Hummingbird pendant

The delicate carving depicts a prominent bird in the Mesoamerican worldview, the hummingbird. Its identifying features are the very long and thin beak, the rounded head, and the narrow and small neck and body. Its flattened silhouette with folded wings is determined by the rectangular plate -perhaps serpentine- whose greenish color refers to the bird's plumage. material aspect is of enormous importance in the famous Mezcala sculptural style, characterized by the use of rocks of fine and compact consistency, whose natural chromatism and durability were highly valued in aesthetic and symbolic . In keeping with the synthetic mastery that distinguishes Mezcala's lapidary art, sharp punctures and grooved lines define the eyes and wings. Our image also has a perforation indicating its design as a pendant, probably from a necklace.

 The faunistic components of the complex construction of the ideological fabric built by the different societies that inhabited the southern half of the Mexican territory and part of Central America can be clarified with the contributions of zoology in its different branches, such as anatomy, physiology, and ethology. Thus, the association of the hummingbird with the Sun, war, and sexuality is understood.

 According to Eva Hunt, the iridescence of its plumage, its aerial acrobatics, its illusory ability to remain static in the air, and the ability to fly in all directions, even backwards, were linked to the brightness and movement of the star across the celestial vault and during the solstices, when it also moves backwards. In relation to the daily cycle of the sun, which, according to mythical thought, each night es through the dark bowels of the watery underworld and is reborn the next day in the east, Jeanette Fravot Peterson suggests another link with the hummingbird. This is due to its apparent ability to die and resurrect because when it is cold, during the night or winter, it slows down its metabolism and decreases its mobility, which increases during the day and when it is warm. The bellicosity is another of its attributes, being a territorial species that can show aggressiveness, and this, together with its solar symbolism, turned it into the animal facet of the main Mexica god, Huitzilopochtli, "Colibrí Zurdo", whose pictorial representation depicts him with a hummingbird head helmet or a complete disguise of the bird.

 Their type of food has male sexual connotations. The beak is equipped with a long tongue that allows it to reach deep into the center of the flowers, and when it catches the nectar, it retracts to carry the liquid towards the bird's mouth; this movement is redundant. In the same sexual symbolism should be considered its frenetic flapping, the frequent consumption of nectar, as it is repeated up to eight times per hour, its high capacity to pollinate plants.

 The ancient Mezcala culture was one of the most prominent in the Mesoamerican region of Guerrero. They inhabited both banks of the middle Mezcala-Balsas river basin, covering the north of the Sierra Madre del Sur in Guerrero and neighboring areas of Morelos, the State of Mexico, and Michoacán. In the iconographic repertoire of its lapidary art there is a minimal selection of animal species. In addition to the hummingbird there are other birds—apparently generic—, such as squirrels, snakes, fish, amphibians, and monkeys. In the Mezcala tradition, and in the rest of the cultures of ancient Mexico, the artistic representation of the fauna and vegetation did not have the purpose of creating a catalog of the species with which they lived or that were harvested, domesticated or cultivated, as these were mainly part of the mythical and religious thought of each society. The above clues about the hummingbird based on the knowledge of its anatomy, functioning, and mechanisms of its organism and its behavior, explain its cultural interpretation in a supernatural sense.