Incised Jar
Unknown Marajoara artist, Marajó Island, Brazil. Incised Jar, 400–1300 CE. Slip-painted ceramic, 16 ¾ x 11 ⅜ inches. Denver Art Museum Collection: Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2006.15.
Jar
About A.D. 400–1300
Brazil, Marajó Island
Earthenware with colored slips
Gift of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2006.15A&B
Much of Marajó Island, located at the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil, is flooded during each year’s rainy season. The island’s inhabitants built large earthen mounds to elevate their homes, ceremonial areas and cemeteries above the floodwaters. Marajó people manufactured elaborately decorated ceramics for use as burial urns, storage and serving vessels, stools, and female public covers.
This large jar may have served as a burial container for cleaned human bones, or it may have stored food and beverages for elite or ceremonial usage. The decoration, carved through the red-slipped surface, is intricate. Two repeats of two motifs alternate around the vessel’s cylindrical body, their complex boundaries interlocking with one another. One motif consists of a vertically oriented creature with two rectangular heads and a long, slender body. The other motif incorporates a central square from which radiate two rectangular heads and two triangular heads. Aquatic creatures such as caimans, turtles and snakes were commonly carved on Marajó ceramics.