Pre-Columbian

Panama, around the year 0. A potter dips a brush, and a fish swims across a cream-colored plate.

Pre-Columbian art and artifacts come from Central America and the Andes, made long before European contact. Gran Coclé potters in Panama, working roughly between 150 BC and 800 AD, painted polychrome plates and bowls with fish, birds, animals and human figures. Coclé gold travelled as far as Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán. In Peru’s Ayacucho valley, the Huari, probably the first centrally governed state in the Andes, had no writing and put their world into ceramics, among them small face-neck jars that still carry painted features.

Burnished slip, faded red and black pigment and the fine crazing of old clay give a quiet intensity. A single Huari jar in a niche needs little around it.

No writing, and yet the message arrived.