Page 12 - Black Range Naturalist, Vol. 3, No. 1

other. My tendency to put things in boxes clouds my under- standing of the Mimbres culture. It is quite possible that art, religious depictions, depictions of trade objects, and homage to food sources was all the same thing in the Mimbres zeitgeist - or not. Graphic depictions can inform, but the perceived meaning may be different than that intended.
The inspiration for the art of the Mimbres, like that of other peoples, may have derived from many perspectives. Rabbits, like those depicted on the bowl to the right, photographed at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, at the University of New Mexico, were common creatures - but important creatures, creatures that ate the crops and were, in turn, eaten. Many common elements may also have represented significant cosmological thoughts. Note that the Mimbres used both black-on-white and reverse images.
Probably a Black-tailed Jackrabbit, Lepus californicus, because of markings on ear, but perhaps Desert Cottontail, Sylvilagus audubonii. And possibly - a rabbit.. On a bowl in the Luna Mimbres Museum in Deming, New Mexico. Below, Desert Cottontail east of Hillsboro.

Jacob Jerome Brody found that non-human mammals were depicted on roughly a quarter of the Mimbres Classic vessels (p. 179, Mimbres Pottery: Ancient Art of the American Southwest). Many were rabbits. Rabbits were often associated with the moon in prehistorical southwestern cultures. (That is the rabbit in the moon you are seeing, not a man in the moon.)
There are 29 dashes on the side of the rabbit depicted on this bowl from the McDonald Observatory in west Texas. Signage at the observatory posits that the dashes may represent the lunar synodic period (29.5 days in length, the time it takes a lunar phase to reappear - full moon to full moon, for example).
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