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A Stone Llama With a Hollow in Its Back

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A Stone Llama With a Hollow in Its Back

A conopa is small, usually a few inches, and carved from a stone soft enough to work easily, often with banding or veining that the carver uses. The commonest form is a camelid, a llama or an alpaca, rendered compactly with the legs folded under and the head raised. Others take the shape of maize cobs, of other crops, or of forms less easy to identify.

The defining feature is the hollow. A depression is cut into the back of the figure, and it is there to hold an offering. That single detail settles what kind of object this is: not an image to be looked at, but a thing to be fed, which puts the conopa in the same family as the Mongolian ongon at the other end of the world and for reasons that have nothing to do with contact.

What a conopa concerns is increase. A camelid conopa is held for the growth and health of a herd; a maize one for a crop. It belongs to a household, is inherited within it, and is not communal property and not the business of a shrine. Because Andean herding families own their animals individually while much else is held collectively, that domestic ownership is exactly right for what the object is about.

Size is part of the definition. These are objects that fit in a hand and can be moved, hidden or carried between houses, which mattered a great deal once officials began looking for them.

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