Mask

400 BCE–500 CE
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 362
This stone mask features an anthropomorphic face with pronounced brow ridge, angular nose, and drilled perforations with raised carved ridges indicating the eyes and mouth. Additional drill holes line the outer edge of the mask, presumably to affix it with fibers to an armature. The mask was most likely attached to a funerary bundle.

The Condorhuasi-Alamito peoples were llama pastoralists in the area that is now the Catamarca province of Argentina. They were skilled artisans in a variety of media, including ceramic, metal, and stone. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Condorhuasi-Alamito peoples maintained extensive long-distance contacts with other regions, including the important site of Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca in what is now Bolivia.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Mask
  • Artist: Condorhuasi-Alamito artist(s)
  • Date: 400 BCE–500 CE
  • Geography: Argentina, Northwest Argentina
  • Culture: Condorhuasi-Alamito
  • Medium: Stone
  • Dimensions: H. 6 3/4 × W. 5 1/2 × D. 2 in. (17.1 × 14 × 5.1 cm)
  • Classification: Stone Sculpture
  • Credit Line: Gift of Claudia Quentin, 2016
  • Object Number: 2016.734.4
  • Curatorial Department: The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing

Audio

Cover Image for 1645. Masks, Condorhuasi-Alamito artists

1645. Masks, Condorhuasi-Alamito artists

Benjamin Alberti

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BENJAMIN ALBERTI: To us, masking is very much a theatrical performance, it’s about being somebody else, or pretending to be something else. I’ve held one up and you can’t see out of it because the eye holes don’t match up with your eye holes. So, they clearly weren’t being used to wear.

JOSÉ MARÍA YAZPIK (NARRATOR): These striking, expressive stone masks were created by people who lived in what is now northwest Argentina. Masks of this kind have been discovered in burial contexts. You can see holes on the outer edges of the masks, which might have been used to tie them onto funerary bundles.

Benjamin Alberti, Professor of Anthropology at Framingham State University.

BENJAMIN ALBERTI: This was a mask that transformed the person into one of the ancestral dead. Another way to look at it, maybe it is about revealing something that is there rather than masking something. So maybe the masks worked to bring out the ancestral qualities in that dead person as they continue their journey in the afterlife.

JOSÉ MARÍA YAZPIK: Notice that the eyes of the masks are left open, empty.

BENJAMIN ALBERTI: In Amazonian thought, staring, wide eyes are a sign that you cannot see… they’re a sign that you cannot see the invisible, which would be the spirits, other beings within the world. So, to present your mask with wide eyes that are hollow could be playing on this idea that the dead cannot see or the dead should not see. Perhaps is not able to see the living who remain, and so is not able to get involved, not able to cause problems for the living. So, it could be a form of limiting the capacities of that person, once they are dead.

So this really calls attention to the fact that these were objects that were designed to do things.

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