Commemorative Altar Head; Uhunmwun Elao

This carved wooden head is shown wearing chiefly regalia, including a red feather and coral bead collar. Although related to the commemorative heads in bronze and brass commissioned for royal altars, wooden heads like this one were made for ancestral altars of lower-ranking Edo chiefs and portray an ideal image of chiefly authority. This head has lost its original label and has therefore been given a temporary number, but it may have been given to the museum in 1937 by a Mr G. H. Turnbull of Wallasey on the Wirral.