Photographer: Andrea Blumtritt | Rights management: Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International
Zoomorphic figurine vessel. Four-footed bowl with a central, hollow head protome that has a rattle ball. There are geometric incisions on the outside of the vessel wall. The object has been smoothed on both sides, slurried, primed and highly polished. The primer is partially eroded. All the feet are fragmented. The ceramic has a black-brown base colour. On the outside of the vessel wall there is a head and tail protome belonging to a zoomorphic creature. Its head is decorated with an upright snake-lizard creature with two opposing heads. They repeat the shape of the head protome. Two opposing rectangular pictorial fields appear on the other surfaces of the vessel wall, showing crosses, triangles and interlocking rectangles. The feet of the bowl were designed as zoomorphic heads. The inside of the object was left undecorated. According to Lothrop 1926: chocolate ware and black ware. Cultural significance: the date of the group requires further documentation. Lothrop links the type with his black ware, which also includes objects from the Murillo Aplicado (1520-1350d.C.) and Castillo Esgrafiado (1550-1200d.C.) groups. He associates the vessels with the black pottery reported by Oviedo, Castañeda and López de Velasco from the island of Chira in the Gulf of Nicoya (Lothrop 1926: 40). Snarskis identifies the same ware with the Murillo Aplicado type (1981: 198, photo 113). Baudez (1972: 118f.) dates a similar object between 1525 and 1200d.C. (Künne 2004)
