Nazca Double-Spouted Pottery

The Nazca Indians, who have lived on the plains of Peru for 800 years, are noted for their gigantic "land drawings" (which can be seen only from great heights) which feature monkey, bird, whale, human and geographic designs. The same style of linear figure is found in the forms and decoration of Nazca pottery. The pottery is usually painted with both bold abstractions of realistic shapes and geometric patterns. Typical Nazca pottery was created without the use of a wheel- coils of clay were laid to form the body, then smoothed together to form a watertight container. This is the same way that 7th grade students created their forms, rolling coils.One of the most notable of the abstract forms of Nazca pottery is that of the double-spouted jug, which are practical vessels. The jug is divided through the inside with a center partition permitting two different liquids to be poured from a single jug, such as oil and water. The 7th graders' pots also contain a center partition, which students added when they had built up about half of the body of the pot. They continued to add coils around the partition until the essentially had a big circular closed form, at which point they added hollow spouts... Students glazed their pots with traditional Nazca motifs and they look awesome! I was so excited to get them in the display case that I forgot to take nice photos of them with a plain background, but you get the picture!