Ivorian Stone Head, Based

A face, if you allow it a moment.

This stone head is Goro, from Goitafila Village in Ivory Coast, West Africa, and its age is indeterminate. The material is stone. Little is firmly recorded about stone heads like this from West Africa, though many are thought to have been kept at shrines or linked to ancestors and the honoring of the dead. A rough, rust-colored surface gives way to a heavy brow, a broad nose and a parted mouth, with deep pits in the stone. A plain dark block holds it. Fourteen and a half inches high.

Whoever it was, the stone has kept the secret.