Mesoamerican Figurines: Small-Scale Indices of Large-Scale Social Phenomena

8. New Fire Figurines and the Iconography of Penitence in Huastec Art

8 New Fire Figurines and the Iconography of Penitence in Huastec Art Katherine A. Faust Any tattoo—indeed—a mark of any kind—on the skin, is a registration of the causal factors which produced it, and hence a symbolic residue of the totality of causal factors, events, social obligations, individual and collective relationships impinging on the social person. Thus a tattoo . . . is always a registration of an external social milieu, because it is only in relation to that milieu that the tattoo has meaning. Gell 1993: 36–37 Iconography adorning anthropomorphic figurines, sculptures, and vessels speaks to the vigorous manner in which the Huastec inhabitants of the northeastern Gulf Coast region of Mesoamerica marked and branded their bodies, thereby creating a unique aesthetic of self. While scholars generally agree that pre-Columbian Huastec art reflects social identity alongside religious and cosmological concerns (see Castro-Leal 1979; Fuente 1980; Trejo 2004; Zaragoza Ocaña 1999), the specific symbols that comprise this ideology written upon the body are poorly understood. Iconographic, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic analyses of a rare set of figurines (reportedly from the Tampico-Pánuco region of the Huasteca) in the collection of the Museo de Antropología, Xalapa, Veracruz, demonstrate that motifs depicted on these small clay bodies collectively reference concepts pertaining to primordial creation, particularly the drilling of fire (producing flame by rapidly rotating a vertical wooden stick upon a horizontal one) and ritual blood sacrifice. More specifically, the symbols on these figurines are representations of divinatory regalia and the tools of penitence, including shining mirrors, fire drills, maguey thorns, and sharp obsidian blades. By permanently marking the body with images of the instruments used to periodically inflict and bleed the body, the aesthetic ideal of penitence and the ritual potency of penitential acts is memorialized in the Huastec self and in material representations of the Huastec body. As portrayals of small bodies inscribed with a limited range of “essentialized” 206 Katherine A. Faust imagery, the figures from the Tampico-Pánuco region, referred to here as “New Fire” figurines, are instrumental to understanding the significance and placement of similar motifs on other examples of Huastec art.1 Huastec Iconography and the Tampico-Pánuco New Fire Figurines The Middle and Late Postclassic (circa 1150–1521 ce) Huastec produced one of the most unique art styles in ancient Mesoamerica, inspiring scholarly interest since the turn of the nineteenth century (for example, Beyer 1934; Fewkes 1906; Meade 1942: 53–67; Nuttall 1888; Saville 1900). Composed primarily through the repetition of highly stylized motifs, Huastec iconography adorning anthropomorphic sculptures, vessels, and figurines emphasizes an aesthetic of self that involved temporarily marking or permanently tattooing the body to create a “social skin,” using the terminology of Terrence Turner (1980). Ethnohistorical sources similarly imply that painting, tattooing, piercing , tooth filing, and other modificatory practices were central to Huastec identity, social status, and military status (see Durán 1964: ch. 14, 105–8; Sahagún 1950–69: bk. 10: 185). In addition to recording adornmental practices , analyses of Huastec art have emphasized that bodily iconography reflects religious and cosmological content, particularly as pertains to agricultural fertility and the cyclical regeneration of life through death (Castro Leal 1989; Trejo 1989). Appreciating the long (albeit turbulent) history of indigenous presence in the Huasteca, scholars have also productively incorporated ethnographic data into their interpretations of ancient art (see Ochoa 1991; Ochoa and Gutiérrez 1996–99). A more recent trend is to examine Huastec iconography within the historical and sociopolitical contexts of its production (see Richter 2004). This represents an important turn, as meaning is dependent on the circumscribing social milieu (Gell 1993: 36; see also Koontz 1994). Some of the symbols inscribed in the Tampico-Pánuco figurines also adorn the most elaborate examples of Huastec sculptures and are likewise prevalent in the ceramic types known as Huastec Black-on-White and Tancol Bi- and Polychrome. These materials first appeared in the Huasteca around 1000 ce, during the middle part of the cultural phases known as Las Flores or Panuco V in the Ekholm chronology (1944), Isla B in the Wilkerson chronology (1972), and Tamul in the Merino Carrión and García Cook chronology and continue to characterize the ritual ceramic tradition 207 New Fire Figurines and the Iconography of Penitence in Huastec Art of the Huasteca throughout the Middle and Late Postclassic periods (Merino Carrión and García Cook...