**Originally Listed At $900**

Pre-Columbian, Bolivia, Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku) / Huari (Wari), ca. 600 to 1100 CE. A fascinating pottery portrait vessel known as a kero for drinking chicha beer and featuring a stylized anthropomorphic visage of bulging annular eyes, a projecting, rounded nose, a rectangular mouth, and a jutting chin. Boasting black-on-red decoration, the beaker is skillfully painted with a series of geometric, linear, and dotted motifs. Keros were used for the consumption of chicha (corn beer) during ceremonies and everyday gatherings and played an important role in the maintenance of social and political relations. Ornate portrait keros like this example may have represented deities and were reserved for the elites of society. At the end of a chicha ceremony, each attendant lord would cast his emblematic kero into a fire in an act of sacrifice. After these embers had cooled, necklaces and bracelets of shell and stone were placed atop the ashes in a display of reverence. Size: 5.6" Diameter x 5.8" H (14.2 cm x 14.7 cm)

Human heads with distinctive facial decoration and caps were a popular motif in Huari artwork; this may relate to the use of human heads as trophy objects, or perhaps for the veneration of ancestors, a favored theme on Huari (and other Peruvian) ceramics. Some have suggested that the wearing of certain types of motifs or textile items in life (because the textiles the Huari are buried with were likely worn by the living before they were used in burial) showed rank in the complex imperial structure that the Huari created.

Provenance: ex-private Schuetz collection, Florida, USA; ex-Tony Putty Artifacts, Gwynneville, Indiana, USA, catalogued August 6, 2022; ex-Tina Burton and Dan Teubner collection

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#177530

Professionally repaired and restored with possible areas of repainting. Some light surface wear commensurate with age, but otherwise has an impressive presentation with nice pigments and decorative program.