Colima Redware Parrot Effigy Pouring Vessel

Pre-Columbian, West Mexico, Colima. A burnished earthenware vessel modeled as a perched bird, most likely a parrot, its hooked beak jutting forward above a rounded head and a compact, wedge-shaped body. Two ridged wings sit in low relief along the flanks, while a broad flaring tail sweeps up behind. The open mouth at the upper back served as the aperture for liquid. Surfaces range from warm red slip to smoky gray and dark brown, a mottled effect produced by open-pit firing and long burial. Avian effigies were placed in the deep shaft tombs of Colima alongside dogs, gourds, and human figures, perhaps as provisions or companions for the dead; birds, as travelers between earth and sky, carried particular weight in that funerary vocabulary. The ceramic traditions of Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit are known almost entirely from shaft-and-chamber tombs cut into the volcanic tuff of western Mexico, some descending more than fifteen meters before opening into lateral burial chambers. Unlike the monumental ceremonial centers of contemporaneous Mesoamerica, these societies left little standing architecture; their artistic legacy is a repertoire of hollow slip-burnished effigies. Colima potters worked a distinctive vocabulary of animal subjects, most famously the plump hairless dog (xoloitzcuintli), but also ducks, parrots, armadillos, iguanas, crabs, and squashes. The parrot, with its noisy sociability and brilliant plumage, was valued across Mesoamerica for feathers used in elite regalia, and its appearance in tomb assemblages likely carried associations with solar and celestial imagery. Item # 204934

Estimate:£226.06

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