In Mande society, clay has historically been a major medium of creative expression identified with female expertise. Women’s mastery of sophisticated techniques of forming and firing clay parallels that of men’s manipulation of iron ore through smithing. Given that these gendered specializations go back as far as anyone can remember, it has been proposed that female authors produced the full array of Middle Niger ritual ceramics, including figurative representations.
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The Met's collection of art of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and North, Central, and South America comprises more than eleven thousand works of art of varied materials and types, representing diverse cultural traditions from as early as 3000 B.C.E. to the present.
