 3/4 by 9 inches. Private collection.

“Casas Grandes potters borrowed compositional devices, motifsand certain symbolic elements from the Anasazi and Mimbres, butthey put it together in a new way. It’s like elements of the samealphabet, but in a whole new visual syntax,” Townsend explains.

Through well-chosen comparisons the exhibition also gives pointers on distinguishing among Hohokam, Anasazi, Mimbres and Casas Grandes wares. Anasazi pottery is preoccupied with symmetry. Says Townsend, “It was extraordinarily inventive, but it had to be regular.”

Mimbres wares use narrative figures to recount myths, cautionary tales and proverbs. Casas Grandes designs also incorporate figures, but the figures are iconic.

Notes the curator, “On Casas Grandes pots, figures are not so narrative, specific and full of the detail of actual event, but more remote. They are archetypes of certain offices: for example, the ball player, the smoker. Casas Grandes potters invent these figures in an entirely new geometric language. The overall approach is very jazzy, very spontaneous, very unpredictable as you turn the vessel around.”

Collecting antiquities today, of course, is fraught with legal and ethical considerations. An additional intention of the exhibition, says James Cuno, the Art Institute’s president and director, is to “create an informed public that will respect and appreciate this ancient patrimony and actively help to prevent the destruction at archeological sites.”

Accompanying the Art Institute’s exhibition is Casas Grandes and The Ceramic Art of The Ancient Southwest($45 hardcover). It illustrates 90 outstanding examples of Casas Grandes pottery along with another 50 Hohokam, Mimbres and Anasazi pieces. Published in association with Yale University Press, the 208-page catalog, edited by Townsend, includes essays by the curator Barbara L. Moulard and Ken Kokrda.

Jar with a figure on one knee with plumes and a ball, and a standing figure with plumes, 1280-1450. Casas Grandes; Villa Ahumada polychrome, Ramos variant; 7 5/8 by 7 3/8 inches. Private collection.

Moulard, an authority on Southwestern ceramics who teaches atArizona State University, examines the underlying structuralaffinities between Casas Grandes vessels and other Southwesternpottery. Kokrda, a retired teacher who traveled extensively overthe decades to create a Casas Grandes photographic archive, tells amore personal tale of his long fascination with the little-knownware.

“There are many ways that people become interested in a field,” says Townsend, who hopes Kokrda’s experience will encourage other lay scholars.

Times have changed since Bandelier created his first crude map of Paquime. Casas Grandes today has a new museum built by Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History. The endangered archeological site is being stabilized, and international attention has turned to Casas Grandes’ key place in the history of the Americas.

“Casas Grandes artists defined the identity of what was a new place. Art was not merely decoration, it was the way people thought about themselves,” says Townsend. On reflection, he adds, “We’re finally seeing this southern extension of the Southwestern world as part of the larger matrix to which it belonged. It’s part of the cultural landscape that now, for all kinds of reasons, we all share.”

The Art Institute of Chicago is in Chicago’s Grant Park, across from Millennium Park. For information, 312-443-3600 or www.artic.edu.