Seven Manabí Pottery Beads - Five Bird Effigies and Two Spindle Whorls

Pre-Columbian, Ecuador, Manabí. A group of seven hand-modeled pottery beads: five bird effigies and two spindle whorls. The birds are built as compact silhouettes, each with a rounded head, a raised tail, and a punched circular eye. Three are fired to a warm orange terracotta, and one has a row of impressed plumage marks along the wing. Two smoky gray birds come from a reduced firing. Each bird is pierced through the body for stringing. The whorls are squat and pierced at the center. One is reddish with incised scrolls and bands filled with white. The other is dark and decorated with incised concentric rings. Spindle whorls weighted the shafts used to spin cotton thread. Pierced ceramic forms like these may also have been worn as beads, so they suit a strand as well as a spindle. Manabí, on the central coast of Ecuador, holds one of the longest ceramic sequences in the Americas. Valdivia, Machalilla, Chorrera, Bahía, Jama-Coaque, and Manteño potters all worked in the region. Small clay ornaments and tools, including beads, whistles, stamps, and spindle whorls, were made there in large numbers. The spindle whorl was the working part of a drop spindle. Fitted near the base of a wooden shaft, it added weight and momentum so the spinner could twist cotton fiber into thread. Cotton cloth was an important trade good on the Ecuadorian coast. Decorated whorls are among the most common small finds from late coastal sites. Their incised geometric motifs, often filled with white pigment, show that potters decorated even the most ordinary tools. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 205806

Estimate:£92.99

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