Nayarit Bichrome Bowl & Chupicuaro Tripod Vessel

Pre-Columbian, West Mexico, Nayarit and Chupicuaro. A pair of hand-built earthenware bowls from western Mexico, each a study in restraint. The larger, attributed to Nayarit, flares from a flat base to an everted rim, its buff exterior banded in iron-red slip and carried around by a stepped-fret meander, that angular scroll motif whose terraced geometry recurs across Mesoamerican ceramic and architectural ornament alike. The interior is left plain save for a red-slipped lip. Its companion, in the Chupicuaro manner, is a shallow tripod dish, wholly coated in burnished red slip and raised on three short conical supports, the profile broken by a crisp exterior ridge below the rim. Both forms served domestic and mortuary purposes, vessels of this class recovered in quantity from West Mexican shaft-tomb and cemetery contexts as offerings accompanying the dead. Chupicuaro takes its name from a village on the Lerma River in Guanajuato, drowned in the 1940s by the Solis reservoir after salvage excavation exposed hundreds of burials. The cemetery yielded the polished red and red-on-buff wares now synonymous with the culture, along with the tripod supports that became one of its signatures. Nayarit belongs to the neighboring shaft-tomb tradition of Mexico's western coast, where chambers cut deep beneath the ground held the dead alongside figures, jars, and bowls. The stepped fret shared between these traditions, sometimes read as a stylized cloud, mountain, or serpent, is among the most durable design elements in Mesoamerica, surviving from Preclassic pottery into the mosaic facades of Mitla more than a millennium later. Item # 204191

Estimate:$250

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