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12 Sex in the City A Comparison of Aztec Ceramic Figurines to Copal Figurines from the Templo Mayor Cecelia F. Klein and Naoli Victoria Lona Scholars have often noted that of the thousands upon thousands of cached artifacts unearthed at the Aztec Templo Mayor, or “Great Temple,” the largest and most important temple-pyramid in the Aztec imperial capital, Tenochtitlan, none is a ceramic figurine.1 This is surprising because thousands of Aztec ceramic figurines exist in museum and archaeological site collections. Averaging between 3 and 15 centimeters in height and generally entirely or partially mold-made, these ceramic figurines were both widely available and easily transportable. Regardless, they are usually recovered, broken and fragmented, from household debris, often in towns and peasant villages located outside the largest urban centers. Michael Smith (1997: 79) has uncovered evidence that some of the Postclassic period (ad 950–1521) ceramic figurines excavated at the Nahuatl-speaking villages of Yautepec, Cuexcomate, and Capilco in Morelos were kept in wall niches inside the home, recalling the sixteenth-century Dominican Diego Durán’s (1967: 1: 248; 1971: 235) report that the Aztecs placed “idols” in their household shrines.2 In the Teotihuacan Valley, Susan Evans (1990) found Late Postclassic (ad 1340–1500) ceramic figurines not only inside Aztec houses but also nearby at temascales, or sweat baths. Other ceramic figurines in Central Mexico had been buried in fields and, rarely, graves, as well as found at the bottom of ancient canals, springs, rivers, lakes, and in temples and palaces (Elson 1999; Kaplan 1958: 175; Millian 1981: 21, 46; Porcayo 1998: 248, 258–59, 263). But if ceramic figurines played such an important role in the daily lives of ordinary Aztec householders and farmers, why were they absent from the Templo Mayor offerings? The Templo Mayor offerings are known to contain numerous objects obtained, whether by gift or by tribute, from regions Cecelia F. Klein and Naoli Victoria Lona 328 outside the capital. Many of these are relatively small and assume a human or animal form, yet none are of clay. Some reasons for the absence of clay figurines in these offerings are suggested by analysis of a genre of figurines that are represented in the Templo Mayor offerings: those made of copal. Copal, as Naoli Victoria Lona (2004a, 2004b) has pointed out, comes from the resin of several trees, primarily those of the species Bursera bipinnata.3 When burned, this resin emits a white, pleasant-smelling smoke still believed by many Mesoamericans to nourish and delight the gods. The presence of figurines made of copal where ceramic figurines are absent begs for an understanding of the historical and iconographic relationship of the two genres. Several aspects of this relationship are salient, including subject matter, standardization, and gender. The subject matter of the copal figurines is greatly limited in comparison with that of ceramic figurines, and their style and iconography are far more standardized. The female figurines made of copal have numerous counterparts among the ceramic figurines, whereas the copal males do not. Moreover, the latter seem to relate to a single ceramic male type that is extremely rare. For some reason, the copal males do not resemble a popular type of ceramic figurine. Any explanation of this situation must take into account the identities of the personages represented in both clay and copal. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars have traditionally identified many Aztec ceramic figurine types with deities in the Aztec state pantheon. They have, moreover, usually assumed that the iconography of the clay figurines reflects the influence of the expanding state’s official religion. However, there is little persuasive evidence for identifying the vast majority of the ceramic figurines with the official gods and goddesses portrayed in and near the capital. In making this point, we follow the lead taken by Alva Millian , who, in her Columbia University master’s thesis in art history (1981: 476), declined to label any of her figurine groups with the name of a deity. Millian believed that “there is reasonable evidence to support the contention that some Aztec figurines [sic] types previously labeled as deities are, instead, humans—perhaps petitioners or deity impersonators” (see also Millian 1981: 3, 113–15). This may be so, but there is also support for Michael Smith’s (2002: 102–5; 2005) suggestion that many ceramic figurines represent not a specific personage per se but rather the spiritual essence or collective life force of an entity in the natural or...

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