Axes, yokes and palms, all small-scale sculptures, find their earliest examples in objects from the Olmec era, spread over much of Southern Mesoamerica, during the Classic period. Associated with the ritual ball game of enormous importance in the civilization of El Tajin, they are found as part of the offering of different tombs, as occurs in the region of Coatepec, in Napatecuhtlan, at the foot of Cofre de Perote and several sites of the central coast of Veracruz which incorporate the artistic style of El Tajin ("intertwining") and the system of symbols of this ancient civilization.
By the ninth century of our era, they were already present in the jungles of Chiapas, the Yucatan Peninsula and even in Central America. They have been found as far away as Tazumal in El Salvador and Copan in Honduras. Closely related to human sacrifice and often required in burial ceremonies held in honor of those individuals who, in life, occupied prominent positions in society, they can also be associated with offerings of a different nature. In a ranch in the Banderilla village, not far from the city of Xalapa, Arellanos and Beauregard recovered two magnificent palms carved in basaltic stone. They were found ritually "killed" within a hole made directly in the ground, which was used to burn "...perishable materials [probably odorous resins] that produced a lot of charcoal" (1986).
Many of these small sculptures, no matter where they are actually from, were probably carefully made in the mountains of Veracruz and Puebla, in territories directly controlled by the city of El Tajin, but there are also those carved in local stone as an imitation of the first. This is why we should not be surprised to see that they were also manufactured in southeastern Mexico, incorporating the artistic style of the Mayan world and even adding some glyphs originating from their own system of symbols.
While they are rare, the pieces of this group of sculptures found in ancient Mayan cities are still relatively numerous. The ax contained in the collection of the Amparo Museum is not only added to other known examples of Palenque or Ceibal (Guatemala), but it is one of the most important pieces of its kind because of the artistic quality of its carving, a face fixed in perfect harmony with the artistic style of the Mayan Classic period, and for the way that it was coupled to the formal requirements of these kinds of ritual objects.
Its workmanship, the style of the face, suggests that it might have been carved in the Usumacinta region (Palenque) or even in the river basin of the ion River (Guatemala), where another ax with very similar characteristics originated. It is necessary to note, in the context of the material culture of Petexbatun, the changes that were incorporated in the iconographic production of the ninth century A.D., which was accompanied by a certain break with the aesthetic canons of the Classic Maya period and elements hitherto unknown in local sculpture, a series of new themes, like the calculation of synodic cycles of Venus undoubtedly were, which in Ceibal are associated with representations of several generations of rulers whose appearance in the stone also reveal them as "foreign" or at least as carriers of a foreign cultural model.
Is this brief resurgence of local civilization that chronologically corresponds to the Bayal phase (ca. 830-930 AD), it is accompanied by a series of changes and innovations of material culture among which is the acquisition and even the reproduction of this group of small sculptures, strongly linked with the culture of El Tajin.
Axes, yokes and palms, all small-scale sculptures, find their earliest examples in objects from the Olmec era, spread over much of Southern Mesoamerica, during the Classic period. Associated with the ritual ball game of enormous importance in the civilization of El Tajin, they are found as part of the offering of different tombs, as occurs in the region of Coatepec, in Napatecuhtlan, at the foot of Cofre de Perote and several sites of the central coast of Veracruz which incorporate the artistic style of El Tajin ("intertwining") and the system of symbols of this ancient civilization.
