Basket and cover

Description

This covered storage basket has a deep, rectangular container made from a plain basketweave and a rim wrapped in thin, spiraled splint. The lid is a separate piece from the container and designed to sit over its outer rim. The outside of the basket is decorated with geometric patterns and dotted lines painted using black pigment. Collectors typically call the diamond and circle shapes stockades and the flower-like designs on the ends medallions, but these images also carry other meaning. Some Native American artists used stockade designs to symbolize political and geographical divisions that occurred within their groups during the difficult years of the early 1800s with pressures from Euro-American groups. The lid, which overlaps some of the stockade pattern on the container and has a different type of design, and may have been added at a later date. This basket was likely made by a Pequot artist in southeastern Connecticut.