Costa Rican Blue Jade Miniature Head Pendant, Avian Crest

Pre-Columbian, Costa Rica, ca. 500–1000 CE. A miniature human face emerges from a polished plaque of deep blue-green jade, its features reduced to the fewest possible strokes: paired incised lines for the eyes and mouth, a crisp triangular nose in low relief. Two highly stylized avian heads crown the top, beaks turned in opposite directions, with suspension holes drilled beneath them so the pendant could hang face-forward against the chest. The lapidary worked without metal tools, abrading and string-sawing the stone before bringing it to a glassy finish. Such pendants were prestige adornments, likely worn by elites and often accompanying them in burial. Presented on a custom metal cube display base. Size: 1.25" W x 1" H (3.2 cm W x 2.5 cm H).

Costa Rican jade carving flourished between roughly 300 and 800 CE, when workshops in the Atlantic Watershed, Guanacaste, and Nicoya regions produced pendants of imported and local greenstone in volumes unmatched elsewhere in lower Central America. Much of the raw material appears to have moved south along trade routes from the Motagua Valley of Guatemala, the only confirmed source of true jadeite in Mesoamerica, though local serpentines and other blue-green stones were worked interchangeably. The avian motif is the region's signature: bird-form pendants, from fully modeled raptors to abstractions as spare as the paired beaks seen here, dominate the corpus and are generally read as shamanic or lineage emblems. Costa Rican jade production had largely ceased by about 800 CE, displaced by gold, whose arrival from the south reoriented the entire vocabulary of elite ornament.

Provenance: Collection of Jimmy Belilty, Miami. Acquired from Latin American Artist Carlos Poveda, Caracas and Paris, 1980 - 1990.

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Item #

73117

Condition
Upper left corner cleanly reattached, otherwise intact.

Buyer's Premium
30%