Skip to content
Pitt Rivers Museum
AboutHire the MuseumNewsletterUniversity of Oxford

1884.10.25

Stone grinder in the form of an animal's head and neck.

1884.10.25

Digital asset copyright: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Terms and Conditions

If you wish to order a high-resolution image and/or licence its use for print or web publication, exhibition, film, promotional product or any other use, whether in the academic or commercial sector of any print run, then please visit photographic services.

Collection type
Object
Description
Stone grinder in the form of an animal's head and neck.
Long description
Stone animal's head and neck from a grinder. The head looks feline with triangular teeth, a snout, eyes and small ears. The stone is dark brown coloured and pitted. [MJD (Verve) 15/2/2016]
Date / Period
Date made: Circa 300-700
Date collected
By 1874
Acquisition information
Donated: 1884
Materials and processes
Material Stone, Process Carved, Process Ground
Dimensions
Height: max 230 mm, Width: max 145 mm, Length: max 160 mm
Object numbers
Accession number: 1884.10.25
Research and responses

Originally documented simply as coming from Central America. This is probably part of a zoomorphic-effigy tripod metate from Costa Rica (see DOC). It seems to represent a feline. These metates were found in high status burials in the Guanacaste-Nicoya zone, and were probably religious symbols rather than for domestic use. [LM]

Associated publications
Referred to on page 385 of 'Central America', by Elizabeth Graham, Dan Hicks and Alice Stevenson, in World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization, edited by Dan Hicks and Alice Stevenson (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), pp. 383-400. Graham, Hicks and Stevenson write: 'The remaining 4 artefacts are recorded as ‘found in a tumulus’ by Dr Berthold Carl Seemann (1825–1871): a sickle-shaped stone tool (1884.126.223), and 4 stone metates (grinding slabs) with carved decorations (1884.10.25, 1884.10.27–28, 1884.68.76). Seemann was a German botanist who trained at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and travelled widely around the world: visiting South America in the 1860s, before managing a sugar estate in Panama, and the Javali gold mine in Chontales, Nicaragua where he was the manager (Belt 1874: 94, footnote 1) until his death in 1871. In his account of travel in Panama, Nicaragua and Mosquito, written with Bedford Pim (Pim and Seemann 1869), Seemann described the excavation of some of ‘a great number of ancient tombs...in the grassy districts of Chontales’ in Nicaragua: ... The similarity between this ‘hatchet like a reaping hook’ and the stone tool described above (1884.126.223) indicates that this object – and perhaps also the metates – may in fact come from burial mound excavations at Chontales, Nicaragua, rather than from Costa Rica.' [MJD (Verve) 7/1/2016]

Search terms: Food and Drink, Tool, Figure, Religion, Death, Grinder, Animal Figure, Grave Good, Food Accessory

Further items to explore