Acoma Pueblo sits just south of heavily traveled Interstate 40, west of Albuquerque. It’s almost impossible to miss. Acoma’s Sky City Casino is aggressively marketed and easily accessible from the Interstate.

The jewel of the Acoma pueblo is the original village and artists that work from it. Sitting atop a shear-walled mesa, the village was built to protect the Acoma people from invasion and destruction. When Spanish Catholic missionaries ultimately penetrated the defenses, they built a village church and converted many Acomas to Catholicism. The native culture has persisted, however, in elegantly formed and painted Acoma pottery.

These delightful objects of art often carry price tags that new collectors find off-putting. How can a pot be worth so much?

1. Clay is collected from secret deposits miles from the pueblo village. Artists can only get there on foot. The journey is long and tiring..

2. The clay is in chunks that are as hard as slate. They must be crushed or dried, sifted and strained to remove non-clay elements, such as small stones and pieces of wood. The remaining clay is ground fine using a special grinding stone.

3. Temper, in the form of finely ground potsherds from old broken pots is added to bind the clay for strength and pliability. The quality of Acoma clay fosters pottery walls that are almost impossibly thin, yet quite strong.

4. The dry, tempered clay is slowly mixed with water and more temper, until the artist believes it has the proper texture and consistency.

5. The pot is formed with coils of clay to build up the wall. This work can take a long time, with pauses to let each coil set enough to support the next coil.

6. Eventually, the shape is defined and the scraping of the surface begins. A piece of gourd smoothes the walls of the pot. This scraping takes place in stages, until the wall is as thin as the artist wants. Shaping concludes by burnishing the wall with a smooth stone.

That’s a lot of work. And the pot is only half-done. There’s painting and firing to do yet.

Yes, you can find cheaper forms of Acoma pottery. These are pots that skip all the hand-work. They are molded, fired and sold to artists to be painted. They are known collectively as “greenware.” While often attractive as decor items, they are not the same quality as authentic hand-built pottery.