Effigy

About Effigies

An effigy is a sculpture or model of an animal or person. Effigies have a long history among southwestern Native Americans. Effigies include everything from pottery that explicitly resembles a human or an actual animal to pottery that only references a part or parts of a human or an animal in its shape to creations of creatures that are absolutely wild and whimsical.

In Nevada, near the Humboldt Sink (where the Humboldt River disappears into the desert sands), a group of guano miners working in Lovelock Cave in 1911 exposed some ancient artifacts while they were digging. Shortly after the miners left, some archaeologists arrived and started poking around and digging, too. They weren't much better educated in the practices of archaeological digging than the guano miners were but they did save almost everything they found. It was more than a decade after those archaeologists investigated the cave that other archaeologists dug a bit deeper in the back of the cave and found a bundle of eleven duck decoys, all woven of local reeds more than 2,300 years ago. Some were painted, some were decorated with feathers, some weren't finished yet.

Effigies have been found in Mayan ruins, Aztec ruins, the ruins of Teotihuacan, the ruins near Valdivia in Ecuador, the ruins of the pyramid-building cultures in Peru and ruins near the Caribbean coast in Colombia. There were many effigies found in the ruins of Paquimé, too.

Photo of the duck decoy courtesy of the Autry Museum, CCA-by-SA 3.0 License.

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