Storage jar

For several centuries around the time of the beginning of the Common Era, artists on Peru’s South Coast developed a striking style of ceramics featuring a colorful palette achieved with post-fire paints, known as Paracas (see, for example, MMA 1979.206.1148). Combining mostly mineral pigments with a binding agent, artists created paints that were applied on the surface of the pottery post firing (Kriss et al., 2018). At a time when most ceramics in the Central Andes were of muted colors, the Paracas palette was a significant innovation. Some designs in Paracas pottery derived from earlier traditions in the north, such as Cupisnique and Chavín, while others were specific to the Ica region, including a figure dubbed the Oculate Being by contemporary scholars (see, for example, MMA 63.232.79 and 1976.287.32).

This jar shows an imaginative composition combining two-dimensional imagery with a modeled bird head. A similar jar (MMA 1974.123.2) completes the set, but with the bird head facing in the opposite direction. The vessel is divided into two sections around its widest circumference. The bottom part was left undecorated while the upper hemisphere was covered with a complex scene. Looking from above, two beings with a human-like face and a fish-like body float or swim around the jar’s mouth. Each of these beings carries a disembodied head. The bird emerges from the vessel’s opening, holds another disembodied head, and is rendered as viewed from above. This scene, which recreates a watery world, may refer to the liquids that were once contained in the jar’s interior while offering a glimpse of how supernatural beings (perhaps deified ancestors), who appear floating or flying in other compositions, see the world from the heavens.

Hugo C. Ikehara-Tsukayama, Senior Research Associate, Arts of the Ancient Americas, 2023

References and Further Reading

Carmichael, Patrick H. “Nasca Origins and Paracas Progenitors.” Ñawpa Pacha, Journal of Andean Archaeology, vol. 36, no 2 (2016): 53-94.

García, Rubén. “Puerto Nuevo y los orígenes de la tradición estilístico-religiosa Paracas.” Boletín de Arqueología PUCP, no. 13 (2011): 187-207.

Ikehara-Tsukayama Hugo C., Dawn Kriss, and Joanne Pillsbury. “Containing the Divine: Ancient Peruvian Pots.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin Vol. 80, Number 4 (Spring 2023). “Containing the Divine: Ancient Peruvian Pots.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin vol. 80, no 4 (Spring 2023).

Kriss, Dawn, et al. "A Material and Technical Study of Paracas Painted Ceramics." Antiquity vol. 92, no. 366 (2018): 1492-510. Menzel, Dorothy, John H. Rowe, and Lawrence E. Dawson. The Paracas Pottery of Ica: A Study in Style and Time. The University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 50. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1964.

Unkel, Ingmar, Bernd Kromer, Markus Reindel, Lukas Wacker, and Günther Wagner. "A Chronology of the Pre-Columbian Paracas and Nasca Cultures in South Peru Based on AMS 14C Dating." Radiocarbon vol. 49, no. 2 (2007), pp. 551–64.