Celt with Incised Profile 10th–4th century Olmec A finely incised design appears on one side of this large, polished jadeite celt, or axe. A sculptor originally shaped and polished the hard greenstone into a long blade, the sharp edge of which was chipped in antiquity, and later a drill hole would have allowed the plaque to hang from a belt assemblage. Jade and greenstone axes were crucial components to Olmec dedicatory practices, also practiced in Chiapas and Guatemala after about 1000 On such celts, Olmec artists often incised images of deities, or even iconic or notational symbols
Celt with Incised Profile 10th–4th century Olmec A finely incised design appears on one side of this large, polished jadeite celt, or axe. A sculptor originally shaped and polished the hard greenstone into a long blade, the sharp edge of which was chipped in antiquity, and later a drill hole would have allowed the plaque to hang from a belt assemblage. Jade and greenstone axes were crucial components to Olmec dedicatory practices, also practiced in Chiapas and Guatemala after about 1000 On such celts, Olmec artists often incised images of deities, or even iconic or notational symbols, which developed and spread around Mesoamerica as proto-writing. An incised disembodied hand with a knot around the wrist floats towards the center of the celt. The hand is stylized yet retains certain details like a thumbnail to suggest a human connection. Atop the back or palm of the hand is a large rectangular field lined with five smaller rectangles. The arrangement might reference a quincunx, a shape widely found in Olmec art and architecture, characterized by five points: the four corners and the center. Hands of this type represented syllabic and logographic signs in later Mesoamerican scripts, so this hand may have had a phonetic or conceptual reading to an Olmec viewer. The other image incised on the broad side of the celt is the disembodied head of a supernatural figure in profile, wearing an elaborate headdress, facing the viewer’s left. The face is composed of a snarling, downturned mouth with prominent upper lip and protruding sharp incisor. A shape composed of four sets of two concentric circles frame the mouth, connected by two bands, again forming the quincunx shape with the mouth as the center. The eye is an L-shaped field punctuated by three semicircles. A large earflare assemblage splays to the right alongside the incised indication of a neck. The headdress dominates the upper composition. In the center above the eye is a u-shaped element filled with cro
Size: 1198px × 1861px
Photo credit: © MET/BOT / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
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