The Mesoamerican Knife Handles at the Museo delle Civiltà (Rome): A Cultural Biography

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Museo delle Civiltà (Rome) holds two famous Late Postclassic Mesoamerican knife-handles, sculpted in wood and encrusted with a mosaic of turquoise, malachite, lignite, Spondylus, Strombus, mother-of-pearl, and gold. Both represent crouching figures—one anthropomorphic and the other zoomorphic—facing toward the now-missing blades. The two artifacts were most probably brought to Bologna in 1533 by the Dominican friar Domingo de Betanzos, together with other mosaics, featherworks, and codices. In Bologna, they ended up in the collection of Ferdinando Cospi (1606–1686) and, subsequently, in other local public collections until 1875, when they were transferred to Rome by Luigi Pigorini. The paper investigates the long cultural biography of the two handles, reconstructing their collection history and focusing on the visual reproductions and textual descriptions produced by a host of scholars over the centuries. Part of the paper will deal with the most recent phase of their biography, that is, a recent multidisciplinary research project—also including scientific analyses and 3D modeling—which explored the handles’ iconography, technology, function, and cultural attribution.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37942.0