The Parrot Pot -- In Flight Across Time

 

The Parrot Pot -- In Flight Across Time

This Colima parrot vessel was made nearly two thousand years ago in western Mexico, part of the Shaft Tomb tradition (c. 100 BCE–250 CE). These sculptural tripod jars were often placed in deep shaft funerary chambers, accompanying the dead into the afterlife. I once saw one just like this in the Los Angeles County Museum.

I’ve read that parrots in Mesoamerica symbolized vitality, sunlight, communication, and the lushness of the tropics — fitting guardians for a journey beyond the physical world.

This vessel was not thrown on a wheel; the potter’s wheel was unknown in ancient West Mexico. Instead, it was shaped entirely by hand all those millenia ago by a Colima artisan working within the Shaft Tomb tradition. Clay gathered from local riverbeds would have been tempered with sand or crushed volcanic grit to strengthen it. The rounded body was built up slowly through coiling and modeling, each layer pressed and blended into the next, the form rising not from rotation but from touch. Even now, with its balanced weight and quiet symmetry, we can feel the intelligence of hands that shaped this clay.

I’ve also learned that the three parrot heads and solid tripod legs were sculpted separately and attached while the clay was still leather-hard, the joins smoothed so that structure and sculpture became one.

Once assembled, the surface was carefully burnished with a polished stone, compressing the clay to create its soft sheen. A red wash — made from iron-rich minerals — was then applied to give the vessel its deep reddish earthen color. It was then fired not in a kiln with gauges and controls, but in an open-air or pit firing fueled by wood, where temperature was judged by flame, smoke, and long experience. The mottling and tonal shifts across the surface are part of that process, the trace of fire itself.

Of course, noone knows the name of the person who made this pot. Colima artisans remain anonymous, their identities folded into time. But this was no casual maker. The confident modeling, the stability of the tripod stance, and the assured sculpting of the bird form suggest someone who was deeply practiced, working within a family workshop, passing knowledge across generations.

The pot began as earth gathered by hand, was shaped by skill and memory, and was fired by flame. That it still stands — and has crossed continents — is a testament to the culture that created it and to the unnamed hands that first gave it form.

I bought this piece in 1993 from a certified pre-Columbian antiquities dealer in Tucson who was the friend of a friend. It had come from a substantial private collection of Colima material assembled decades earlier. At the time, I justified buying it because of its story, its beauty and my thought that it would be an investment. I also wanted it to join the collection of Indigenous artifacts I'd inherited and collected — objects that felt alive with continuity and presence.

I did not yet realize I was beginning a shared migration.

From Tucson it traveled to my home in rural Akita prefecture, Japan, where it became a fixture — and a conversation starter — for more than a decade. Its rounded, ribbed body and grounded stance seemed to anchor the room, even as snow fell outside for months each year.

It was then crated and shipped to Kuala Lumpur, and later to Singapore, where it lived with me in four different residences. In our last apartment there, beside the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, we would watch flocks of parrots every early evening as they swept across the sky and settled into the rain trees. The ancient bird-form vessel sat quietly indoors, while its living counterparts crossed the twilight in formation — a reminder that motion and continuity are part of the same story.

On my first trip from Singapore to Bohol, I hand-carried the pot on the flight via Manila, just to make sure it would be safe. After decades of careful packing and shipping across continents, it made its most recent journey not in a crate but under my direct care.

Created as a ceremonial object for a shaft tomb nearly two thousand years ago, this vessel has already traveled across time. Its own modern migration — from Mexico to Arizona, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and now the Philippines — feels strangely appropriate. Like a small flock of parrots in flight, it has moved through geographies while retaining its essential form.

Originally acquired as an artifact, it has become something more personal. I now intend to keep it in the family, eventually as the repository for a bit of my own earthly remains — a quiet echo of its first purpose. In that sense, its long journey may come full circle.

An object made to accompany the dead has instead accompanied the living — across oceans, climates, and chapters of life — before returning, once again, to its ancient role.