Carrying a load on the back with the help of a rope or band, which in Nahuatl was called mecapalli (Castellanized mecapal) must have been one of the most habitual actions in the daily life of Mesoamerica. In particular, the carrying of a vessel on the back was a very common theme of Mesoamerican art, especially in pottery, but also in onyx and obsidian. Carriers are not always men; they can also be more or less anthropomorphic animals.
It is often the case that artistic pieces with the carrier theme play with the assimilation of two notions of body, the body of the vessel and the body of the person or subject that carries it. Sometimes it seems that the figure arises or emerges from the vessel, and sometimes it is the other way around. Also the allusion to the abdomen as container, because sometimes the prolongation of the curve of the vessel is present in these types of pieces.
This piece corresponds, therefore, to a common theme of Mesoamerican art. The male or female carrier, holds and tightens the mecapal with the hands, as was typical of that carrying technique and is reflected in many images. The belly, bulging so ostensibly, would seem to be that of a pregnant woman, but the volume of the breasts is a little puzzling. In any case, the swelling of the belly would correspond to an aspect of the general meaning of the figure, which has to do with the world beneath the earth, associated with death prior to regeneration (the seed inflates and rots before allowing life to break out, just as the mother's womb swells), also associated with water.
The piece that concerns us has the rich polychromist characteristic of the pottery of the Mixtec-Puebla Tradition (a tradition that extended throughout much of Mesoamerica), in this case with predominance of the colors red, orange, yellow, brown and black. The repertoire of symbols with which the figure has been decorated also corresponds to that of that tradition.
In the painted bands at the upper and lower extremes of the globe of the vessel is a motif that was very common in the Late Classic, for example in Cacaxtla, known as the "Reptile Eye", associated with the underworld. This does not mean that the vessel may correspond to this period, since the rest of its decoration is undoubtedly of the Late Post-Classic; what is happening is that the glyph Eye of the reptile was incorporated in the later iconography.
In the central upper band eight motifs of concentric circles appear to coincide with the representation of the jade or chalchihuite jewel, symbol of water. And in the lower one a connected figure appears, as if it were a great slope presented horizontally, on which the head of a serpent can be distinguished from whose jaws springs a spiral finished in what seems to be a jewel.
The neck of the vessel is decorated with a strip divided into squares. From right to left, starting at the point where the vessel s the carrier's head, we can see the symbol of the year, then a typical image of the underworld in which a stellar eye is perceived (the underworld imagined and represented with something like a night sky, with stars) surrounded by stones. In the central picture, on the back of the figure, appears a face of Tezcatlipoca and, continuing to the left, another image of the underworld with a stellar eye and stones. In the penultimate picture there is a representation of death, by means of a skull, and finally a repetition of the image of the underworld.
