The Costa Rican Ceramics Exhibit

MENU: [ Home ] [ Belize Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Costa Rica Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ El Salvador Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Guatemala Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Honduras Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Nicaragua Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Panama Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ]

In Costa Rica three major archaeological areas have been defined, and they are: El Gran Nicoya (see below) in which you can find the sub-region of Guanacaste; The Central Region divided between the Pacific and Atlantic sub-region; and the El Gran Chiriquí that includes the sub-region Diquís.

In the three regions it is worth highlighting the jade and other green stones, the ceremonial metates, large stone balls, and the pottery as the main part of the funeral furnishings. With the jade they produced the so-called hachas gods (celts / small axes) that were pendants with animal and human motifs. In terms of pottery, at the beginning they used the color red and the natural color of the clay itself separated by engraved lines, then later on developed elaborate polychrome.

They were excellent goldsmiths, they produced beautiful ornaments in the form of birds and other animals such as frogs, lizards and cats. Human representations have also been found with animal masks and sticks or musical instruments, these elements being related to shamanic art.  To view Costa Rican and other Pre-columbian Gold click here

They also used the so-called Pintaderas or Sellos (ceramic stamps / seals - see below) that were used to paint designs on the human body. The most common designs were geometric figures and representations of human and animal figures. The body painting was not only used for making the body more beautiful but also it aimed to communicate ideas and beliefs, and their tribal group. The pigments were most likely vegetable and it seems that in the Gran Nicoya they also used a mixture of blood with ash.

The Atlantic Watershed of Costa Rica was home to a succession of little-understood cultures. Their art, however, has come down to us in many forms, and despite being heavily influenced from both north and south, has several unique types, such as the La Selva tripod pots and the stone metate, or grinding stones.

Large tripod vessels with openwork legs are characteristic of the La Selva style.

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

North Carolina Museum Of Art

Greenville Art Museum

Large jar with three tall, human effigy supports, each wearing a different type of hat. Typically, this kind of hollow support contained a clay or stone ball that rattled when the vessel was moved. These supports, however, were broken and the pellet was lost. The jar's body is embellished with three different faces of modeled clay, two of which are humanoid and one is zoomorphic with a long snout. Appended to the edge of the jar's rim are three, small, modeled human faces with large noses, each wearing circular ear ornaments.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Private Collection

Private Collection

Tripod dish with hollow supports modeled in the form of a stylized zoomorph (peccary?). The dish's interior is slipped red with cream-painted geometric designs on the rim. The exterior and supports are painted red with cream-painted geometric motifs. A stylized, modeled zoomorph is attached to the exterior wall.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Bowl with flaring rim and three large, mammiform supports. Post-fire incised motifs on the bowl's exterior conposed of two parallel lines topped by triangles embellished with three parallel lines inside each form.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jar with tall (16 cm) tripod supports. Each support is embellished with a modeled rendering of a lizard or saurian with long tail and three small spikes on its back and three on the top of its head. The base of the jar's tall, outflaring neck is decorated with a wide, incised band of parallel lines broken at regular intervals by a wider incised, vertical line. Three appliquéd nubbins are attached to the body of the jar between the supports. Extensive fire-clouding on the sides of the jar and the upper parts of the supports.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Barbier-Mueller Pre-Colombian Art Museum

Denver art museum

Zoomorphic Double Headed - Rattle Vessel - 18cm H x 26.5cm L Science Museum of Minnesota

Costa Rica
Birmani Style Ceramics

Ceramics in the Birmania style began to be made close to 1,000 years ago in northwestern Costa Rica. They are distinguished by animal shapes, often four-legged with two heads on opposite sides and a bowl on top. Realistic features and abstract designs are painted in clay slips of several colors on a light background. Pieces like this one with tilted jaguar heads have been found in elaborate graves. Did it have a function in a ritual involving food or drink or the burning of incense? Was it possessed by a chief who obtained it through ceremonial trade? In this case we don't know the significance to the people who made and used it. Ceramics found in residential areas, presumably for everyday use, are much simpler and sturdier.

The Diquis culture was located in the southwestern part of Costa Rica. The culture arose around 600 and declined about 1100.  These include Tarrago Biscuit wares and Buenos Aires Polychrome objects.

Logan Museum Collection

A detail of one of the handles reveals the simplicity of the figure, and the attention to details such as the toes.

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Small bowl with tall, tripod supports modeled and incised in the form of stylized fish. Each hollow support contains a single clay pellet that rattles when the vessel is moved. Two handles, each composed of two clay coils twisted together, are attached to the rim and sides of the bowl. Encircling the bowl's shoulder are two incised lines flanking a single discontinuous, incised line. The rolled rim is painted red as are the lower parts of the supports and the exterior bottom of the bowl.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Small jar with outflaring rim and traces of red-brown slip on the jar's rim interior. The clay body is characteristically gritty and has inclusions of small nodules of red iron oxide. Two small, loop handles extend from the rim to the shoulder of the jar. Each is modeled in the form of a seated humanoid figure with "coffee bean"-shaped eyes. Each figure holds an elongated, bulbous object against his/her abdomen, the narrow end touching his/her mouth.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Banco Central Collection

Banco Central Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Banco Central Collection

Private Collection

Costa Rican Jade Museum

The Gran Nicoya culture was centered in the north- western part of Costa Rica from around 600 to 1100 AD. During this period numerous ceramic styles developed.

Earthenware, light reddish clay body under a pale orange slip, burnished with red and black paint, Guanacaste-Nicoya zone, Period V/VI (AD 500-1500), 4" diameter.

Also visit GranNicoya.com

(Lower Image) This detail of one of the tripod feet of the vessel above demonstrates the great skill employed in its production.

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

North Carolina Museum Of Art

Cleveland Museum of Art

During the last few centuries prior to the Spanish conquest, numerous ceramic styles were produced in the Greater Nicoya region of Costa Rica that were strongly inspired in form and decoration by ceramic traditions in the Maya area and central Mexico. One of those styles, known as Vallejo, emphasizes white-slipped surfaces with polychrome designs outlined by incision, as seen on this pedestal bowl. The motifs decorating the outside of the vessel recall the geometric, brightly colored painting style—known as Mixteca-Puebla—popular in central Mexico at the time. Elements of the style and the religious concepts associated with it spread throughout Mesoamerica and northern Central America, probably by means of an exchange network of elite goods and perhaps even an influx of migrating Nahua-speaking peoples from northern Mexico. Local ceramic artists formulated their own interpretation of the foreign imagery and created a blend of figures and symbols that only vaguely resembles a Mesoamerican original. Two of the motifs, shown on opposite sides of the bowl, represent a version of the Mexican earth monster, a fanged, toadlike deity known as Tlaltecuhtli, believed to swallow human sacrifices and the heavenly bodies on their daily journey through the sky. Only the open profile mouth of the creature and one eye are recognizable as animal features. The figure's body and what are usually clawed hands and feet are abstract shapes. The second image on the vessel is that of the Feathered Serpent, also known as Quetzalcoatl. This ancient deity had numerous aspects and was worshipped by many Mesoamerican peoples. The snake's long body forms a U-shape ending in a sweeping curl; its profile head has a wide open maw with streamers emerging from it, symbolizing the split tongue and fangs. The feathers, an essential feature on Quetzalcoatl representations, are depicted as long, rectangular projections from the head and tail end.

metropolitan Museum

Vallejo Polychrome, Filidelfia Variety  - Nicoya, ca. 1200-1550
Tempisque Valley, Northwest Costa Rica 
Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

Logan Museum Collection

This pot has been negative resist-painted, meaning that it was treated with wax before firing to prevent certain area of the pot to acquire the characteristic red color caused by firing.

Logan Museum Collection

Private Collection

The flare-footed, spherical bowl of this ceramic censer is enhanced, in silhouette, by the flamboyance of its chimney. Textured, appliqué bands encircle and emphasize the tall smoothness of the chimney. On the perforated cap rests an elaborate crested crocodilian. Smoke from the incense that was burned in the bowl escaped through the holes of the cap and from openings in the animal's body. The rhythmical texture of the appliqué visually unites it with the surface of the creature's body where the nubby portions are taken to represent the scutes of the reptile. Both textured appliqués and scutes are surfaced in white. The spiky crest that surrounds the head is customarily found in incensarios of this period. Crocodilians frequently appear in Costa Rican art, strongly suggesting the supernatural import of these creatures in ancient times.

Metropolitan Museum - The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection

North Carolina Museum Of Art

The simple shape of this wide-mouthed jar is elaborated by the presence of three-dimensional bodies of abstract lizards or alligators presented as an identical repeated form around the vessel body. The segmented reptilian creatures were added to the finished jar after its upper surface received an allover patterning of diagonal grooves. The three lizards are formed by individual pieces of clay appliquéd to the vessel, creating bodies that crawl up the wall and tails that curve around and terminate on the underside of the flared lip. The jar is slipped on the lower portion of the exterior, on the lip, and in the interior. Although the reptilian forms are abstract, there is a degree of reality, as they appear to rest in stillness like those that soak up the midday sun.

Metropolitan Museum

Logan Museum Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection

Guanacaste-Nicoya Region, Costa Rica or Nicaragua
Overall: H: 29.2 cm (11 1/2 in.)
Earthenware with red and black on white slip paint

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Cleveland Museum of Art

Banco Central Collection

Cleveland Museum of Art

Cleveland Museum of Art

Banco Central Collection

Banco Central Collection

Banco Central Collection

Museo Nacional de CR

Museo Nacional de CR 

Univ. of Richmond Museum

Within the diversity of ceramic objects produced by the pre-Columbian groups, the seals are perhaps the least known and studied, however, are of great importance in regard to its aesthetic and cultural value. They have different sizes; may have flat or cylindrical shape and designs are more common, triangles, diamonds, circles, spirals, concentric figures, as well as representations of the human figure and animal.
The use of stamps for stamp designs is part of the pre-Columbian tradition of using graphic elements to communicate ideas and concepts that have to do with their beliefs with their symbolic and ritual practices, as well as distinguished social conditions or membership in a group individuals, however, can say that basically, were used for body decoration. This idea is based on the fact that there are human figures produced ceramic presenting bodies decorated with designs similar to those of the seals.
These appear on several pre-Hispanic cultures that developed in existing territories of Mexico, the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. In Costa Rica have appeared mainly in the North Pacific and the Central Region. Few copies come from scientific excavations, which are known have been part of the offerings in the burials and the objects within the housing areas. The peak season has been located between the years 100 BC And 800 AD, but does not rule out its continuation until the time of contact.
The stamp collection of the Museo del Oro Precolombino, has 300 of them, of whom will be on display approximately 130, which constitutes a great opportunity for the public to observe closely the different forms and footprints left by a technique so novel and as is the current tattooed.

Museo del Oro Precolombino

Museo del Oro Precolombino

Museo del Oro Precolombino

Museo del Oro Precolombino

Private Collection

Metropolitan Museum - The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection

Ceramic stamps are found in Costa Rican burials, suggesting that their importance extended beyond utilitarian. There has been much speculation with regard to the material that these stamps were intended to imprint, including textiles and the human body. This last theory is reinforced by the presence of stamp motifs on Costa Rican ceramic figure sculpture. The designs of the stamps can be divided into two categories, those that mimic the geometricity of textile structure and those that do not. The frog stamp, with the angular lines of an amphibian, falls into the category of textile imagery, whereas the more fluid depiction of the serpent is derived from a more naturalistic source.

Metropolitan Museum - The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection

In the prehistoric world, the animals were part of the natural and social environment. The representation of certain animals is related to various aspects of the culture of their makers as mythology, social organization and ritual, as well as their use as food source.

From the year 300 BC And till the time of contact in the sixteenth century, a limited range of animals were represented in various materials, especially the clay as one of the most used, which were modeled figures, vessels, musical instruments and utensils ritual.

Mammals are the group of animals that has greater variety of species represented in ceramics. Emphasize large animals such as cats, tapir and saíno. For example, throughout the pre-Columbian period, the cats have been used by various groups to represent symbolic qualities associated with the strength, cunning and power.

The birds are the animals most often represented. Predominantly birds of prey, such as the harpy eagle, zopilotes (turkey vultures), and owls, and to a lesser extent other species of birds with striking plumage (such as toucans). Among the birds used are highlighted food animals such as: curassows, doves and partridges.
Different parts of the birds, such as feathers, beak, and bones, continue to be part of the trappings and rituals of activities carried out by indigenous people to this day.

Reptiles and amphibians are also part of the range of animals produced in ceramics. Snakes, turtles, toads, frogs, crocodilians, as well as lizards and salamanders, were used as models in the development of myths and beliefs. The design of crocodiles especially has been interpreted as a symbol of fertility, death, and as an indicator of hierarchy between high-ranking personalities.

Costa Rica Panama & Nicaragua Timeline

[ Home ] [ Belize Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Costa Rica Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ El Salvador Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Guatemala Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Honduras Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Nicaragua Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ] [ Panama Pre-columbian Ceramic Pottery ]