Miniature tower

Indonesian antiquities made of fired clay present questions for archaeologists and art historians. Though great numbers of such works have appeared on the market in recent decades, relatively few of such works have been excavated scientifically. It is possible that many are fakes. Usually, scientific tests can be used to determine the approximate age of ceramic objects, but Indonesian clay has characteristics that make it difficult to test, and results are often inconclusive. Also, many objects of fired clay, including both of these, have been broken and repaired repeatedly, again confusing the issue of date.

Miniature towers of stone—or like these, of fired clay— reproduce the features of architectural temple towers. How they were used is far from clear. Stone examples were sometimes positioned like turrets at the corners of platforms and bases of temples. Some of the fired-clay examples, like the smaller one here, have upper parts that can be removed. It has been suggested that they functioned as containers for relics. But in the example here, the inside of the lower part, where the relics would presumably have been kept, has no floor, so it is hard to imagine it containing anything.

Larger tower (1991.197): The ornamentation of this tower is very similar to a stone tower at the Majapahit Museum in East Java. The tower may represent the Hindu myth of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, in which gods and demons work together using a mountain on the back of a turtle to churn the ocean.