Jalisco Sheep-Face Musicians Turtle Shell Drum, Male Female Pair

Pre-Columbian, West Mexico, Jalisco, ca. 100 BCE – 250 CE. A pair of burnished redware musicians caught mid-performance. The taller male kneels with a large turtle-shell drum, its shell incised and painted in white geometric bands, held against his left side while his raised right hand grips a striker. Both figures wear the classic sheep-face profile of the Jalisco tradition: elongated crania under tall coiled headbands, needle noses, pointed ears, and broad disc earspools. White slip picks out beaded necklaces, body dots, and the smaller female's striped and dotted wraparound skirt; she cradles a smaller drum in her left hand. Modeled solid in fine red-slipped clay with a lustrous burnish, such couples were placed in shaft tombs, where musicians and dancers likely accompanied the deceased in perpetual ceremony. Size: 9.25" H (23.5 cm H); 6.5" H (16.5 cm H).

The "sheep-face" designation is a collector's shorthand for the Jalisco Ameca-Etzatlan style, whose figures share a long muzzle-like profile, coffee-bean eyes, and cranial deformation exaggerated by the tall banded cap. They belong to the shaft-tomb horizon of West Mexico, a mortuary tradition shared by Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima in which deep vertical shafts led to lateral chambers furnished with ceramic households: warriors, ballplayers, dogs, dwellings, and above all musicians. Percussion assemblies of this kind, turtle-shell drums struck with a bone or antler beater, gourd rattles, and conch trumpets, are documented across Mesoamerica into the Colonial period, the carapace instrument surviving in Maya and Nahua ritual long after these figures were buried.

Male and female pairs are a recurring convention in the shaft-tomb repertoire, generally read as complementary halves of a lineage or household rather than as portraits of named individuals.

Provenance: Private New England collection. Ex. Meza Family collection, Whittier, Ca., 1950’s - 1960’s.

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Item #

73037

Condition
Scattered mineral deposits on the red-brown slip surface. Both figures have scattered repairs, some restoration and areas of resurfacing.

Buyer's Premium
30%