Ceramic: Escavada Black-on-white, frog effigy seed jar (fragment), AMNH 29.0/7528

Escavada Black-on-white, frog effigy seed jar, AMNH Accession 29.0, Catalog #7528, Morris FS 1121. Analyzed by Lori Reed 2004. Temper is sand in a silty paste and slip is washy but silty suggesting manufacture at Aztec or elsewhere in the Middle San Juan region. Effigy is only about 25% complete. Image AMNH 29/7528 A: side view showing rim. Image AMNH 29/7528 B: base view showing sculpted legs. Recovered from Earl Morris' excavation of Room 48, West Ruin, Aztec Ruins.
Room 48 is in the east wing of West Ruin. Earl Morris’ description of the room at the time of excavation is as follows. “The floor of Room 48 was covered with refuse to a depth of from 4 1/2 feet to 7 feet, deepest in front of the door in the east wall. The greater proportion of this deposit was of vegetable substance; cornstalks, husks, tassels, and cobs, cedarbark, splinters of the same wood, as well as human excrement. This deposit of Chaco age had been completely protected from moisture and constituted, aside from some found in the caves of Del Muerto canyon, the richest repository for perishable artifacts (29.0- 7521-7839) that has come within the experience of the writer. Among other objects this deposit contained: two black-on-white bowls, fragments of mended vessels, pottery effigy of a skunk, three pottery feet belonging to animal effigies, black-on-white potsherds, two jar stoppers of unburned clay, four pieces of moulded unburned clay, [and a long list of other items]….From 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 feet of sand had worked down through the second floor before the timbers supporting the latter had failed. These had fallen in recent times, after the mound had reached its final form, as evidenced by the ragged crater left by the settling of the debris above them subsequent to their collapse” (Morris 1928:307-308).
Reference: Earl Morris, 1928, Notes on Excavations in the Aztec Ruin, Volume XXVI, Part V, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, New York.