An Underground Home for Earthly Beings. Reconstructing the Archaeological Context of a Lot of Mesoamerican Mosaic Encrusted Artifacts in the National Museum of the American Indian Collections

Summary

The National Museum of the American Indian holds a lot of Mesoamerican mosaic encrusted wooden masks and shields bought in 1921 from Carl A. Purpus, who stated they were found in a cave near Acatlán, Puebla (Mexico).

The presentation, besides including a brief description of the artifacts, it is aimed at reconstructing the objects’ unknown contextual information through a comparison with similar objects held in American, Mexican and European museums, some of them proceeding from scientifically excavated caves. The comparative analysis, integrated by information deriving from Mixtec codices and early colonial Spanish historical sources, suggests that a group of caves in Puebla and Oaxaca contained similar sets of sacred bundles representing earthly beings known as ñuhu in Mixtec language. The bundles must have been used in ritual performances related with the reciprocal exchange of gifts between humans and extra human beings. The aim of the paper is thus to provide the artifacts in the NMAI collection with some of the contextual information that was lost when they were looted from the cave. In this way, the artifacts reacquire their status of powerful instantiations of earthly fertility, thus becoming much more meaningful both for Mesoamericanist scholars and contemporary indigenous communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 18746