Description
This bowl shows a staff-bearing feline, likely a puma, repeated many times around the surface of the bowl. At the center, an eight-pointed star, broken into four directions, may represent a stylized image of the known world and its cardinal directions. Pumas, as some of the most powerful predators of the Americas, were highly important in the mythology of the Andes, and this likely has a meaning not well-understood today.
Dishes on short, ring-shaped bases were common in the Nariño region straddling the border between Ecuador and Colombia. They were carefully shaped, burnished (carefully polished with a stone), and painted with different colors of slip, a thinned out clay. Many of the Nariño vessels show highly abstracted patterns, like this one.
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