Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands

Gods, Ancestors, and Human Beings

Brigitte Faugère, Christopher Beekman

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781607329947
• eBook ISBN: 9781607329954
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands, Latin American, North American, and European researchers explore the meanings and functions of two- and three-dimensional human representations in the Precolumbian communities of the Mexican highlands. Reading these anthropomorphic representations from an ontological perspective, the contributors demonstrate the rich potential of anthropomorphic imagery to elucidate personhood, conceptions of the body, and the relationship of human beings to other entities, nature, and the cosmos.
 
Using case studies covering a broad span of highlands prehistory—Classic Teotihuacan divine iconography, ceramic figures in Late Formative West Mexico, Epiclassic Puebla-Tlaxcala costumed figurines, earth sculptures in Prehispanic Oaxaca, Early Postclassic Tula symbolic burials, Late Postclassic representations of Aztec Kings, and more—contributors examine both Mesoamerican representations of the body in changing social, political, and economic conditions and the multivalent emic meanings of these representations. They explore the technology of artifact production, the body's place in social structures and rituals, the language of the body as expressed in postures and gestures, hybrid and transformative combinations of human and animal bodies, bodily representations of social categories, body modification, and the significance of portable and fixed representations.
 
Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands provides a wide range of insights into Mesoamerican concepts of personhood and identity, the constitution of the human body, and human relationships with gods and ancestors. It will be of great value to students and scholars of the archaeology and art history of Mexico.
 
Contributors: Claire Billard, Danièle Dehouve, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Melissa Logan, Sylvie Peperstraete, Patricia Plunket, Mari Carmen Serra Puche, Juliette Testard, Andrew Turner, Gabriela Uruñuela, Marcus Winter

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction:. Gods, Ancestors, and Human Beings
• 1. Pretty Face and Naked Body in Context: Meanings and Uses of Chupícuaro Figurines (Guanajuato) during the Late Formative
• 2. Unseating the Shaman: Narrative Performance and Co-Essences in the Hollow Figures of Western Mexico
• 3. Gender and Paired Ceramic Figures in Late Formative West Mexico
• 4. Sexuality and Regeneration in the Underworld: Earth Sculptures in the Cueva del Rey Kong-Oy, Sierra Mixe, Oaxaca
• 5. Costumes and Puppets among Cholula’s Early Classic Figurines and the Formation of Social Worlds
• 6. Unmasking Tlaloc: The Iconography, Symbolism, and Ideological Development of the Teotihuacan Rain God
• 7. The Nature of the Old God of Teotihuacan: Why Would the Old God Be Represented by an Elderly Human Body?
• 8. Epiclassic Figurines of Xochitécatl, Tlaxcala, Mexico: Hypotheses on Their Social Lives and Their Ideological Relevance
• 9. All the Earth Is a Grave: Ancestors and Symbolic Burials at Tula
• 10. Representing the Human Body in Postclassic Central Mexico: A Study of Proportions and Their Evolution in the Aztec Pictorial Tradition
• 11. The Notion of Substitution in Aztec Kingship
• Contributors
• Index