Francis H Harlow (1928-present) is a world class physicist, an expert on Pueblo Indian pottery and Southwest sea fossils, an accomplished painter and cellist. In this memoir, the retired Los Alamos scientist and scholar looks back on his life and career, including his fifty years as a theoretical physicist at one of the U.S.'s top research facilities. He considers his study of Pueblo pottery a "hobby", though it draws on archaeology, history and ethnography, as well as interactions and interviews with living and deceased potters (including Maria Martinez). This book highlights the Museum of Indian Art (Santa Fe) Harlow Pottery Collection.

The pottery of Acoma Pueblo stands at the height of ceramics among the Pueblo Indian pottery traditions. This exhaustively researched book traces the history of Acoma pottery over the past seven hundred years, concentrating on the periods from 1300 to 1930. with a summary of the modern period. The authors studied over several thousand examples, presenting more than 800 examples here, along with dozens of photographs of potters. The book identifies more than nine hundred Acoma potters, several of whom are credited for the first time, who worked between about 1880 to the present. Acoma pottery has evolved significantly in form and decoration over the past seven hundred years, each change reflecting the interplay of many factors, including advances in technology, individual innovations, changing markets, and the evolving uses of pottery vessels. The book is a comprehensive illustrated survey of Acoma pottery at a depth and level of detail that has never before been achieved, and will be the standard for all studies in the future.

The potters of Zuni Pueblo, in western New Mexico, are recognized for their superbly functional and aesthetically unique polychrome ceramic vessels. The authors present an authoritative and comprehensive study of 700 years of Zuni pottery, drawing upon 1200 examples from incomparable collections acquired at Zuni by expeditions dispatched by the Smithsonian Institution, as well as from museums across the country. The authors use ground breaking original research (which has become the standard for subsequent research teams) to study the evolution of the pottery styles of the Zuni Pueblo. Every individual type and style of pottery made at Zuni is discussed and illustrated chronologically and in detail. The book offers a history of the Zuni Pueblos, an introduction to Ashiwi (Zuni) pottery, as well as a chronological history of the craft. The authors examine fine and rare examples of pots--many of which are from private collections--in terms of forms and designs from the ancient antecedents of Zuni pottery to the contemporary work being produced today. The definitive treatment of the extraordinarily popular Zuni Pueblo's long and complex ceramic tradition, this book sets the gold standard and will be an indispensable reference for researchers, collectors, Native arts enthusiasts, archaeologists, and visitors to the Southwest.