Five oddly expressive clay figurines, made on the edge of the Maya world about 2,400 years ago, were probably used as puppets in public rituals to commemorate mythical or real events.
“They would have either represented actual personages, or they were generic ‘media’ for rituals connected to rulers,” says archaeologist Jan Szymański of the University of Warsaw.
Szymański and his colleague Gabriela Prejs unearthed the puppets near the top of a ruined pyramid at the San Isidro archaeological site, a little under 50 kilometers west of San Salvador. The soil layer containing the puppets dates to about 400 B.C. But such figurines may have been used throughout the Maya Preclassic and Classic periods, from about 2000 B.C. to A.D. 900, Szymański and Prejs report March 5 in Antiquity.
One of the largest puppets is about 30 centimeters tall and depicts a man, while two others of similar size depict women. The three large figurines lack hair, but two smaller ones — one almost 18 centimeters tall and the other about 10 centimeters — depict women with locks of hair on their foreheads.
The puppets had no clothes when they were found, but Szymański thinks they were decorated for their ritual roles. “I’m pretty sure that they were given clothes and wigs in order to look more lifelike,” he says.
The most striking features of the large puppets are their movable heads and strange facial expressions. From eye level, the puppets look angry, but from above they seem to be grinning, and from below they look scared, Szymański says.
What messages or stories they would have been posed to convey, however, are not known.
University of Michigan archaeologist Joyce Marcus, an expert on Mesoamerican figurines who was not involved in the study, says the ability to move the puppets’ heads was “probably a sight to behold, a kind of ‘numinous’ [spiritual] experience.”
This suggests that the figurines may have portrayed participants in rituals, witnesses to certain events or deceased individuals who were “brought to life” during the public rituals, she says.
Similar figurines have been found elsewhere in Central America, hinting at unexpected cultural connections between the San Isidro site and these other areas. The region was once thought to be a southern frontier of Maya culture, centered in the lowlands of Chiapas and Yucatán in Mexico, as well as Belize and eastern parts of Guatemala. But Szymański says that the discoveries indicate the region was instead a cultural crossroads linking the Maya world with other societies.
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