Postconquest Figurines from Central Mexico: Aspects of Phenotype and Artifice

Summary

This analysis focuses on figurines made after the Spanish conquest (1521 CE) of Mexico, based on the collections from three museums: the Hearst Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Field Museum. The central questions address figurines as media that could potentially negotiate issues of racial (or casta) categorization, phenotype, and artifice. The figurines were collected and accessioned in the early 20th century, before the development of archaeological methodologies that pay close attention to context and stratigraphy. Therefore, they present serious challenges to chronology-building, to our knowledge of the sites where the figurines were collected, and to any determination of use of the figurines. Still, it is possible to address three basic questions regarding the figurines: 1) Do they portray what we would recognize as phenotypes or any other aspects of racial categorization? 2) Do they focus instead on what we would associate with ethnicity, including aspects of dress, hairstyles, and other material culture? 3) Were figurines media for conveying ideas about race or casta, ethnicity, class, or other social distinctions in postconquest Mexico? The figurines offer us a unique opportunity to understand how indigenous people portrayed aspects of ethnicity and casta in colonial and republican Mexico.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage