Funeral and Divinatory Figure

Terracotta figures that do not usually exceed 25 centimetres and which were intended to commemorate an ancestor or a founding hero of the ethnic group in a sacred place or to indicate the burial place of a deceased while performing the function of offering. They have an ovoid shape and an anthropomorphic appearance. They are carved in a soft stone, greyish or brown tones and with a grainy surface. They are also pieces that are used in divination, because the ancestor knows the future and was also used to discover the guilty of a misdeed or conflict in the village. When those involved or presumed guilty around the soothsayer were gathered, he rubbed the figure on the skin of each of them and the culprit started to burn. Psychological effect used by fortune tellers through other objects or statues. The culprit always gives himself away because of psychological pressure.

The figure has an elongated ellipse shape. The head occupies one third of the figure. In some figures ña a position of the arms forms a rhombus in the ventral zone, in others the arms are extended along the body and in some others only the head figures, always with a simple and rudimentary size. Brown terracotta.