Bowl with a metalworking scene

This bowl with high, slightly flared sides represents a walled enclosure with crenulations. On the exterior, the structure’s lower walls were painted with a red slip, and a door was outlined in white. The interior of the vessel reverses this, with lower walls in white and crenulations in red, and two doors, on either side of the vessel, outlined in blackish brown. In relief on the base of the bowl, the artist depicted an orange smelting furnace on a brown floor, with seven blow tubes resting on it. A figure wearing a headdress and whiskered nose ornament sits to one side, knees drawn up.

The structure recalls the battlements found around the Templo del Escalonado at the site of Cahuachi, an important ritual center on Peru’s South Coast in the first half of the first millennium A.D. The depiction of the smelting furnace is unusual, and it provides a rare opportunity to show an indigenous view of the production of metal objects, of gold, silver, copper, or bronze—a process that was very likely considered a semi-divine act.