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Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Porcelain & Pottery / Hopewell Pottery Jar - Incised Crested Wave Motif
Native American, Hopewell culture. A globular earthenware jar rises to a short, everted rim, its rounded body swelling generously before tapering to a compact base. The buff-to-grey surface, mottled by firing, carries a band of incised ornament: sweeping curvilinear scrolls that curl into crested, wave-like volutes, their interiors filled with fine roughened hatching that catches the light against the burnished ground. The vessel was likely coil-built and paddled, then finished by hand, its plastic decoration cut into leather-hard clay. Utilitarian jars of this type served domestic ends, holding foodstuffs, water, or seed, yet the deliberate rhythmic motif suggests attention to form beyond mere function. The fluid, interlocking scrollwork belongs to a woodland aesthetic vocabulary in which curvilinear design carried enduring symbolic resonance across the Ohio Valley. The Hopewell tradition (roughly 200 BCE to 500 CE) was not a single people but a widespread cultural and exchange network centered on the Ohio and Illinois river valleys, famed for monumental earthworks and an extraordinary interregional trade in exotic raw materials: obsidian from the Rockies, mica from the Appalachians, copper from the Great Lakes, marine shell from the Gulf. Curvilinear scroll and wave motifs recur across Hopewell material culture, incised on ceramics and carved on stone, and are thought to encode cosmological ideas about water, movement, and the ordering of the world. Item # 202954
Estimate:$400
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPorcelain & Pottery
Estimate:
$400
RÖRSTRAND. MAT, KAFFE-OCH TESERVIS. "SWEDISH GRACE", 99 DELAR.
09/29/2026
$149.86
Est: $200.78
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MEDLEM AV SVENSKA BYGDEKVARNARNAS RIKSFÖRBUND, emaljskylt.
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$54.94
Est: $80.31
TERRIN på FOT, porslin, "Perlrand", Rosenthal, Tyskland.
09/29/2026
$34.96
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SIGVARD BERNADOTTE (SVERIGE, 1907–2002). Kaffekoppar med fat, 8 st
09/29/2026
$149.86
Est: $250.98
