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Patricio, Robert – 11″ Tall “Chocolate Jar” with Swirling Designs
8.5"w x 11"h
$ 2,800.00
It’s great to see Robert Patricio once again reviving his classic Chaco Canyon “chocolate jars”. It is a shape (see last photo) that was found in quantity at Chaco Canyon. It was only recently discovered to be a receptacle for chocolate or cacao! This large jar is coil-built and painted with bee-weed. Robert said he wanted to “make it his own” and added the fluted rim. The jar is the largest he said he had made to date in this form. Creating pieces with straight sides is always technically difficult as they tend to warp in drying or firing. It is painted with spiraling Tularosa Swirls that are painted with thin lines representing rain. It is signed on the bottom, “R. M. Patricio”. The jar is an exciting extension of his clay artistry and continues the amazing Acoma legacy.
More about the “Chocolate Jars of Chaco Canyon”:
For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen. Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects.
But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border.
How did the ancient Pueblos come to have cacao beans in the desert, more than 1,200 miles from the nearest cacao trees? Ms. Crown, a University of New Mexico anthropologist, noted that maize, beans and corn spread to the Southwest after being domesticated in southern Mexico. Earlier excavations at Pueblo Bonito, the largest structure in the Chaco complex, had found scarlet macaws and other imported items. Click here to read the New York Times Article by
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It’s great to see Robert Patricio once again reviving his classic Chaco Canyon “chocolate jars”. It is a shape (see last photo) that was found in quantity at Chaco Canyon. It was only recently discovered to be a receptacle for chocolate or cacao! This large jar is coil-built and painted with bee-weed. Robert said he wanted to “make it his own” and added the fluted rim. The jar is the largest he said he had made to date in this form. Creating pieces with straight sides is always technically difficult as they tend to warp in drying or firing. It is painted with spiraling Tularosa Swirls that are painted with thin lines representing rain. It is signed on the bottom, “R. M. Patricio”. The jar is an exciting extension of his clay artistry and continues the amazing Acoma legacy.
More about the “Chocolate Jars of Chaco Canyon”:
For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen. Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects.
But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border.
How did the ancient Pueblos come to have cacao beans in the desert, more than 1,200 miles from the nearest cacao trees? Ms. Crown, a University of New Mexico anthropologist, noted that maize, beans and corn spread to the Southwest after being domesticated in southern Mexico. Earlier excavations at Pueblo Bonito, the largest structure in the Chaco complex, had found scarlet macaws and other imported items. Click here to read the New York Times Article by
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Patricio, Robert (b. 1976)