Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Porcelain & Pottery / Anasazi Chaco Black-on-White Chocolate Drinking Vessel
Native American, Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi), Chaco Black-on-White. A Chaco black-on-white pitcher built for a drink that traveled some fifteen hundred miles to reach it. The body swells to a low globe and stops at a shoulder folded sharp as a seam; above it the neck rises straight and untapered, with a strap handle arcing from just below the rim down to the break. There is no pouring lip, and none was intended. Archaeologists call the form a pitcher out of long habit, but the proportions are those of a tankard, sized to be gripped in one hand and set down where the company could see who held it. Mineral black over a chalk-white slip carries the ornament: barbed diagonals panelled against fields of fine hatching, pendant ticks stitched around the shoulder, solid chevrons descending the lower body. Vessels with this exact silhouette, vertical-necked and sharp-shouldered, belong to a very short list. At Pueblo Bonito only three ceramic forms have yielded the methylxanthine residues associated with imported stimulant beverages: cylinder jars, shallow bowls, and pitchers of this type. Roughly two in five tested pitchers came back positive. Cacao is the likely ingredient, carried north from the Aztatlan coast of western Mexico along the same route that brought scarlet macaws, copper bells, and conch trumpets into the San Juan Basin while turquoise moved south. Holly imported from the Southeast remains a candidate the chemistry cannot fully exclude. Either way the drink was rare, costly, and consumed in public, and the vessel that held it was doing social work as much as hydraulic. Chacoans appear to have taken theirs hot. Sandstone discs found alongside related forms have been read as lids, and controlled experiments confirm that a tall, narrow profile holds heat far better than an open bowl. The Maya, and later the Aztec, raised the foam on their chocolate by pouring it from a vessel held at chest height into another set on the ground, a performance a handled pot executes rather well, and one Chacoan practice may have echoed. These pitchers ended in ceremony as often as in the midden. Chacoans stacked them across doorways as symbolic barriers, sealing rooms that held things outsiders were not meant to see, and terminated others by fire, killing the object rather than simply discarding it. They also accompanied adults into burial, more often at the great houses than at the outlying farmsteads. Item # 204500
Estimate:£983.76
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPorcelain & Pottery
Estimate:
£983.76
RARE HAUSSE-COL D’OFFICIER DU RÉGIMENT PRÉOBRAJENSKY DE LA GARDE IMPÉRIALE
09/18/2026
£21,448.02
Est: £3,422.6
OCT 8 | 3:00 PM
OCT 8 | 3:00 PM
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed now
Ancestral Puebloan Earthenware Bowls and Fragments with Maya Pottery Figures
08/21/2026
£43.98
Est: £36.64
OCT 17 | 10:00 PM
