Standard Bearer

Early artists throughout the region of West Mexico crafted ceramic sculptures of daily life including human effigies, plants, and animals (see MMA 1979.205.5). This clay example depicts a seated male with a broad chest and shoulders, a pronounced nose, hollow almond-shaped eyes, his mouth upturned, as if smiling. He wears a loincloth with a rectangular fringe and a belt that wraps around the waist and is adorned with circular earspools. A perforation at the center of each suggests that an additional dangling element may once have been attached. The figure’s left arm and hand are placed atop his hip, while the right arm is supported by his bent knee. His right hand is outstretched, fingers and thumb touching, a gesture that may indicate he is either a standard bearer or warrior, responsible for carrying an emblematic staff or weapon.

Colima ceramics are often produced using a local clay of orange and brown hues and applied with a deep red paint or slip. This figure would have been modeled by hand, using techniques of coiling and beating of malleable clay to produce its features. The artist would have used a stylus to cut into the surface, revealing the contrasting, grey-colored clay to accentuate the facial features and details of the hands, feet, and garment. Like many Colima figures, this example is highly burnished, a technique in which clay sculptors carefully rubbed the surface with smooth stone or other abrasive materials to produce its luminous luster.

From the first millennium BCE, figures like this one were part of funerary assemblages placed in shaft tombs. These are deep, rectangular burial structures consisting of a series of tunnels and adjacent chambers for several interred individuals. They were likely multigenerational, with ceramic offerings representing vital vignettes to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. Additional offerings might include shells, jade, greenstone, tecomate (gourd), and woven textiles. During this period, this was a shared cultural process of ritual interment throughout what are now the western coastal states of Jalisco, Nayarit and Colima.

Archaeological excavations have revealed that several ceramic figural offerings were intentionally fragmented. This modification of figures included the decapitation of clay bodies that were then placed with the interred, allowing them to accompany the deceased into the afterlife (Zavaleta Lucido & Florez Ramírez 2016: 66–67). Although some of its features no longer remain, this figure remains fully intact, its carefully sculpted facial features and ornamentation connoting the enduring potency of civic authority.

Brandon Agosto, 2026

Further reading:

Beekman, Christopher S., and Robert S. Pickering. Shaft Tombs and Figures in West Mexican Society: A Reassessment. Edited by Christopher S. Beekman, and Robert S. Pickering. Tulsa: Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, 2016.

Butterwick, Kristi. Heritage of Power: Ancient Sculpture From West Mexico: The Andrall E. Pearson Family Collection. New York, New Haven, London: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004.

Butterwick, Kristi. "Food for the Dead: The West Mexican Art of Feasting," In: Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past, edited by Richard Townsend, pp. 89–105, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998.

Hernández Díaz, Verónica. "Muerte y vida en la cultura tumbas de tiro", in Miradas renovadas al Occidente indígena de México, edited by Marie Areti Hers, pp. 79–131. Mexico: Mexico Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, 2013.

Meighan, Clement W., and H.B. Nicholson. "The Ceramic Mortuary Offerings of Prehistoric West Mexico: An Archaeological Perspective." In: Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico. Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima. A Catalogue of the Proctor Stafford Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Revised edition, by Michael Kan, Clement Meighan, and H. B. Nicholson, pp. 29-67. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989.

Olay Barrientos, María de los Ángeles, and Andrés Saúl Alcántara Salinas. "La tumba de las Fuentes, Colima. Notas sobre los contextos funerarios de las élites hacia el fin de la fase Comala. In Memoria I Foro Colima y su Región Arqueología, Antropología e Historia, edited by Juan Carlos Reyes G., pp. 1-34, Mexico: Secretaría de Cultura, Gobierno, del Estado de Colima.

Pickering, Robert B., and Maria Teresa Cabrero. "Mortuary Practices in the Shaft-Tomb Region." In: Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past, edited by Richard Townsend, pp. 71–87, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998.

Pickering Robert B., Cheryl Smallwood-Roberts, and Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. West Mexico. Ritual and Identity. Tulsa, Oklahoma: Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, 2016.

Townsend, Richard, ed. Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998.

Zavaleta Lucido, Marcos Trinidad and Rosa María Flores Ramírez. "The shaft tombs of Parcelas 12, 19, and 25 and their inhabitants: Funerary considerations on recent archaeological finds in Colima," in: Shaft Tombs and Figures in West Mexican Society: A Reassessment. Edited by Christopher S. Beekman and Robert S. Pickering, pp. 55–72, Tulsa: Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, 2016.