4 Narino Miniature Buff-Ware Jars, Punctate Bridge Form

A quartet of miniature buff-ware jars, each thrown by hand into a full, near-spherical body that rises to a short neck and a sharply everted rim. Three carry plain collars; the fourth is the outlier, its shoulder pierced with a row of punctate dots and its mouth spanned by twin strap handles, a bridge form favored for suspension or cordage. The surfaces are burnished to a soft sheen, the pale slip broken by ochre clouding and fire blooms from open, uncontrolled firing. Vessels of this compact scale are typical of highland Narino domestic and mortuary assemblages, where small ollas held coca lime, pigment, chicha, or offerings interred with the dead. Their appeal lies in economy of profile: no painted register, no modeled figure, only volume, stance, and the record of the flame. The Narino (also written Nariño, and shared across the modern Colombia and Ecuador frontier with the closely related Carchi tradition) occupied the high inter-Andean basins of the far southwest. Their ceramic corpus is best known for the negative-resist Capuli and Piartal styles, whose black-on-red spirals and stepped frets have long dominated the market, yet the great bulk of excavated material is undecorated utility ware of exactly this kind: burnished monochrome ollas, cantaros, and cuencos built by coiling, scraped thin, and fired in shallow pits. Shaft tombs in the region regularly yield such plain vessels stacked beside their painted counterparts, a reminder that the same potters produced both registers. The double-handled example warrants separate attention. Bridged and lugged mouths recur in Andean small wares because they allowed a vessel to be slung from a carrying net or a belt, keeping a portion of lime, resin, or pigment mobile. The punctate collar is decoration reduced to its cheapest possible gesture: a fingernail or reed impressed once, repeated around the shoulder before the clay stiffened. Item # 204278

Estimate:$225

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