CONTENIDO

CONTENTS

SPIS TREŚCI

Prefacio

Foreword

Przedmowa

Clay figurines and their clothing: feminine identification features in the western region of the Mayan culture in the Late Classical period

In the plastic representations of the pre-Hispanic world, various cultures – Maya Chontal among them – marked some of the distinctive features of their identity. They emphasized the garment or the body elements that were more significant for them. Women and men were portrayed to scale, conforming an emic description of the way they auto-defined themselves. The physical representations of the ancient inhabitants of the State of Tabasco – south of Mexico – are found mainly reflected in stone sculptures, vessels and clay figurines. However the most important collection is formed by the latter. The figurines establish a division – via the clothing, ornaments, hairstyles, headdress and even their physical position – of gender, origin, activities and hierarchy corresponding to each individual. Also, the designs, the ornament composition decorating the capes, the laincloths, or the huipil reflect part of the cosmovision of this culture during the Late Classical period.

West Mesoamerican women’s representations, their body designs and symbology

The female ceramic figurines realized in the west Mesoamerica territory, have an important body painted decoration which represent singly or combined geometric designs like spirals, straight, zigzag and wavy lines, circles, concentric circles, triangles, crosses and points are observed like decoration. This order designs transcends by the location in breasts, pelvic and belly area, in addition to this, most of them allude to the sexed body. It is thus the symbolic codes present in the sculptures can be interpreted from the relationship with thoughts of life, where societies are intimately linked with the cycles of nature, with the universe distribution of vertical and horizontal way, which refer archetypal concepts in Mesoamerica. Therefore it is important to consider these representations as possible social and cosmological allegories conceptions of culture that developed in the late formative and half Classic period (BC 200 – AD 400/600), during the tradition of the Tumbas de Tiro in territory comprised by the present states of Jalisco, Colima, Nayarit, Michoacan and the south central of Sinaloa.

A bat which has become eternal among colors and precious stones

Mesoamerican religions in the pre-Hispanic period perceived the animal and plant world as inseparably connected with the divine world, and, thus, having decisive influence on human existence. Animals could play different roles in them: from deity personification, through assuming a part of divine nature, to acting as messengers communicating divine and human reality. Due to the environment in which they live, bats became one of the leading figures in Indian culture. Since caves, being typical habitat of these mammals, were regarded as gateways for communication with the supernatural world, while bats, freely moving between the unexplored darkness of the caves (identified with the underworld) and the outside world (the world of living people), naturally became personification of divinity and/or messengers of gods. Moreover, as shown in the presented iconographic sources, bats aroused both curiosity, admiration and fear due to their ability of echolocation, feeding on blood and also due to their dual nature: although they were mammals, they could fly like birds. This article aims at analysing perception of bats in various Mesoamerican cultures over the centuries: from the Olmec civilization through the Maya, Zapotec to the Mexica.

Common Nahuas women, life cycle

The poetry stimulates the imagination; is creation act of imaginary worlds without rules of credibility, or perception of reality, laws are suspended by the reader in the act of reading - invited by poetical faith to penetrate this universe-. It’s possible to establish interaction between an author and a reader, by a poetical element and artistic perception, moments of major value for the poem. Texts of nahuatl lyric poetry (cuicatl, “singings”, “poems”, and huehuetlatolli, “advice”), from before the conquest of the Mexico valley, are identified and analyzed on the basis of stylistic resources that help to reconstruct a life cycle of an ordinary woman. In this case, the expressive modalities of literary production are understood in social and cultural context. Through these lines, we will search the sense of poems and advice that gave sense to a stage of México’s history. The present text is an analytical exercise of a literary manifestation that still guards many secrets for discovering: the literature nahuatl.

Panorama of research into embroidery patterns functioning in Mexico

In Mexico, primarily during the 19th century, production of embroidery designs was a popular activity among young girls. Objects which reflected reproducibility of some of the ornaments and methods of creation, became patterns demonstrating types of embroidery techniques. They have been subject of numerous studies, especially in historical, ethnographic, archaeological or restoration-related contexts. This allowed for distinguishing the main concepts that led to devising schemes which designated a former approach to the subject. This article reviews various research concepts that have shaped reflection on embroidery patterns in Mexico, including foreign studies. It also proposes an art history approach, allowing for new findings and possibilities for analysing those objects being elements of material culture. Women who dealt with development of patterns may be seen as artists, the masters of their profession, whose virtuosity was manifested in the class of the objects themselves as a result of devoted time and extraordinary manual skill.