Ceremonial Mace (Club) Head: Bird (Male Curassow?) (300 BCE–600 CE): Art, History and Details

Ceremonial Mace (Club) Head: Bird (Male Curassow?) (300 BCE–600 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Probably once mounted on wooden shafts, these objects could have served as symbols of chiefly authority, group insignia, the heads of ceremonial weapons, or all three. They eventually were placed in elite graves. The bird may be a male curassow and the feline, a jaguar.

Object facts

• Title: Ceremonial Mace (Club) Head: Bird (Male Curassow?)
• Date: 300 BCE–600 CE
• Culture: Costa Rica, Southern Nicoya region
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: stone
• Collection: AA - Intermediate Region
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1949.194

Collection credit

Gift of John Wise

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William. "Pre-Columbian Accessions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 37, no. 1 (January 1950): 10-11, 14-16.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.