The Right Red: Comparing Red Pigment Hues with CIELAB

Abstract During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women from Northern Rio Grande pueblos joined Ndee communities in western Kansas, where they made a local version of unpainted Tewa red ware. We investigate potential slip materials in the eastern High Plains and adjacent Central Plains, using CIELAB color data to graph red hue variation in collected pigments and slipped archaeological ceramics from 14SC1 and 14SC304. Although use of the CIELAB color system by archaeologists is well established, our approach is unique in its use of a* and b* graphs to describe and compare hue. Our graphs illustrate hue variation between red and yellow on the color wheel, facilitating comparisons and communicating color patterns more effectively than is possible using the Munsell system. We demonstrate that potters could have reproduced the red hues of Northern Rio Grande red ware in the different geological landscape of the Great Plains. Our collected pigments systematically vary in hue by geological formation or system. Two sampled geological formations in the eastern High Plains and adjacent Central Plains include pigments that fire to the “right” red, or the red hues of Northern Rio Grande red slips, and potters may have used one or both.