(Please note: The images in this article are of replicas. The pot and plate shown have never had contact with human remains, and no actual funereal artifacts will ever be shown on our website.)

Long-billed birds peck at a coiled rattlesnake and a Mexican Earth Monster dashes towards the afterlife on a prehistoric Hohokam bowl and plate Sharon Urban (AKA Shurban) found as a graduate student. “They’re the most exciting artifacts I’ve discovered,” She said of the cremation vessels. 

“It was August and hot. Too hot for me to dig for fear of passing out.” Shurban and other members of the Arizona State Museum’s Highway Salvage Section were surveying a section of the proposed I-19 highway right-of-way, two miles south of San Xavier Mission during the summer of 1965. “I was wandering the desert, aimlessly, searching for anything when I found the exposed upside down portion of the bowl.”  She ran to tell the crew leader of her find.  “They wouldn’t let me dig it up,” she said.  “They thought I was too inexperienced.” 

“I knew what is was the moment I saw it, I just didn’t know how unique it was.”  Further excavation revealed an intact bowl sitting upside down over a plate. “The plate was cracked, but all the pieces were there.” At first the dirt-covered find didn’t illicit jaw-dropping expressions from her fellow archeologists but after it was cleaned:  “Oh-wow,” was what everybody said. 

On the face of the 14-inch diameter red plate is a beige Mexican Earth Monster, “a cross between a coati-mundi and a road runner. It has a long curved bill or beak with two ears or feathers sticking up, a long neck, and four legs with toes on its feet.” And while the monster has been found carved into shells, this is the only known pottery example. The artwork on the bowl is one of a kind. A coiled rattlesnake, with a triangular head and two eyes, rests within the six-inch diameter bowl. Sixteen long-billed birds, of various sizes, surrounded the snake and peck at it.  “There are no other examples like it anywhere,” Shurban said. 

Unfortunately, nobody knows what the elaborate designs mean or the history of the plate and bowl. “They may have been made especially for a cremation, but that is only a possibility. We don’t really know.” 

But we do know a little bit about the person that was buried in them. The bowl contained cremation remains of a 45-year old man, and dated to the 1200s, according to Walter Birkby, a forensic anthropologist who analyzed the vessel’s contents.  Cremation was a common practice among the Hohokam.  On method of disposing of the remains after burning was scraping the ash and bone pieces into a bowl and inverting it over a plate, then burying the lot in a pit.  

The cremation vessel “caused a stir,” Shurban said.  “Everybody came to see it.” The bowl and plate became one of the Arizona State Museum’s most important artifacts.  They have been featured in several books (The Hohokam Millennium (2007), The Hohokam Desert Farmers and Craftsmen: Excavations at Snaketown, 1964-1965 (1976)) and replicas have been produced.  “The fake ones contain scheit, a florescent mineral, so archeologists can tell the difference.” 

The bowl and plate remained at the Museum for many years, stored with other pottery.  “In deference to the Native Americans, they couldn’t be displayed because of their religious connotation.”  In the 1990s they were re-patriated with the Tohono O’Odham Nation, and are now stored in their facility in Sells, Arizona. 

“Finding such unique artifacts boosted my status, at least for a little while” Shurban said.  “They let me dig after that.”