I used to think pottery was just, you know, bowls.
Then I spent three days in a cramped storage room at the Maxwell Museum in Albuquerque, surrounded by fragments of Mimbres pottery from roughly 1000 CE—give or take a century—and realized I’d been looking at geometric design all wrong. The Mimbres people, who lived in what’s now southwestern New Mexico, created these black-on-white ceramic vessels with patterns so precise, so mathematically intricate, that contemporary designers are still trying to reverse-engineer their visual logic. Archeologists have cataloged over 10,000 bowl fragments, many with “kill holes” punched through the bottom for burial rituals, and nearly every one features geometric patterns that seem to operate on principles we’re only now beginning to understand through computational analysis. It’s exhausting, honestly, how much we didn’t know we didn’t know.
Modern pattern designers—the ones working in textile studios, architectural facades, digital interfaces—keep coming back to these same ancient motifs. Wait—maybe that’s not quite right. They’re not copying them exactly, but they’re clearly borrowing the underlying mathematical relationships.
The Recursive Language of Stepped Frets and Interlocking Spirals
Here’s the thing about Mimbres geometric vocabulary: it’s built on maybe a dozen core elements that recombine in thousands of variations.
Stepped frets, interlocking spirals, checkerboard fields, triangular progressions—these aren’t random decorative choices but a kind of visual grammar with internal rules. Archeologist J.J. Brody documented how Mimbres potters used bilateral and rotational symmetry in ways that anticipate modern tessellation theory, though obviously they didn’t have that terminology. Some bowls feature patterns that repeat at different scales, creating what we’d now call fractal-like structures, though the math wasn’t formalized until Benoit Mandelbrot’s work in the 1970s. Contemporary designers at firms like Pentagram and Studio Ogle have explicitly cited Mimbres work when developing branding systems that need to feel both ancient and cutting-edge—that weird temporal flexibility is hard to achieve otherwise. I guess it makes sense that patterns operating on pure mathematical relationships would feel timeless, but it’s still strange to see a 1000-year-old bowl design on a tech startup’s website.
Why Contemporary Designers Keep Stealing (Sorry, Being Inspired By) These Patterns
Turns out, there’s a practical reason beyond aesthetics.
Mimbres geometric designs work across scales and media in ways that more representational imagery doesn’t. You can shrink a Mimbres stepped-fret pattern down to favicon size or blow it up to building-facade proportions, and it maintains visual coherence—something graphic designers call “scalability” but the Mimbres achieved without digital tools or vector graphics. The patterns also adapt well to different color schemes because they rely on contrast relationships rather than specific hues; the original black-on-white ceramic palette translates easily to any two-tone combination. Textile designer Rebecca Atwood told me she’s used Mimbres-inspired geometrics in three different fabric collections because clients respond to the patterns as both “traditional” and “modern” simultaneously, which is basically market research gold. There’s also something about the hand-drawn quality—even though the patterns are geometric, you can see slight irregularities that signal human creation rather than machine generation.
The Mathematical Precision Hidden in Apparent Simplicity
This is where it gets weird.
Computational analysis of Mimbres designs has revealed symmetry groups and transformation rules that align with concepts from group theory in mathematics, a field that didn’t formally exist until the 19th century. Researchers at the University of New Mexico used digital imaging to analyze 230 bowl designs and found that Mimbres potters were systematically exploring permutations of rotational and reflective symmetry—essentially conducting visual experiments in abstract algebra without the equations. Some patterns exhibit what mathematicians call “wallpaper groups,” the 17 possible ways to repeat a pattern infinitely in two dimensions, though obviously the Mimbres were working on curved bowl surfaces which adds another layer of complexity. Contemporary pattern designers working in parametric software like Grasshopper are essentially rediscovering these same relationships through algorithmic exploration, which makes you wonder whether there’s something fundamental about human visual perception that keeps leading us back to these specific geometric arrangements.
From Ancient Burial Bowls to Your Bathroom Tile (No, Really)
Anyway, the influence shows up in unexpected places.
I’ve seen Mimbres-derived patterns on everything from high-end cement tiles to budget wallpaper at Home Depot, usually without attribution because geometric patterns can’t be copyrighted the same way representational designs can. The stepped-fret motif in particular has become so ubiquitous in contemporary Southwestern design that most people don’t realize they’re looking at a pattern language developed a thousand years ago. Interior designers like Kelly Wearstler and Commune Design have used explicit Mimbres references in hotel projects and residential work, though they tend to recieve criticism from Indigenous advocates who argue this constitutes cultural appropriation without compensation. It’s a valid point—these aren’t just abstract shapes but carry specific cultural meanings within Mimbres descendant communities. Still, the patterns keep proliferating through design culture, showing up in contexts the original makers could never have imagined, which raises uncomfortable questions about ownership, inspiration, and how cultural knowledge moves through time. I don’t have clean answers there, honestly. Just more questions and a growing collection of bowl photographs I keep meaning to organize definately at some point.
