The material, workmanship, and design give this small object the character of a jewel, in of ornamentation and high value. Its manufacture would begin with the selection of stone with the appearance, consistency, and contour appropriate to the form and function intended.
A stone block of fine and compact consistency was cut and carved to generate this rectangular plate of minimum thickness, which lowered upper and lower edges and a biconical hole for hanging. It was probably the central and main element of a sartal, a type of necklace composed of a series of beads of similar or different shapes, sizes, and materials, with a longitudinal perforation to be strung on a string. In Mesoamerica we find sartales made with beads of different types of stones or combined with shell beads; those of stone with irregular, spherical or tubular shape.
The delicate manufacture of this pendant involved a highly specialized lapidary artificer. The perforation could have been done with a flint burin, making rotating movements on both sides.
In Mesoamerica, certain types of stones were held in high esteem, whose qualities include their limited availability, peculiar shapes and sizes, color scheme in various shades and intensities, smoothness, durability, brilliance, transparency, translucency, iridescence, and reflectance. The objects made with them were sumptuary goods, used as ornaments and in ritual paraphernalia. They denoted social prestige, power, and sacredness. In particular, bluish-green stones, like the one we see here, were assigned links with the precious, sacred liquids, life, vital breath, and plant fertility.
The brownish color of this jewel gives us the guideline to explore the metaphorical sensibility and knowledge of nature by Mesoamericans and their descendants.
Through the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, a work directed by Fray Bernardino de Sahugún and concluded in 1585, Lizandra Espinosa highlights that among the Nahua of Central Mexico, the dark green or bluish stones were called matlallin or matlalitztli. In his translation, with the collaboration of the Nahuatl master Santos de la Cruz Hernández, of the column in Nahuatl on precious stones of the eight chapter of book IX of the also called Florentine Codex, we read that the stone is associated with obsidian because of its intense color scheme: "for that reason its aspect, well as if it were matlali [plant], very dark green/bluish, very blue, painted like blue, in moldy bluish points, and its body, well as obsidian is little transparent, perhaps with little dark, very irable, well appreciated, inhabits the precious, shows itself precious, is found with difficulty."
For her part, Teresa Castelló provides clues to identify that this plant was also called matlalxóchitl; it is a wild Commelina coelestis with diurnal blue flowers, known as "chicken grass" because, as José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez testifies, cockfighting bettors used it to stop the blood from the birds' wounds. It is said that the plant "brings rain" and "is the daughter of water" since the leaves absorb the liquid and increase in size. The underside of these is hairy and gives them a brownish appearance that refers to that of the elongated pendant, and to the description of the matlalitztli stone in the Florentine, where it is mentioned to have "wet bluish dots."
Verónica Hernández Díaz
