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.