Stirrup-spout Bottles from Central Africa

Abstract

It is not true that stirrup-spout bottles are absent in the Old World. The Brooklyn Museum possesses an ethnographic specimen of a stirrup-spout bottle collected in 1930 among the Mangbetu in the northern Congo. This bottle is strikingly similar in many features to Cupisnique style stirrup-spout bottles from the north coast of Peru. There is another Mangbetu style stirrup-spout bottle in the R. H. Lowie Museum in Berkeley.

Using the Tlatilco-Cupisnique case above mentioned as an example, it might be argued that a stirrup-spout bottle is a perfectly natural ceramic form to invent more than once; if so, then one would expect to find it in those parts of the Old World where vessels were used to store liquids. On the contrary, this form was evidently unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere, suggesting diffusion from a single point of origin as the most reasonable hypothesis to account for its distribution in the Western Hemisphere (Coe 1963: 103).