A pottery turtle, hand built with a white slipped shell painted in fine black line work: a radiating leaf or feather motif across the crown of the carapace and a field of close parallel lines sweeping down the flank. The head, tail and four feet are modelled in relief. The hollow underside is painted ACOMA in black across the white rim, with an artist's initials in pencil on the bare clay beside it. Acoma Pueblo sits on a mesa in western New Mexico and has been continuously inhabited for something close to a thousand years, which makes it one of the oldest lived in settlements on the continent. Acoma potters are known above all for thinness. The clay is tempered with ground potsherds from older vessels, which lets the walls be built up impossibly thin by hand coiling, and a good Acoma piece rings when tapped. The black lines are not paint in the ordinary sense: the pigment is boiled wild spinach, and it is applied with a brush cut from a yucca leaf, chewed at one end until the fibres