In many respects, the revival pottery of Mata Ortiz owes its birth to Juan Quezada Sr. As a young man Juan was trying to get by as a farmer, cowherd and supplier of firewood in the vicinity of the village of Mata Ortiz. Each of these activities brought him into the ruins of what were formerly outlying villages of the major pueblo of Paquimé.

By the time Spanish explorers reached the region in the early 1500s, Paquimé had been abandoned for a hundred years and was washing away more with each succeeding rainfall. However, the ruins impressed the Spanish as an example of a formerly wealthy New World community and perhaps spurred them on to find out where the gold went. These days, the ruins of Paquimé are a designated United Nations World Heritage site. Much of the area has been excavated and a significant portion of the ruins have been stabilized so that erosion doesn't have quite the effect it used to. That said, in some areas there are still ancient potsherds scattered all over the ground. To dig a few inches down is to expose many more.

There were also many unbroken pots unearthed in the area, pots showing a multitude of designs, shapes, forms and uses. Some of the designs and forms found have been traced back to the Mimbres Mogollon culture and to possible Hohokam influences. Some of the Mimbres designs are also still seen in use by Acoma, Laguna, Isleta and Zuni potters. Archaeologists have suggested that when the Mimbres Mogollan people abandoned southern New Mexico around 1150 CE, some went north to the Acoma and Laguna areas while most went south to Paquimé. The area of Paquimé may have been wetter in those days but by about 1400, it was getting pretty dry.

Juan often found himself wandering through the ruins of Paquimé, stepping on potsherds everywhere he went. Eventually he started picking them up and examining them. Then he stumbled across a cave that contained unbroken pots painted by the residents of Paquimé hundreds of years before. That led to him trying to figure out how the pots were first made, then where the colors came from and how the designs fit together. With no tools to work with outside of his own drive to discover and his own ingenuity, it took him several years to figure it out.

Juan's creations may have gone unnoticed except for the serendipitous discovery of a few of his pieces in a small shop in Deming, New Mexico by an Anglo trader named Spencer MacCallum. Spencer recognized quality when he saw it but it took him a while to follow the trail back to Juan. Once he'd met Juan, Spencer came up with a great marketing story and out of that marketing story grew the brilliance that is today's Mata Ortiz pottery. And as good a potter as Juan was, that marketing story was not a true story. It did serve to make Juan famous in the United States but in Mexico, he's almost unknown.

The meeting with Spencer MacCallum fueled Juan's rise and as his pieces brought more and more income, his siblings got more and more interested in making pottery. Before long, Juan had taught them all how to do it and over the years since, many other potters have learned, made it their own and built their own careers, making and selling pottery into the United States and global markets and bringing a level of prosperity to Mata Ortiz that the village had never known.

Juan is also the progenitor of the "Quezada style," a design style that incorporates whitespace into the overall design. In contradistinction to that is the "Porvenir style," originated by potters in the Porvenir neighborhood of Mata Ortiz. The Porvenir style essentially decorates every centimeter of a pot's surface, leaving little-to-no whitespace.

After decades of making pottery, Juan finally retired and spent his last years on a ranch atop one of the hills above Mata Ortiz. He almost stopped making pottery but he did mentor younger folks, teaching them the basics and some of his more advanced techniques. A lot of folks in Mata Ortiz owe their prosperity to Juan's willingness to teach and pass on his knowledge and techniques. The Government of Mexico honored Juan by giving him the Premio Nacional de los Artes, the highest honor Mexico gives to its finest living artists. Sadly, Juan passed away on December 1, 2022.

The Mimbres Mogollon culture was named for the Mimbres River in the Gila Mountains. They lived in the area from about 850 CE to about 1150 CE. Substantial depopulation of the area occurred but there were many small surviving populations. Over time, these melted into the surrounding cultures with many families moving north to Acoma, Zuni and Hopi while others moved south to Casas Grande and Paquimé.

The time period from about 850 CE to about 1000 CE is classed the Late Basketmaker III period. The time period was characterized by the evolution of square and rectangular pithouses with plastered floors and walls. Ceremonial structures were generally dug deep into the ground. Local forms of pottery have been classified as early Mimbres black-on-white (formerly Boldface Black-on-White), textured plainware and red-on-cream.

The Classic Mimbres phase (1000 CE to 1150 CE) was marked with the construction of larger buildings in clusters of communities around open plazas. Some constructions had up to 150 rooms. Most groupings of rooms included a ceremonial room, although smaller square or rectangular underground kivas with roof openings were also being used. Classic Mimbres settlements were located in areas with well-watered floodplains available, suitable for the growing of maize, squash and beans. The villages were limited in size by the ability of the local area to grow enough food to support the village.

Pottery produced in the Mimbres region is distinct in style and decoration. Early Mimbres black-on-white pottery was primarily decorated with bold geometric designs, although some early pieces show human and animal figures. Over time the rendering of figurative and geometric designs grew more refined, sophisticated and diverse, suggesting community prosperity and a rich ceremonial life. Classic Mimbres black-on-white pottery is also characterized by bold geometric shapes but done with refined brushwork and very fine linework. Designs may include figures of one or multiple humans, animals or other shapes, bounded by either geometric decorations or by simple rim bands. A common figure on a Mimbres pot is the turkey, another is the thunderbird. There are also a lot of different fish depicted, some are species found in the Gulf of California.

A lot of Mimbres bowls (with kill holes) have been found in archaeological excavations but most Mimbres pottery shows evidence it was actually used in day-to-day life and wasn't produced just for burial purposes.

There's a lot of speculation as to what happened to the Mimbres people as their countryside was rapidly depopulated after about 1150 CE. The people of Isleta, Acoma and Laguna find ancient Mimbres pot shards on their pueblo lands, indicating that pottery designs from the Mimbres River area migrated north. There are similar designs found on pot shards littering the ground around Casas Grandes and Paquime near Mata Ortiz and Nuevo Casas Grandes in northern Mexico. Other than where they went, the only reasons offered for why they left involve at least small scale climate change. The usual comment is "drought" but drought could have been brought on by the eruption of a volcano on the other side of the planet, or a small change in the El Nino-La Nina schedule. Whatever it was that started the outflow of people, it began in the Mimbres River area and spread outward from there. Excavations in the Eastern Mimbres region (nearer to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico) have shown that the people adapted to new circumstances and that adaptation itself moved them closer into alignment with surrounding tribes and cultures. Eventually they just kind of merged into the background, although the groups that moved south and built up Paquime and Casas Grandes seem to have lost a war and survivors migrated to the west, to a land a bit more hospitable for them.