Terra cotta from Koma

The head has been broken at the level of the neck and has been stuck again. (See the photos). We bought this item during an auction sale at Drouot.
In 1984 the anthropologists from the Münster university discovered ancient funerary hillocks in the northern part of Ghana, at the south of the border with Burkina Faso, on the Koma-Bulsa territory. The news did not remain secret and at the end of the eighties, the peasants living there started to look for and dig up small size ceramics representing most often male heads. They were all sunk into the ground and nobody knew about their origin. In a poetical manner, the peasants have named these little sculptures « Kronkronbali », that is to say their former children…
The thermoluminescence tests results indicate that the items were created between the XIII and the XIX centuries. Due to this antiquity, they have been assigned to the ancestors of the modern folk Koma-Bulsa, an under group of the ethnic group Mole Dagbani from Northern Ghana.