Anasazi Stone Plano-Convex Mano / Pestle

Native American, Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloan). A long, loaf-shaped implement pecked and ground from a dense tan sandstone, its silhouette tapering smoothly to blunt, rounded ends. The section is decidedly plano-convex: one face swells in a broad dome shaped to the palm, while the opposite face is worn nearly flat, the signature of prolonged reciprocal grinding against a metate or a flat milling slab. Pitting and granular texture survive across the dorsal surface where the original pecked finish was never fully abraded away. Tools of this class served the daily labor of maize processing in Ancestral Puebloan households, though the elongated, narrow form also invites reading as a pestle or, per the consignor, a celt-like implement. The stone's warm ochre tone and mineral speckling are native to the sandstones of the Colorado Plateau. Manos and metates are the most abundant artifacts on Ancestral Puebloan sites, and their morphology tracks a dietary revolution. As maize became the caloric backbone of Southwestern life, open basin metates gave way to trough and then slab forms, and the hand stone lengthened accordingly so that it could be driven with two hands across the full width of the grinding surface. A mano that has developed one flat working face and retained a convex back is a two-handed tool from that later regime. Ethnographic accounts from Hopi and Zuni pueblos describe women working in batteries of milling bins, each successive metate ground finer than the last, a labor measured in hours per day and audible across the village. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 204968

Estimate:$350

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