Three Nicoya Incised Redware Bowls

Pre-Columbian, Costa Rica, Nicoya (Greater Nicoya, Guanacaste). A trio of hand-built earthenware bowls, each a compressed globe of burnished buff-to-terracotta clay, the walls drawn inward to a plain unthickened rim. Decoration is restrained and confident: shallow incised arcs and hatched panels sweep across the shoulders, the lines still holding traces of pale slip or mineral encrustation that throws them into relief against the warmer body. The largest is the shallowest and widest, the two smaller examples more sharply shouldered. Vessels of this class served domestic and mortuary purposes alike in the Greater Nicoya sphere, where such plain-to-incised wares accompanied the more familiar polychromes in burial assemblages. The economy of the ornament, a few strokes placed exactly where the eye follows the curve, is characteristic of the potters of the Guanacaste peninsula. Greater Nicoya, spanning the Guanacaste province of northwestern Costa Rica and the Pacific shore of Nicaragua, was one of the most productive ceramic provinces of the Intermediate Area. Its workshops are best known for elaborate polychromes (Papagayo, Vallejo, Mora), but the same communities produced large quantities of monochrome and incised utilitarian wares, coil-built without the wheel, smoothed with a pebble or gourd rib, and fired in open bonfires that left the mottled fire-clouding often visible on the exteriors. Incised decoration of this kind, cut into leather-hard clay before firing, is a shorthand vocabulary rather than a narrative one, and it persisted across centuries with remarkable conservatism, which is one reason such bowls resist tight dating on style alone. Item # 204268

Estimate:£170.26

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