Pre-Columbian, Peru (South Coast), Paracas culture, ca. 800 to 100 BCE. A black ware bowl with low, steep sides and a broad, gently curving base. The exterior has incised and painted decorations showing a series of fierce, zoomorphic - probably serpent - faces with prominent eyes and spikes emerging from their edges. Sharing space in this register are pyramid- and mound- like motifs. Size: 8.85" W x 2.95" H (22.5 cm x 7.5 cm)

Little is known about the Paracas people, and what little we do know comes from a 1920s archaeological excavation of the Paracas Cavernas, shaft tombs containing multiple burials, many of which contained ceramics like this one, probably for holding offerings or provisioning the dead in the afterlife. Their iconography is linear and stylistic, based on formal figures whose species, when zoomorphic, cannot be identified. Motifs on their ceramics mirror those on the textiles that they used to wrap their dead - like this serpent, with its long, narrow body, and a head at either end.

Provenance: private New York, USA Collection

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#121719

Repaired from multiple large pieces, with well done repairs that do not mar the artwork on the exterior of the bowl. Some remaining pigment.