I knew Roy Sieber as a teacher and mentor I became his student after he had officially retired, but as in all other aspects of his active and productive career, retirement didn't end his commitment to train a new generation of African-arts scholars. He still taught an annual graduate seminar and continued the tradition of more informal mentoring during long afternoons spent in the Sieber living room. I too was given this wonderful gift of spending time with Roy looking at and discussing African art together and listening to him and Sophie reminisce about their family's days in west Africa.

And of course, learning about African art from Roy Sieber meant many trips to Motel 6 to view African traders' wares and learn what "looked right" and what didn't. Sometimes more costly pieces were brought to Roy for evaluation. I will never forget the afternoon when he asked me and another graduate student to carry a large wooden sculpture upstairs into the bathroom so that he could test its authenticity. As we turned it over, Roy took out a small bottle, dipped a Q-tip into it, and after a quick rub on its base, announced that the patina was indeed genuine. It was only later that I learned that the sculpture I had been holding upside down in the bathroom was valued at $600,000. Just another day in the Sieber household.

For all of us who knew Roy, it is hard to accept that we can no longer give him a quick telephone call or drop in for a visit during a trip to Bloomington. But I do feel his continuing presence through memories of times we spent together, often laughing, and through his eloquent and insightful writings on African art. Having this article published in this memorial issue is particularly meaningful to me, because during the summer before his death, Roy worked with me in readying the manuscript for submission to African Arts.

Fig. 1a. Asante dual-disk funerary pectoral (awisi- ado) made of electroplated cast brass. Kumase, Ghana, 1990.
Photo: Suzanne Gott. Pectorals with two breastlike disk forms have long appeared in Asante rituals related to the court. Only recently, however, has their use been documented in funerals of nonroyal persons.

1b. Reverse of the Asante funerary pec- toral seen above. Kumase, Ghana, 1990.
Photo: Suzanne Gott. The two disks are two separate castings, held together by a stick extending across their backs and threaded through small cylinders at the sides.

The Asante, an Akan people of southern Ghana, are renowned for communicating status, wealth, and power through displays of golden ornament and elaborately woven cloth. This opulence, combined with the symbolic richness of Akan regalia in general, has generated a special appreciation for Asante leadership arts. [1] For many scholars, the centerpiece of these arts is the profusion of golden regalia worn or displayed by male and female traditional rulers and their court officials on state occasions. [2]

Fig. 2. Dual-disk pectoral. Asante, Ghana. Cast brass with some gold residue; width of one disk 11.4cm (4.5").
Collection of the author

Yet one particularly intriguing form of regalia has remained relatively unexamined: an Asante chest ornament, or pectoral, that consists of paired golden disks in the form of stylized breasts suspended from a massive chain (Figs. 1-4). It appears to have originated within the context of Akan leadership arts, and it continues to be seen in the adornment of the two Asante royal fly-whisk attendants called mprakyirefoo (Fig. 5). In addition, over the course of the past century, the dual-disk pectoral has increasingly become associated with a new display context, that of the funeral, where it is known as awisiado, or "orphan's neck- lace" (Fig. 6). [3]

Fig. 3. Asante dual-disk funerary pectoral made of electroplated cast brass. Kumase, 1990.
Photo: Suzanne Gott

Although the process by which the dual-disk pectoral came into being may always be somewhat of a mystery, its meanings related to fertility and maternity suggest some manner of historical association between the necklace worn by the mprakyirefoo and the funerary awisiado. At least one, and perhaps two, early European accounts offer intriguing information that, allied with more recent ethnographic research, provides insights into the apparent transformation of the Akan single-disk pectoral into the Asante dual form.

Fig. 4. Dual-disk pectoral. Asante, Ghana. Electro- plated brass; width of one disk: 13.5cm (5.3").
Private collection. Miniature replicas of cocoa-farming tools, sym- bols of wealth, are attached to the sides of the ornament.

Akan Pectoral Ornaments
The Asante necklace with two pendant disks belongs to the broader category of Akan chest ornaments known as adebo or adaaboo, which are among the profusion of golden ornaments worn and displayed by Asante rulers and members of the royal entourage (Christaller 1933:70; Kyerematen 1961:3). The single-disk akrafokanmu (popu- larly translated as "soul washer's badges" or "soul disks"; sing. Akrafokonmu) are considered to be the most characteristic type of Akan golden pectoral. They are worn by court officials called akrafo (Fig. 7), whose full range of duties has only recently begun to be understood (see Ross 2002a, b).

Fig. 5. One of the Asantehene's two mprakyire- foo attendants.
Photo: Edward S. Ayensu. From Ayensu 1997:139.
Part of the royal entourage, the two girls wear regalia including golden dual-disk pendants, an expression of the fertility and nurturing leader- ship of the Asantehene.

Akan pectorals, including Asante double-disk pectorals, are either cast, using the lost-wax process, or made from sheet gold, using repousse or gold-leaf techniques. The cast examples may be made of solid gold, of base metal electroplated with silver and gold, or of brass that has been polished to a golden shine. Akan pectoral disks have a distinctive suspension structure. For a single-disk pectoral, a stick is passed horizontally behind the center of the disk and inserted through two hollow cylinders on each side. The pectoral hangs from a cord attached to the protruding ends of the stick. [4] The suspension method for the Asante double-disk pectoral is similar, requiring only a longer stick (see Fig. lb, the reverse of Fig. la). Similar suspension structures in gold discoid beads from at least the seventeenth century to the present, as well as the symbolic resonance of the circular form across a spectrum of Akan visual culture, attest to the historical depth of such discoid forms within the region. [5]

Fig. 6. Bereaved Asante daughters wear- ing the awisiado at their mother's funeral. Near Kumase, 1990.
Photo: Suzanne Gott. The awisiado ("orphan's necklace") was pre- sented to these women by their husbands as a symbolic gesture of consolation. The breastlike form is significant, suggesting the maternal sup- port that has now been lost.

The fact that the Asante dual-disk ornament has remained largely unrecognized or poorly understood may be due in part to its relative absence from major museum collections.6 There is no documentation of this form among the many gold objects that the British acquired as a result of Anglo-Asante wars in the late nineteenth century. In her catalogue of Asante regalia in museum collections, Martha Ehrlich did find two sheet-gold disks, "broken in half and numbered separately," that had been accessioned in 1875 by the Royal Scottish Museum. They may have originally formed one pectoral prior to their removal from Kumase, the Asante capital, during the 1874 war (Ehrlich 1981, vol. 2: fig. 36).

Fig. 7. Portrait of a young okrafo ("soul") of the Akua- pem king Kwasi Akuffo.
Unknown studio in Akropong-Akuapem, before 1908. Basel Mission Archive, D-30.11.042.
The single-disk okrafokonmu ("soul washer's badge" or "soul disk") is a well-known type of Akan pectoral ornament, worn by an official of the royal court.

It is possible that other single-disk pectorals in museum or private collections are only half of the original ornament. [7] The paired Asante disks are not actually attached to each other, and they could have been disassembled-as might have happened during British soldiers' efforts to consolidate Asante war booty for transport. [8]