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!  The jar is coil-built and painted with bee weed (black) and clay slips.  The piece has a cylindrical shape and it is fully designed with vertical bands of terraced clouds and rain.  It is a striking and colorful design!  It is signed on the bottom, “R.  M.  Patricio”.  The jar is an exciting extension of his artistry in clay 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 Michael Haederle from February, 2009.