Chamba Spike Figure

This columnar Chamba statue is an example of a spike figure, identified as such due to its iron tip used for insertion into the ground. The extremely columnar form of the sculpture speaks to its formidable symbolism, as spike figures “provided cult practitioners with a point of address, so that cultic power might be disposed to react favorably to entreaties accompanied by offerings made with appropriate ritual formalism,” according to Central Nigeria Unmasked. These figures would have been placed either in cults or ancestral shrines. While there have been suggestions that these statues could have at one time represented particular chiefs or ancestors, “such identification is likely to have been post hoc” and there is little evidence if any to support this. Rather, the “statues carried diffuse, rather than individual, ancestral reference,” which “readily shaded into a generic class of spirit entities thanks to the way in which the dead and the underworld tended to be elided.”

20″

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