Forged Tiahuanaco-Style Keros

Extract

Well before the Spanish conquest the Incas were drinking their chicha out of big wooden cups, usually called keros. The earliest ones have simple incised designs only, but later an elaborate art developed involving lively representative designs executed in lacquer inlay in several colors. The lacquered keros continued to be made almost throughout the colonial period for use by the caciques and other comparatively wealthy Indians, and numerous specimens are known depicting people in 17th and 18th century costumes. Most of the specimens in our museums were not excavated but were acquired from descendants of the original owners who had kept them as heirlooms over a period of several centuries. While it seems not unlikely that the lacquer technic was developed before the Spanish conquest, we have no really satisfactory proof of its age, since all the pieces found in indisputably preconquest archaeological context are of the unpainted incised type. No wooden keros of any type have been found in any context suggesting a pre-Inca date for them.