“Back when the stones were soft,” my brother Jeff might say in his best Old Lodge Skins voice from “Little Big Man,” things were much simpler.

Among Native tribes in the Southwest, when The People needed something to carry something else, they made it out of the materials at-hand. First, there were tanned hides. If you needed a basket, there were willows near the stream you could cut, strip and weave. If you needed a pot to put over a fire to cook a venison stew, you sought out an arroyo where micaceous clay was exposed by flash floods, added water and shaped it into a vessel that was fired over a cedar wood flame.