Papua New Guinea Chambri pottery is essential for food preparation and storage in the thatched stilt houses along the Sepik River. Although some cooking is done outside, each house has a place for a gugumbe or fire dish and some large sago flour storage jars. Sago storage pot with bird face. Only the Iatmul speaking village of Aibom, which sits inland off the middle Sepik River in the Chambri Lakes, has suitable clay to make this style of pottery. Women collect clay from pits at the foot of Aibom Mountain behind the village.
Most women make pots of all types during the wet season.
If they marry outside the village they lose their access to the clay pits, but they can still make pots. A potter starts with a double thickness pinch pot and adds coils to build up the form. The coils are smoothed to complete the pot. The pots are dried to the leather-hard stage under the stilt houses, a slow process in the tropics. Decoration is added, sometimes with filets or with finely detailed clay slip designs using natural earth colors of red, black and white.