Female Figure, 1200–1521, Huastec culture; limestone; Mexico, Veracruz, Tempoal.
Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, INV09-211134
Transcript
Male Narrator: The Huasteca is a multiethnic region that flourished along the northern Gulf Coast of Mexico in the centuries before the sixteenth-century Spanish Conquest. These monumental figures represent a Huastec man and woman. Kim Richter:
Kim Richter: What is interesting and unique about these sculptures is that when you look at them frontally, they look really three dimensional. But from the side, they’re really flat.
Male Narrator: The poses of both figures are typical in representations of each gender. The female figure has her hands on her hips. The male figure poses with one hand semi-closed in front of his chest and the other open at his side. The markings on the woman’s shoulders and chest are either tattoos or scarifications. Their garments and other regalia reveal they were high-ranking individuals.
Kim Richter: The man wears a headdress with a face that seems to engulf the wearer’s head and ear pendants [soft percussion with ambient music evoking wind sounds] in the shape of an ‘L’ that probably would have been made of shell, and are associated with the wind god. The man also wears a spectacular collar with this scalloped design and little round shapes that could have represented gold.
The female sculpture wears a fan-shaped headdress made of rich plumes and gold ornaments. It shows two serpents emerging on either side of her face. Intertwined serpents of this nature were connected to rulership.
[music ends]
Male Narrator: Walk around to the reverse side of the sculptures and you’ll see carvings on the back, too. Men and women are featured in monumental sculptures like these in roughly equivalent numbers, suggesting that among the Huastec elite, they had equal status.