Joe Rosson: African artifacts may have been made for tourist trade
When I was home on furlough from the Vietnam War in 1967, my mother had a water leak under her house. While I was under the house fixing it, I dug up these artifacts wrapped in a cloth that had mostly deteriorated. The standing figures are 6 inches tall, and the others are 3 inches tall. They are metal — could they be bronze? Are they African? Do you have any other information about them?
Let me begin by saying that these are way outside my area of specialization, and all I can really offer is what my research has revealed.
First of all, yes, I do believe these are African and probably from West Africa. The crux of my research centered around the fact that these look like Ashanti or Akan gold weights, but they are too large to have been used for this purpose.
Until the introduction of paper money and coins, gold dust was used as the currency of many places in West Africa. In order to engage in trade, merchants and individuals had to have a set of weights that would be used in a scale to determine the actual weight of the gold being offered in exchange for goods and services.
These weights were based on the Islamic weight system and owning a set of these weights was something of a status symbol. They were often given to young men as wedding presents (along with two pounds of gold and a rifle), and they assured him that he could enter the world as a respectable merchant.
These weights were most often fashioned from cast brass — which is an alloy of copper and zinc. Bronze on the other hand is an alloy of copper and tin but may contain such other ingredients as phosphorus, manganese, aluminum and silicon. Brass usually has a golden (or whitish) color while bronze is generally dark — but sometimes brass can look like bronze and it often does on centuries old gold weights.
Gold weights are found in three types. The earliest are geometric in shape and can trace their origins back to the 1400s. The second type depicts tribal chiefs on horseback or seated, and the third features images of people engaged in everyday activities — including some pretty naughty poses by Western standards.
Animals were also depicted, and sometimes the weights are depictions of well known proverbs. The Ashanti people are said to have been responsible for the introduction of the figural gold weights sometime in the 18th century, and these pieces are often termed 'Ashanti gold weights,' but 'Akan gold weight' is probably a more correct term.
The pieces in today's collection are really too large to have been used for the measurement of gold dust, and few Akan gold weights are larger than 2½ to 3 inches tall. This leads me to believe that the metal figures belonging to L.G. were probably made for the tourist market and are post 1900 — how post I could not say.
As for value, the most valuable is the one whose iconography I cannot even discuss in a family newspaper, but as a group, I feel they fall into the $300 to $500 range.
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