Yesterday our niece Stacey drove up from Tempe to visit us. She arrived around noon and we went to a local cafe for lunch: the Old Town Red Rooster Cafe. They specialize in organic and locally grown foods - mostly very-affordable sandwiches, salads and soups. We sat in their outside patio in 75 degree sunny weather and we thoroughly enjoyed!

Wisely we all ordered either half a sandwich or a mini.

After lunch we wandered around Old Town for a while peeking into wine tasting rooms and shops then returned to the RV park. We hiked up to the lower portion of the 13th century pueblo on the ridge just above our trailer.

Both Stacey and Sharon proved they have eagle eyes because they both spotted a few of the very rare decorated pottery sherds. The site is covered with 10s of thousands of sherds, most of which are the locally made undecorated gray, red and brown wares. Some are very thick and come from very large ollas used for storage of water and bulk farmed foods (e.g., corn, beans, squash, amaranth, etc). Thinner gray and red wares were used for food cooking, serving and some storage. They were made from the 9th into the 14th centuries but disappeared as people began abandoning the Verde Valley. Apparently only one type of locally made ware was decorated: Prescott Black-on-gray made from A.D. 800 - 1400 and we observed a few sherds of this type.We have seen three sherds of this type that seem to represent the range of quality - from fairly fine ware to quite crude.  All images of pottery below are copied from the internet (mostly from the Museum of Northern Arizona website) and are not the sherds that we have observed.

A nicely made Prescott Gray with black linear decoration

in the inside of the rim.

A more crudely made Prescott Black-on-gray bowl.

We also observed a few sherds of some beautifully and finely made yellow and orange ware that were decorated with black lines and designs. These apparently represent imported trade wares (mostly bowls) probably used for serving food at special occasions and/or for important people (perhaps like today's fine china). We observed two types: Jeddito Black-on-yellow and Tuwiuca Black-on-orange.

The above is Jeddito Black-on-yellow (which appears to be the same type as Awatovi Black-on-yellow) which dates to A.D. 1325 - 1600 (and later according to some information) and was made on Second Mesa in Northeastern Arizona. This dates to the last few generations of people who occupied the large pueblos in the Verde Valley and after the local abandonment. One sherd observed here at the RV park site appears to have a portion of an animal design (the back and partial head with backward sloping antlers or horns - the sherd is too small to tell for sure). This type of pottery does rarely exhibit animal motifs but nothing like this one (at least what is available on the internet). Looking at other Southwestern decorated pottery we see many animal designs on types like the Mimbres which originates many hundreds of miles away in Central and Southern New Mexico.

Every Mimbres example like the one above with backward sloping horns is interpreted as a Bighorn Sheep. It seems possible that what we see on the RV park example are floppy ears of a rabbit or dog, but every example of  rabbits and dogs that we can find show ears that point straight up. So it is a wild guess that what is illustrated is a desert bighorn and maps of the prehistoric distribution of bighorns include all of Arizona (although there are no surviving herds in Eastern and Northeastern Arizona today).

We have also observed a rim sherd of  Tuwiuca Black-on-orange like the one above which dates to A.D. 1260 - 1350, so it overlaps the later half of the occupation of the Verde Valley pueblos. It was made a little south of Second Mesa near the current Petrified Forest National Park in Eastern Arizona (which you may remember from our blog last year is filled with prehistoric pueblos). Decorations on the Tuwiuca and the Jeddito seem very similar - mostly angular patterns of lines. One very common element in both types is a broad black line just under the rim on the inside of shallow bowls - there are two examples from the RV park site that are rim sherds exhibiting this (one is a Jettito and the other is the Tuwiuca). The difference between the two types is not only the color but the complete absence of temper (sand mixed into the clay to add strength) in the Jeddito and the presence of a very fine sand temper in the Tuwiuca.

So the above is probably much more than you wanted to know (or read) about some of the pottery we have observed on the RV park site. But this blog serves also as our diary and we may want to look back during the upcoming years to what we are observing and interpreting today.