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Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Ethnographical / Mississippian Pottery Bottle with Four Modeled Faces, Effigy Vessel
Native American, Mississippian culture. A globular earthenware jug rising to a tall, slightly flaring neck, its swelling shoulder punctuated by four modeled faces set at the cardinal points. Each visage is rendered with economy: small applied lugs pinched into brows and noses, with shallow punctations marking eyes and mouths, lending the vessel the watchful quality of a sentinel circling its own circumference. The clay reads in muted gray and warm earth tones, the surface scumbled with fine pitting and the soft abrasions of long burial. Hand-built and likely shell-tempered in the manner characteristic of late Mississippian potters of the central and lower Mississippi Valley, the form belongs to a long tradition of effigy vessels in which the jar itself becomes a body, a head, or a gathering of spirits. Four-faced jars are uncommon and resonant: the cardinal arrangement evokes directional cosmology, with each face perhaps acknowledging a quarter of the world, a wind, or an ancestral presence. Such vessels likely accompanied feasting, ritual libation, or interment, mediating between the living community and the powers that sustained it. The Mississippian tradition, flourishing across the Southeast and Midwest from roughly the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, produced some of the most sophisticated ceramic sculpture north of Mesoamerica. This jug, modest in pretension yet deliberate in its quadripartite gaze, carries the quiet authority of that legacy. Item # 203142
Estimate:£227.02
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Hammer price:
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Estimate:
£227.02
OCT 23 | 8:00 AM
OCT 27 | 4:00 PM
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Get listed now£405
Est: £405
![[ TRIBAL - NATIVE AMERICAN ] NORTHWEST COAST WOOD TOTEMS AND RAVEN](https://barnebys2.imgix.net/41/2006/09/PQWC53WO5Q/PQWC53WO5Q_B7C45C0540?auto=format&w=3840&q=75)
[ TRIBAL - NATIVE AMERICAN ] NORTHWEST COAST WOOD TOTEMS AND RAVEN
09/16/2006
£1,026.37
£0.84
OCT 17 | 10:00 PM
