Page 592 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

Inka metal figurines can be male or female, of
gold, silver, or copper. Some small examples are
solid and cast; the hollow ones are made of pieces
of sheet metal soldered together. The usual pose
is with hands at the chest. The female figurines
have long, center-parted hair, ending with some
sort of clasp in back near the bottom. The male
figures usually wear a band wound around the
head. Cat. 446 has an added cloth turban. Cat.
447 is shown wearing ear spools. The other
figurines lack ear ornaments, but the lobes are
elongated from having worn them; the figurines
may at one time have been furnished with them.
Throughout what is now Latin America, ear orna-
ments symbolized high status and often the cere-
mony in which the wearer was participating. In
an important Inka initiation rite, boys of royal
lineage were given their first breech cloths and
ear ornaments (J. Rowe 1946, 308).
Some figurines are dressed in miniature gar-
ments. There was a tradition, probably wide-
spread throughout pre-Columbian America, of
dressing sculpted figures. A gold male figurine
(cat. 448), from the important central coast site
of Pachacamac, Lurin Valley, central coast of Peru,
is wrapped in a mantle tied with a sling-like belt.
Silver figurines without garments have also been
found at Pachacamac (McEwan and Silva I. 1989,
fig. 22).
The two female figurines here wear feather
headdresses. Cat. 442, from Cerro El Plomo,
Chile, wears parrot feathers, a silver chain around
the neck, and, over a wrapped garment, a mantle
of vicuna wool, fixed with a silver pin (tupu), a
type of object used to fasten full-size mantles
worn by Inka women. This figure was buried
near the mummy of an entombed boy of eight or
nine years—possibly the son of a local official —
preserved in central Chile at the cold altitude of
5,400 meters (17,700 feet) (Mostny 1957; see also
Besom 1991). A small shell figure, also wearing a
headdress, was found with him, along with other
offerings.
A child was a particularly precious sacrificial
offering in the Andes. Such victims might be
buried with oblations including small figures —
humans and llamas —of metal and of the highly
valued spondylus shell. Another child burial from
the southern end of the Inka empire, at about the
same altitude on a high mountain in Argentina,
was that of a seven-year-old boy, accompanied by
three small male figures: one of hammered gold,
one of a solid alloy, and one of spondylus shell, all
clothed and with plumed headdress, and three
llama figures, one of gold and two of spondylus
(Schobinger 1991). Perhaps there is an analogy
between these dressed figurines and the human
dead, who were also wrapped in layers of cloth
garments. The silver, gold, and shell figures
might be considered escorts to the other world.
The use of gold and silver was the prerogative
of the Inka rulers, and the distribution of spondy-
lus shell was carefully controlled (Davidson 1981).

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