The title, Fragmentos de Alfarería, Hecho en México (Pottery Shards Made in Mexico, or literally, “Fragments of Pottery Done in Mexico”) is the tip-off to you that was unavailable to me when coming across these “shards” in Santa Elena Canyon.
An initial moment of joy was in contemplating the discovery of Native Indian artwork on pottery shards. Common sense then took over: The shards are made of the wrong material to be of Native American origin. The artwork itself is of the wrong coloring (and thus also likely to be of the wrong medium). And finally the artwork is on the inside curvature of the shards (rather than on the outside of the curved shards).
So, what has brought these into existence and transported them to this location? Well, most likely the artwork was done by Mexican children directly onto the sunbaked ground. After relentless sun-exposure, the dried ground cracked and, “curled up,” as demonstrated by the surrounding surface area.
But deductions aside—and without a background in ancient Native American pottery—I photographed the shards, their location and my fedora for a comparison of scale. I then showed these to a Park Ranger who confirmed that the material and the medium are indeed, NOT of Native American origin. The Ranger didn’t opine on the evolution of events as I have hereinabove, and I didn’t ask. But that seems the most logical explanation.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 4.85 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.