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Product Description
SEE MORE PRE-COLUMBIAN TOOLS AND WEAPONS
This massive ceremonial war club mace head was carved out of Andesite stone and comes from the Greater Nicoya Pre-Columbian Culture. It represents a stylized serpent god with open mouth baring teeth. A small protruding nose leads the narrow head form, with a pointed elongated body ending in a tail. Two reinforcing lugs flank the shaft handle opening on the top. The compact knobbed face would have been the primary striking edge, but the tail would have also been deadly effective in its pointed form. A blow from either side would have inflicted major skull crushing and bone breaking injuries in enemy soldiers. The large drilled opening indicates this was a functional weapon meant to be mounted on a substantially thick shaft handle. Large Pre-Columbian carved stone war clubs with anthropomorphic designs are rare and their use would have been strictly limited to either ceremonial human sacrifice, or ownership restricted to very high ranking warriors or elite class noble soldiers. One blow to the head with a war club topped with this mace head would have inflicted a fatal wound, and wielding such a weapon in a ritual human sacrifice, or on the battlefield, would have instilled fear and intimidation to all enemies!
In Mesoamerican history, many different ethnopolitical groups worshipped a feathered-serpent deity. Evidence of such worship comes from the iconography of different Mesoamerican cultures, in which serpent motifs occur frequently. While not usually feathered, classic Maya serpent iconography seems related to the belief in a Venus war and fertility-related serpent deity. To both Teotihuacan and Maya cultures, Venus was in turn also symbolically connected with warfare. In the iconography of the Classic period, Maya serpent imagery is also prevalent: a snake often appears as the embodiment of the sky itself, and a vision serpent is a shamanic helper presenting Maya kings with visions of the underworld.
The Andesite stone of this war club mace head shows a beautiful and varied make up of substances famous for its type. It boasts of NO modern damage which is hard to find in authentic pieces. Ancient mineral deposits are intact and impacted in all microscopic crevices with no evidence of modern grinding - a trait ONLY seen in AUTHENTIC specimens.
HISTORY
The Kingdom of Nicoya, was an indigenous nation that comprised much of the territory of the current Guanacaste Province, in the North Pacific of Costa Rica. Its political, economic and religious center was the city of Nicoya, located on the peninsula of the same name, which depends on several provinces located on both banks of the Gulf of Nicoya, as well as numerous tributary villages. In the 16th century, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Nicoya was the most important chiefdom of the North Pacific of present-day Costa Rica.
In archaeological terms, the territory of Guanacaste is part of the archeological region of Greater Nicoya, which extends from the Gulf of Fonseca in Honduras, covering the entire Pacific of Nicaragua, to the northern Pacific of Costa Rica. The Greater Nicoya has been divided, for its study, into two subregions: the northern or Nicaraguan subregion (Nicaragua Pacific) and the southern subregion or Guanacaste (Nicoya Peninsula, the Tempisque river basin, the piedmont and the highlands of the Guanacaste and Tilarán mountain ranges in Costa Rica). In this last subregion is the Kingdom of Nicoya.
In the Greater Nicoya, there was a constituted cultural center that flourished for approximately 2000 years. Archaeological research shows that the Nicoyan society achieved a complex social organization and a high degree of cultural development. Upon the arrival of the Spaniards into Nicoya in the 16th century, they found complex cities and governments, specialized agriculture that included irrigation, arts and crafts, highlighting the triad of polychrome ceramics (whose tradition has been inherited by Guanacastecan artisans to this day), the making of jewelry from jade and the manufacture of stone metates, with various regional styles. For 1200 years, the Nicoyan cultural tradition in Guanacaste was clearly established as a distinctive entity.
The people had no written language but spoke Nahuatl and had continual contact with the Aztec (Mexica) Indians of Central Mexico. Gran Nicoya art included many beautiful designs incorporating a variety of different mammals, reptiles and amphibians in effigy pieces. Their pottery is also known for complex glyph-like painted decorations. In the first 500 to 600 years A.D., resources became low as populations grew and warfare become increasingly evident. Tribes in this region practiced head-hunting and victim sacrifice in their warfare.
