Female Figure

Handmolded clay figurines were produced across Mesoamerica throughout its history, from as early as the second millennium BCE though the early 16th century (see MMA 1979.206.96, 989). During the Preclassic period, nude female figures such as this one, emphasizing the breasts and hips - body parts associated with female fertility - were particularly common. This example wears only a few items of jewelry. Typical of figurines of the period, it blends minimized or exaggerated elements with highly naturalistic details. The arms are disproportionately short, each terminating in four squat fingers, and each small foot has only four toes. In contrast, the head and its features are large, with wide eyes outlined and infilled in black, angled upward and set wide apart to either side of the broad nose. The full lips are pulled back to reveal a row of teeth showing signs of dental modification, also tinted black.

The figure’s gender is made clear in the naturalistically rendered breasts and nipples, full hips and thighs, and softly rounded belly, with the groin defined by deep cuts into the clay. This is clearly a woman of status. She wears sizable earspools, and the ridge across her forehead may represent an ornamental band. Her hair is elaborately coiffed. Two wide sections, colored black, extend from the forehead and behind each ear to meet at the nape of the neck. A third lock covers only the top of the head. Areas of bare scalp are painted in a darker red slip than that covering the rest of the body. The elongated shape of the head, flat at the base of the skull with a distinctive bulge at the top, is the result of cranial modification performed in infancy. This, together with the dental modification, is most likely an indicator of status, social identification, and perhaps stage in life. Noting the emphasis on adornment in the burials of young adults at the Preclassic site of Tlatilco, Rosemary Joyce (2000: 30-34) suggests that the elaborate coiffures and adornments of figurines such as this one reflect social practices of beautifying those passing from youth to adulthood.

Figurines depicting humans, animals, and composite beings have been discovered in burials and offering caches, as well as refuse middens. They were sometimes configured to suggest narrative scenes, objects in place creating moments in time. Joyce Marcus (2009:27) believes that the handling of small figurines may have been confined to household rituals, practiced exclusively by women as a way for the spirits of the deceased to continue to have a role in the lives of their descendants. Their small scale would make it possible for these miniaturized representations to have been manipulated in rituals before being discarded or placed as offering. Unlike larger ritual objects, figurines could be held, positioned, and re-positioned easily, the movements of the handler reflected in those of the object, a particularly intimate relationship between ritual practitioner and ritual object.

Further Reading

Halperin, Christina T., Katherine A. Faust, Rhonda Taube, and Aurore Giguet, eds. Mesoamerican Figurines: Small-Scale Indices of Large-Scale Social Phenomena. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009.

Joyce, Rosemary. Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Marcus, Joyce, Rethinking Figurines. In Mesoamerican Figurines: Small-Scale Indices of Large-Scale Social Phenomena, edited by Christina Halperin, et al. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009, pp. 25-50.