**Originally Listed At $500**

Pre-Columbian, Costa Rica, Diquis, ca. 1000 to 1450 CE. A hand-carved and string cut stone figure representing a standing shaman in a trance-like state. The peg base male figure carved with delineated fingers and toes, broad squared shoulders, face with rounded chin, smiling lips, a pronounced nose, very large bulging lunate eyes, and a headband fitted coiffure in tan-grey basalt. Diquis stone sculptures like this example are admired for their abstract, geometric yet figural style. Size: 9.375" H (23.8 cm); 9.625" H (24.4 cm) on included custom stand.

About a very similar piece in the Denver Art Museum, their curatorial team writes, " This rigidly frontal sculpture likely once stood atop a chiefly house mound or in the plaza of a town in the Diquís region of southern Pacific Costa Rica. Both male and female figures, always nude, were carved and displayed. Archaeologist Michael Snarskis believed that this example represents a prisoner destined for sacrifice. If so, the sculpture was likely commissioned by a victorious chief and displayed as a symbol of dominance. Stone sphere sculptures carved of hard volcanic stone also served to mark architectural spaces in Diquís sites." (http://denverartmuseum.org/collections/pre-columbian-art)

You may be familiar with Diquis spheres, perhaps the best-known stone sculptures from this area which range in size from a few centimeters to over 2 meters in diameter and were sculpted from gabbro, a coarse-grained type of basalt. First "discovered" in the 1930s when the United Fruit Company was clearing the jungle to establish banana plantations, many were damaged in the process. What's more, legends of hidden gold motivated workers to drill holes in the spheres and blow them up with sticks of dynamite. By the 1940s, legitimate investigation was conducted by Samuel Kirkland Lothrop of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. As recently as 2010, University of Kansas researcher John Hoopes visited the site with the intention of evaluating the area's eligibility for protection as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Countless legends surround Las Bolas including the myth that they come from Atlantis or that the indigenous possessed a poison that was able to soften the rock. According to the cosmogony of the Bribri, these stone spheres are in fact Tara's cannon balls. Tara or Tlatchque, god of thunder, according to the native's legend, used a giant blowpipe to shoot the balls at the Serkes, gods of winds and hurricanes, to force them out of these regions. Perhaps peg figures like this example are associated with the mythical legends surrounding these bolas.

Provenance: private New York, New York, USA collection; ex-lifetime collection of Dr. Saul Tuttman and Dr. Gregory Siskind, New York, USA

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#137540

Normal surface wear commensurate with age. Nice earthen deposits grace the surface. Old inventory number written in black ink on back of peg.