Vessel with a ceremonial scene

Pottery objects like this one from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are preserved in numerous museum collections. Many of them are simple and roughly made, and this is probably one of the best decorated, even having some motifs and designs that are recognisable as being in Tairona period style. What makes all of them extraordinary is that they depict a ceremony with masked figures. The bottom of the container usually shows one or more snake figures (four here?), and sometimes containers with liquids. The masks take up the themes of Tairona pottery ocarinas, but also of ancient masks carved in wood that are still a sacred element of the rituals of indigenous groups on the Sierra Nevada, as photographs by German ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss show, which were taken when he visited the Kágabas on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta from November 1914 to April 1915. EL