Nazca Double-Spout Vessel, Warrior with Trophy Heads

Pre-Columbian, Peru, Nazca, ca. 100–600 CE. A globular ceramic vessel rising to twin tapered spouts joined by a flat strap bridge, its surface burnished and painted in slip polychrome of oxblood red, cream, orange, grey and black. The principal figure is a headhunter, his face masked by a whiskered nasal ornament and framed by large disc ear spools, with two small trophy heads suspended beneath them. He grips a beheading knife in his left hand while a long serpentine appendage streams from his headdress, terminating in a perched bird. Repeating zigzag bands and a second feline or serpent creature complete the field. Such double spout and bridge bottles held liquid for ritual and mortuary use, and their imagery belongs to the martial and agricultural symbolism of the south coast. Size: 5.25" Diam x 4.5" H (13.3 cm Diam x 11.4 cm H).

Trophy-head imagery is among the most persistent themes in Nazca art, appearing on textiles, drums, and painted ceramics alike. Excavated caches from Cahuachi and the Nazca drainage have yielded human crania perforated at the forehead and fitted with carrying cords, matching the small heads painted at this warrior's ears. Whether they memorialize captured enemies or venerated ancestors remains debated, though most scholars now read them as agents of fertility, the taken head returning water and abundance to a desert valley dependent on subterranean aqueducts.

The double spout and bridge bottle is the signature closed form of the Nazca potter, inherited from the earlier Paracas tradition. Its slip paints, up to a dozen mineral colors ground and applied before firing, were burnished with a pebble to the low satin sheen visible here, a technique that distinguishes Nazca wares from the resist-decorated pottery of contemporaneous Andean cultures.

Provenance: Ex. Collection of Leo and Beatrice Drimmer, acquired in the 1960’s. To family by descent.

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Item #

73200

Condition
Some loss to the tips of the spouts, otherwise intact.

Buyer's Premium
30%