Moche Carved Wood Lime Container, Panpipe Player with Jaguar Lid

Pre-Columbian, North Coast Peru, Moche. A carved wooden lime container, sometimes called a poporo, in the form of a musician seated on folded legs with a fitted stopper crowned by a standing jaguar. He grips a panpipe to his lips, with crosshatching across its binding and holes at the top of each tube. Below it a small incised mouth curves into a contented smile. Shell inlays sit in his round eyes, and his tall, box-like headdress is set with a cream nacre chevron, iridescent side panels, and a band of purple and orange shell, the orange likely Spondylus. The container's neck rises from his back, where diagonal bands of incised scrolls echo Moche textile patterns. The jaguar stands on a zigzag-banded collar with alert ears and wide eyes. Containers like this likely held the powdered lime chewed with coca leaves. In the Andes, coca leaves were chewed with a pinch of alkaline lime, usually made by burning and grinding seashells. The lime releases the leaf's active alkaloids, so the container and its dipping implement became paraphernalia of status and ritual. Moche artists showed coca chewers often, usually with a small lime gourd and stick, and treated the vessels as objects for display as well as use. The panpipe (antara) is one of the instruments Moche artists portrayed most often. Painted and modeled ceramics show players in procession and in ceremonial scenes, sometimes in pairs, and actual clay panpipes survive from burials. Pairing a musician with a jaguar, the predator most closely tied to Andean ideas of power, joins two well-established themes from the north coast repertoire. Item # 205583

Estimate:£454.04

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