Kero

1525-1600

Name(s) currently unknown

Cuzco, PER, Museo Inka (current location)

This wood drinking vessel, known as a kero, comes from the Andean highlands. The wood has been hollowed out for liquid. An inlay of tiny metal nails covers the exterior in a net-like pattern.

The geometric pattern of diamond shapes has parallels in pre-Hispanic Inka designs, and continued to be used in the colonial period. However, the use of nails to fill tiny holes, as seen here, seems to be a colonial-period invention. Along the rim, the silver has fallen out, suggesting a long period of use.

This kero is made of wood and nails of either tin or silver. Other keros known from the 16th century are solely wood, yet others only silver. Typically keros were created in pairs by skilled craftsmen in the Andes, but were never signed.

Today this kero is in the collection of the Museo Inka in Cuzco, and it may well have been created in that Andean city, or in town nearby.

Keros were among the most valuable possessions of pre-Hispanic Inka and they continued to be important ritual and political objects among native Andeans long after the Spanish settled in Peru. Keros were offered by local leaders as gifts to other leaders, as a way of establishing and cementing community connections. Objects such as this one thus make clear how local political and ritual relationships in the Andes were negotiated through objects of long-standing tradition, even as the designs and materials of keros sometimes differed from those of their pre-Hispanic counterparts.

Reproduced courtesy of the Museo Inka

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Cummins, Thomas B.F. 2002. Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Otarola Alvarado, Carlos Alberto. 1995. Qeros decorados del Qosqo. Cuzco: Municipalidad del Qosqo.

Phipps, Elena. 2004. Johanna Hecht and Cristina Esteras Martín, eds. The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.