Male protective figure (pagar)

This male and female pair represents the ancestral couple. The male figure would also have had forearms with very large hands. The figures were traditionally clothed, and the stems of wood on the top of the heads probably once supported turbanlike headdresses. The pair was bound together with a third sculpture. They were preserved and honored in the uppermost region of the house of the lineage founder, where they could be seen or touched only by a privileged few. Periodic offerings and solicitations encouraged benevolent behavior from the ancestral couple, who were capable of inflicting harm.

This pair was acquired from descendants of the last priest-king of the Toba Batak people, whose defeat and death in 1907 marked the end of Batak resistance to Dutch colonialism.