We do not know the exact history of the first seals, since we cannot know when and where they were initially made. Although it is possible to determine that they were used by many men and women of various towns in ancient Mexico and due to the value of their significance, they are an essential part of the larger canon of Mesoamerican life.
The seals were important ceremonial objects, and archaeologists have found them in controlled excavation sites that were developed early on such as Tlatilco, in central Mexico, La Venta in the state of Tabasco, as well as in the two big cities: Teotihuacan, in the State of Mexico and Monte Alban, Oaxaca, which dominated the Mesoamerican region during the Classic period; also at several sites on the Gulf of Mexico and in the Mayan region. Similarly, during the Post-Classic Period and during the sixteenth century, the Nahua and other peoples in many regions of Mexico employed seals. It is an object that covered a great geographical spread and that was part of the system of exchange that existed throughout the Mesoamerican region for an ample period.
Most of the seals that we know of were modeled in clay, and because few examples have been found manufactured in bone, it is thought that early on seals were also made from other materials, many of them perishable, and thus there could be seals made of wood, which is a material that disintegrates over time. In this way, most seals that have been found were made of clay, a ductile and malleable material arising from the decomposition of rocks containing feldspar through a natural process that takes thousands of years.
Clay, located in deposits discovered by potters, is characterized by obtaining plasticity when mixed with water and is composed of other materials such as sand or organic material called degreasers to give greater strength and cohesion for working and shaping it. Once the clay has dried it becomes firm and when subjected to high temperatures, in an oven specifically designed for firing it, becomes a permanently rigid material. Obviously the firing temperature is important and influences the hardness of the piece.
It is important to note that the first, that is, earliest seals were modeled by hand and that the designs were achieved using a sharp instrument to remove all the clay from around the desired shape, and to forge deep incisions. In turn, it is important to stress that the manufacture of seals made using molds began later in the Classic period, possibly in the city of Teotihuacan, due to the high demand for this object and the possibility of mass producing them in large numbers.
In this case, the clay, mixed with a selection of degreasers, was poured and pressed inside the molds, which were also made of fired clay. Once dried the piece would become rigid and was extracted from the inside of the mold for firing in wood-burning kilns. This speaks of a significant workforce and the organization necessary to produce these small objects. They were possibly manufactured in specialized workshops dedicated to pottery, where this ceramic object of daily and ceremonial use was also manufactured.
Seals can take many forms. They can be square, rectangular and circular, and they can be flat, convex and concave. To some extent it depends on the surface to which the seal is applied. Its shape depends on its function; if the surface is flat, like a sheet of paper (amate, for example), or a piece of fabric, a flat or cylindrical seal would be used; on the other hand, printing or stamping a curved and concave surface, which could be a vessel or part of the human body, required a concave seal to be able to place the design in fine low relief on the surface, or perhaps a convex seal also called a rocker.
It should be noted that the seals usually have a handle or small grip, it can have different forms. The small grip serves to hold the seal when the design is applied to a surface, and it may be flat, tapered, elongated, or in the shape of a handle or bulb, whereas cylindrical seals are very different. It is worth adding that seals often play the role of a rattle. Inside the handle there is a small clay sphere.
Jorge Enciso records that seals were often employed for painting paper and textiles, and adds that the seals were also used for applications on different parts of the human body. The seal, impregnated with a pigment: colored earth, charcoal, chalk or many other pigments together with a binder to set the color, is positioned on the body part receiving the application and pressed onto the skin, and when the seal is lifted the positive design emerges.
We know this because in written records and other documents made at the time of between Europeans and the inhabitants of these lands, it is mentioned that the women had distinctive marks of different printed colors with seals on their arms, in the manner of temporary tattoos. In the Chalchihuitzin Vazquez Codex in the region of Zumpango in the state of Tlaxcala, there is a representation cited by Jorge Enciso in his work, and in which there is a woman with her arms and hands covered with elaborate designs. This shows that body painting, a form of expression, was an element of transformation; the designs and colors defined position or hip of a certain class or group. Each motif and design marked and classified the person and placed them in their rightful place within the community.
Examples that show the use of seals to paint the body are few, but the archaeological data yields information pointing to that same conclusion. In an area of Las Margaritas in the highlands of Chiapas in a house of persons of high status, archaeologists located over 260 ceramic seals used to paint the body with red pigment, possibly cinnabar. Carlos Alvarez Asomoza records that they are Post-Classic and that virtually all the iconography of these objects refers to the rattlesnake or nauyaca (fer-de-lance): its skin, head, jaws or tail, noting that other designs refer to monkeys, deer, ducks, waterfowl, or dogs. These seals used to paint the body are also called "pintaderas", and the markings applied, unlike those resulting from a tattoo, are not permanent since the images applied should be perceived as an ephemeral art, in other words, a fleeting and impermanent element.
However, it is possible to know the range of designs that the seals leave printed and stamped because we have the seals themselves. As demonstrated by Jorge Enciso, by placing a piece of paper over the seal and rubbing the surface with a pencil, it was possible to obtain an exact reproduction of the designs of many of them to determine that they are multiple. We only need to imagine that any of the seals before us at some point caressed the skin of a man or woman from Ancient Mexico.
We believe that their use on the face or other parts of the body must have been part of a ceremony which undoubtedly involved the selection of the color and motif to be used; therefore, different seals were associated with specific rituals performed within the community for transmitting information. In other words, the designs and motifs printed by the seals were important, since they were more than mere decoration and an important symbolic element.
The seals include geometric shapes (zigzags, triangles, squares, circles, spirals, frets, crosses) or naturalistic forms in the shape of flowers, plants and animals (butterflies, snakes, eagles, quetzals or lizards) and fantastical beings, human beings and human body parts (heads, skulls or hands), while other designs make up what Enciso defined as artificial forms, which include architectural elements, and other forms that he identifies as trophies and emblems.
This is a seal that emphasizes the representation of a great serpent. In the work of Enciso we do not find such a seal, although our scholar records several representations of feathered serpents and fire snakes in his catalog (see pages 71-83); the uniqueness of this example lies in its complex form, a feathered serpent that arches and flexes to the extent that the seal is no longer rectangular as it adopts a sinuous shape that repeats the movements of the great serpent as it wraps around to form a semi-circle. This piece, finely elaborated in a very reddish clay, is possibly a synthesis between a snake and a bird: the serpent covered with quetzal feathers. Similar images are in the records of Roman Piña Chan in his work Quetzalcoatl: Feathered Serpent, Fund for Economic Culture, Mexico, 1977.
Scholars have proposed that the cult of the feathered serpent in Mesoamerica appears in the Classic in Teotihuacan. Its numerous representations in ceramics, painting and sculpture suggest that the combination of a snake, which corresponds to the terrestrial environment, with bird feathers that correspond to the atmosphere, is a metaphor of the union of the sky and the earth referred to by a creative concept as explained to us by Hasso Von Winning in his study of the Iconography of Teotihuacan vol. I 1987, p.125-133), and the continued presence of the feathered serpent in the cities that dominated the region of the Central Highlands once Teotihuacan's hegemony was over, shows its constant relevance.
The images of the feathered serpent are in the mural painting of Cacaxtla, in Tlaxcala, and in the reliefs that cover the temples of Xochicalco, Morelos and they allow us to the continuity of its form. As explained to us by Walter Krickeberg explains in his book The Ancient Mexican Cultures, Mexico, FCE, 1985, p. 136-137, in the time of the Toltecs, the feathered serpent was a general symbol of the sky, and among the Nahua peoples of Puebla it also had this meaning. It is in the Post-Classic that the feathered serpent evokes the various aspects of the god Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl and is linked to the connotations attributed to him in the Post-Classic Pantheon.
The forms and motifs that the peoples of ancient Mexico printed on a variety of surfaces using seals were important elements in the Mesoamerican symbolic repertoire, and to this day the forms and designs of many of them remain in use. They have been appropriated by artists and artisans as inspiration, and although their original meanings have rarely reached us, when incorporated into our vocabulary of images we give them a new meaning that aims to reassess the forms in which ancient Mexicans thought and expressed themselves.
