Maria Martinez, a Native American artist,    was from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, a community located  20 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico and was known   for her traditional Pueblo pottery.

An excavation, in 1908, led by Edgar Lee Hewett, a professor of archaeology and the director of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, discovered  examples of black-on-black pottery.

       
  Maria was asked to recreate the black-on-black   pottery style for Hewett.  As almost all clay found   in the New Mexico desert was red, one specific challenge   was to figure out a way to dye the red clay jet black.   Maria discovered that smothering the fire surrounding   the pottery during the firing process caused the smoke   to be trapped. The carbon in the smoke caused the   pottery to turn to a black ash color (Hyde 20-23). She   experimented with the idea that an unfired polished   red vessel which was painted with a certain paint on top   of the polish and then fired in a smudging fire at a   relatively cool temperature would result in a deep   glossy black background with dull black decoration.   Shards or sheep and horse manure placed around the   outside and inside of the outdoor kiva-style adobe oven   would give the pot a slicker matte finished appearance.   After much trial and error, Maria successfully produced   a black ware pot. The first pots for the museum were   fired around 1910.