In the graves and tombs at Cuilapa were discovered many personal ornaments made of jadeite, amazon stone, and turquois. In an excavation made during January, 1902, in the great temple mound, or teocalli, dominating the group of mogotes at Cuilapa, a grave was discovered on the summit at a depth of six feet from the surface. It contained the skeleton of a child, whose bones, together with the accompanying artifacts, were stained bright-red by hematite paint which had been thrown into the grave. Surrounding the skeleton were seventeen greenstone idols in the form of human figures; more than four hundred beads of greenstone and jadeite of varying sizes; thirty-five shells of various kinds, perforated for suspension; bits of mother-of-pearl, obsidian, and hematite, which evidently were fragments of disintegrated mosaic objects; but the most interesting objects recovered were a pair of small discs of pottery, upon the flat upper surfaces of which were cemented small pieces of very thin, highly-polished hematite, placed in mosaic. These last were undoubtedly mirrors, although from the small perforation in the center of each we are inclined to regard the pair as having been used also as ear-ornaments. One of these specimens should be in the Museo Nacional of Mexico, where it belongs; the other is in the American Museum of Natural History. The latter, now illustrated for the first time (fig. 7), is an inch and three-quarters in diameter, and an eighth of an inch in thickness. Our reproduction of this interesting object has been made possible by the courtesy of Dr. Clark Wissler, Curator of Anthropology.
Fig. 7
An interesting specimen of the combination of gold with turquois mosaic in jewelry has been recently figured in colors, and described by the writer (see fig. 8).[77] It is in the form of a shield, with four arrows or darts and pendent bells, and has an extreme length of three and one-eighth inches from the top of the shield to the bottom of the central bells. We have described in detail the meaning of the hieroglyph formed by the mosaic-work, and shown that the brooch-like jewel was the insignia of one of the four principal chiefs of the Aztecan army, who governed one of the four wards, or calpullis, into which Tenochtitlan, the capital of Montezuma, was divided. As a matter of fact, the jewel was found in a grave in Yanhuitlan, in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. It is the only known specimen that shows turquois set on gold, a combination to which we have called attention, in quoting from Sahagun and others, regarding turquois mosaic on crowns, bracelets, and other gold objects for personal adornment.
Fig. 8
In the collections of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, are three mirrors faced with highly-polished marcasite on their original matrices, apparently slate—the only specimens of this character that we have seen. Two of these mirrors, which were collected by William Niven from ancient graves near Iguala, Guerrero, are perforated for suspension, and all three average five inches in diameter and a quarter of an inch in thickness. With these mirrors were found numerous little unpolished cubes of iron pyrites, which may have been intended for use in mosaic-work. There are, however, a number of rather thin, flat, irregularly shaped pieces, with very thin matrix of stone, and with beveled edges, which unquestionably have been parts of mirrors made in mosaic fashion similar to those found in the Cuilapa grave, the only difference being that the inlays from Iguala are larger and thicker than those on the Cuilapa specimens, which are simply thin sheets of hematite. The region where the Iguala specimens were discovered was probably the seat of a people of Nahuan culture.
PL. XVIII
MASK OF HUMAN SKULL WITH MOSAIC DECORATION