I’m assuming that this super Pre Colombian style coca eater figure is a 20th century copy but would welcome your thoughts.
John, as usual, I can add nothing helpful to your query but... To my eye, that piece appears to be too good to be true. Debora
Beautiful-it looks good to me.Of course,after watching so many hours of 'Fake or Fortune' & hundreds of archaeology documentaries i'm suspicious of everything. PS-John,you share wonderfully varied stuff with us-may I ask,do you collect or sell a broad range of things ? Sorry for my incorrigible nosiness.
AJ-You've looked at & handled many ethno-antiquities since you were a kid,can you tutor me on what clues to look for on a good repro ? Thanks for any tips or 'tells' you can share.
Bosko, please remind me in a couple of weeks time. I would love to help, but I'm not up to explaining much at the moment.
I sell about ten items a week on eBay. I specialise in ceramics (which I know most about) but I buy at auction and often end up with other items when buying mixed lots. I bought this figure in a mixed lot which included three paperweights, a perfume bottle, a Spode saucer and a Ridgway cup and saucer. I'm usually just wanting one of the items in a mixed lot but this time I wanted the figure and the Spode and Ridgway. I give a lot of pieces from mixed lots to the local Charity Shop most weeks as anything worth less than say £15 isn't worth the effort of selling online.
Almost certainly a recent reproduction. Such figures are known as "coqueros" (coca-chewers), and were made by the pre-Columbian Capulí culture (c. 800-1500) located in the regions of southern Colombia (Nariño) and northern Ecuador (Carchi). They are believed to depict high ranking individuals, indicated by their sitting on stools, and may be shamans. Capuli pottery is typically covered with red slip and burnished/polished before firing. Subsequent to firing, it was decorated with what is referred to as resist or negative painted designs. In one technique, areas that were to become black were painted with plant resins, and areas that were to remain red were temporarily covered with a slip or other resist material. The pot was then held over a fire, which caused the resin to burn and penetrate the clay surface. The protective resist material was then removed to reveal the contrasting original red surface. The dark designs on genuine Capuli pottery tend to have soft edges, and may show more wear as the resin paint is more fragile. The surface of your figure does not appear well polished/burnished, and the black decoration looks more like a dark clay slip. I have also noticed that (most-likely) genuine coqueros often have a hole in the top of their head. This feature is often not shown in photographs, and so might be missed by those reproducing the form. As with many pre-Columbian ceramics, determining authenticity of such figures is complicated by the fact that most on the market have no archeological provenance. And such unique and rare objects become popular, which encourages reproductions. Here is a coquero in my collection, which I would like to think is authentic:
