Vessel with a reclining figure

This figure, with a small opening in the top of his head, is apparently eating from a small bowl in his left hand. His nose is pierced, and there are multiple holes around the edges of the ears. These may once have held rings of metal wire. In contrast to the rest of the pot, the face of the figure is left matt and unburnished. The skull has been artificially deformed, as described by the sixteenth century chronicler Cieza de Leon (1864: 185) for the region around Manta: ‘When a child was born they put its head between two boards, so that at the age of four or five, the head was long and broad, but flat behind, not content with the heads that God gives them, they thus make them into shapes that please them most’.

Warwick Bray, 1997