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Snake shaped vessel | Ancient Mexico. Pre-Columbian Art Galleries | Museo Amparo, Puebla

Snake shaped vessel

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Region Colima
Period Early Classic
Year 200-600 A.D.
Technique

Modeled clay with slip and incisions

Measures 9   x 18.2  x 21  cm
Location Gallery 2. The Religious World
Record number 52 22 MA FA 57PJ 1110
Researcher
  • Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo

This piece belongs to the ceramic group of the shaft tombs. In those crypts excavated in the hardened soil that we call tepetate, typical of volcanic areas, some of the most striking and surprising works of pottery art in Mesoamerica have been found. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the pieces of the shaft tomb tradition have not been extracted in archaeological excavations and therefore we do not know their exact location or the arrangement they had in the tombs.
Ceramics from these funerary contexts include vessels, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic sculptures, and also mixed pieces like this one, which are vessels and representations of people or animals at the same time. In the stylistic approach that is usually called Comala, figures are made with a limited naturalism; that is, there is no degree of abstraction that suppresses fundamental elements of the anatomies; the shapes are present but slightly rounded, with some cartoonish but not comical stereotypes. The expression rounded naturalism is a good description of many expressions of the style.
Among the figures that we find in that tradition, a common one is that of the snake. There are ceramic sculptures in the shape of a snake (such as piece 52 22 MA FA 57PJ 1152 from this collection) and vessels with the same shape (such as 52 22 MA FA 57PJ 1151, also from this collection). We must assume that our snake-vessel was used to contain a liquid, and it is possible that it had some ceremonial use. The snake is very important in Mesoamerican mythology and is associated with agricultural cycles and notions such as the fertilization of the earth. Regardless of its original use, the vessel was placed in a funerary crypt along with other figures and vessels.
In its production process, the vessel was covered by two layers of slip. We are not sure if both slips completely covered the piece, one after the other, but it is clear that, at least in some areas, they do overlap. It is also noted that the slip covered part of the interior of the vessel, as if it had been applied not with a brush but probably by immersion. Once the slip was dry and before firing, the body of the snake was decorated by means of linear incisions, a kind of sgraffito: a grid was formed on the tail, to suggest a rattlesnake, and another on the head, as if indicating the scales The rest of the body was covered with groups of punctures, between ten and fifteen more or less, forming textured spots.

 

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