Photographer: Andrea Blumtritt | Rights management: Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International
Heavily fragmented bowl with a hollow base, protruding wall and broad, flattened lip. There are several central protomes on the wall that belong to an avimorphic creature. They also served as handles. The object has been smoothed, slurried, primed and polished on both sides. Its exterior was painted. The primer and paint are heavily eroded. The restored vessel has several fractures. The ceramic has a white-yellowish base colour, which is painted red and black on the outside of the vessel. The rim is decorated with a red band. There are six trapezoidal pictorial fields on the wall, which lie between two surrounding red bands. They show lines, dots, triangles and trapezoids applied with black paint and thin lines. The panels alternate with sectors that have painted sculptural applications. The interior of the object remains undecorated. Symbolic meaning: Holmes (1888: 183) and MacCurdy (1911) refer to discs, trapezoids and squares with dots in the centre as scale or alligator motifs. However, the same decorations also occur in other animal groups. According to Holmes 1888: alligator ware. According to Lehmann: Chiriquí style. Cultural significance: Stone (1958: 48) reports that objects of this type were associated with iron objects in a burial. She therefore assumes that these ceramics were still being produced in the Diquís region (Pacífico Sur) after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. (Künne 2004)
