Lea este ensayo en español: Género, identidad y poder en las tumbas de tiro del Occidente de Mesoamérica
During the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods (300 BCE–400 CE), western Mesoamerica—a region that spans eight present-day Mexican states—was inhabited by a series of chiefdoms immersed in a vigorous process of development and social hierarchization. These societies shared similar beliefs and practices related to the role of rulers, ancestors, and death, which they expressed by creating elaborate shaft tombs. Some of these tombs were located under temples in ceremonial complexes, forming multipurpose sacred spaces. They could be more than eighteen meters deep and included several funerary chambers where offerings made of fired clay, shell, slate, quartz, and greenstone were deposited. Among these offerings were elaborate ceramic sculptures recognized today for their artistic quality and stylistic variety.
In recent decades archaeologists have discovered intact tombs that provide valuable information about these pieces as indicators of status and their use in political ceremonies and funerary rituals. Western Mesoamerican artists captured the human figure with great technical and aesthetic mastery, creating expressive, dynamic three-dimensional bodies ; . These sculptures enabled communication based on shared symbols constructed in the context of daily life. The variety of well-defined stylistic conventions employed reflects the intent to indicate differences among the societies coexisting in the region. Thus, ethnicity, social standing, and clan lineage were made evident through details such as coiffure, clothing, body modification and ornamentation, and tattoos or body paint ; ; . A standing female figure in the Tala-Tonalá style , for example, communicates the polity to which she belonged as well as her status and role within it.
The political organization of western Mesoamerica was based on autonomous, independent villages and small chiefdoms; thus, conflict and political fragmentation are recurring themes in artworks of the region. War was celebrated as a strategy to obtain prestige and power, and weapons were key in the construction of the idea of masculinity. Mighty warriors were represented in fierce stances, flaunting their weapons . Other sculptures show scenes of confrontation: captives subdued and tightly bound in positions of submission, personages with trophy skulls hanging at their sides, and decapitated heads with the eyes closed , signifying death. Funerary offerings crafted in various types of greenstone and shell depicted atlatl (spear-throwing grips) and maces with finely worked anthropomorphic and zoomorphic designs . Protective armor such as corselets and elaborate helmets were also prominent.
All was not violent confrontation, however. Elites obtained prestige and recognition through social and religious ceremonies such as the sacred ball game played on courts near the central plazas of the region’s main settlements ; . Female representations revolved around fertility, the reproductive cycle, and, indeed, the entire lifespan: vigorous young women, pregnant women with large abdomens and breasts decorated with two-headed serpents , women giving birth while strapped to beds (as well as those who died during childbirth), and elderly women with hunched backs and flaccid breasts. These figures often appear performing domestic activities, such as grinding grain on metates, preparing food, and caring for children and pets .
The dichotomy between female figures associated with fertility and nurturing and male figures linked to power and strength suggests that gender roles were well defined in these communities. Yet women also played an important role in the political practices of these groups, as when they appeared with male counterparts at ritual banquets . The body and its depictions played a central role in articulating all kinds of societal functions extending through the corporeal, social, and cosmological experience. Figures of warriors, ballplayers, and pregnant women, censers, shells, and phallic elements—linked to agricultural fertility, death, and earthly power—also symbolized strength and sacred power.
In addition to anthropomorphic figures, numerous dogs—considered guardians of the tombs and guides that led the dead to their final resting place—have been found at the entrances of burial chambers . Also common were aquatic animals related to fertility, such as frogs, mollusks , and two-headed serpents, as well as those associated with death and the underworld, such as turtles , or the celestial world and the sun, such as birds. These pieces possessed religious meanings related to Mesoamerican cosmogony.
Across the diversity of styles evident in these figures an iconographic continuity reveals common beliefs concerning the eternal cycle of life, death, and regeneration. While this was an art made for burial, to be seen by the dead, these sculptures were at the epicenter of liturgical acts carried out by the living. They were bathed with organic materials and integrated into various rituals, such as funerals, that reflected the social status of the deceased. Depictions of majesty, ornamentation, and offerings in the ceramic representations of rulers emphasized their prestige and supremacy by reflecting their differential access to luxury goods and other objects carrying symbolic capital. The bond between the living and the dead in these societies was in many ways mediated by these funerary sculptures.
Deceased rulers were celebrated for both their earthly power and their relationship to the sacred as they ascended into the realm of revered ancestors. Their divinity was affirmed by offerings of conch trumpets, drums, pyrite mirrors, quartz crystals, and braziers—elements used by these ritual specialists who achieved altered states of consciousness through music and the consumption of hallucinogenic plants. In this way, these ritual specialists participated in and guided initiatory rites such as ritual dances that allowed them to establish contact with the supernatural world and ancestors, sometimes while impersonating mythical beings.
Although these sculptures do not depict specific individuals, they highlight important roles in Mesoamerican communities: champion of the ball game, warrior defending his people, ritual specialist honoring ancestors, sponsor of ceremonial banquets. The shaft tombs where these personages and their offerings were deposited encapsulated complex cosmological beliefs that were animated by supernatural symbolism. The media par excellence for conveying these meanings were ceramics, whose role in rituals imbued them with the power to regulate norms and enforce social cohesion while also highlighting differentiated social status among both the living and the dead. In this context, the body and its depictions acquired a central role in the articulation of all levels of experience: corporeal, social, and cosmological.