From a Cave near Tehuacán? Reconstructing Object Histories of Looted Postclassic Mesoamerican Turquoise Mosaics

Summary

The mid-20th-century market for pre-Columbian antiquities is notoriously opaque. Riddled as this moment in the market is with stories of looting, forgery and deceit, the period between roughly 1950 and 1990 is also the era in which significant parts of today’s best-known museum collections of pre-Columbian art were formed. Because of the practices of art dealers many pieces that once formed part of the same original deposit are now scattered over the globe. Any possible information on the provenience of these clusters of objects can only be found hidden away in the archives of the institutions that hold them. The only way to bring these pieces back together and (partially) reconxtextualize them is through the study and publication of their object biographies.

In this presentation I attempt to reassemble a corpus of Post-Classic Mesoamerican turquoise pieces, that were probably looted in the late 1950s/early 1960s and appeared on the market between 1950 and 1980. All of these are said to come from caves near Tehuacán, but lack any further information on their exact provenience and provenance. Nonetheless, the pieces can be relatively securely traced to specific localities or regions through a combination of stylistic, archaeological and archival research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21209