Mesoamerican Earspools

I recently had the great good luck to see an amazing private collection of rare Mesoamerican ear plugs and eyelets. My friend Christopher is working as part of a team restoring a massive collection of 40,000 ancient Mexican artifacts in Oaxaca. The collection originally belonged to an ex-pat living in Mitla. The collection is diverse, with pieces collected from all over Mexico, and it is the job of these archeologists to clean, repair, authenticate, and document each piece in the collection. I feel really lucky…it is a rare opportunity to see these amazing, unique and finely crafted pieces.

In this photo there is a clay figure representing Cocijo, the Zapotec god of rain and lightning. He is wearing a massive head dress, large ear expansions, and has an elephant like snout. In the foreground there are two eyelets in a floral design, one made in jade and the other in obsidian. The tip of each petal has a tiny perforation. Perhaps feathers or beads hung from the ends. The obsidian piece is interesting because of the length of the tunnel.

In this photo you can observe the wonderful transparency of the gray obsidian volcanic glass.

These are two obsidian labrets and several obsidian “corazones” or hearts. The hearts are the left over from the manufacturing process of knocking off long shards from a central core of obsidian. One of the labrets has a hole in the center, perhaps for hanging beads or for an inlay.

Here are a couple of pieces of jade Mayan style earrings. I believe these are jadeite, nephrite, or possibly diorite but I am not a stone expert. These are extremely interesting because they demonstrate how some ear expansors were designed in multiple parts to be fit together. The lighter jade is the back side, and the darker jade would fit into the groove. This explains how the wearing surface could be so small on many of the Mayan style flares, because they would have had a second back plate to keep them from falling out. The hole in the back side would probably have had a string with a counter weight passing to the front. These are most likely not a pair originally, but they are the proper scale to show how these pieces were designed.

In the sculpture of Cocijo the ear jewelry looks similar to this style. Could these be Oaxacan pieces with a Mayan influence?

These are a pair of copper ear tunnels. These are possibly from Central Mexico and are probably only five or six hundred years old, when metal working began to be more common in Mexico. Apparently there was a group in central Mexico who began to manufacture metal weapons and who most likely would have displaced the Aztecs if the Spanish invasion had not arrived first.

The last photo is an obsidian earspool in a classic Teotihuacan design, which was also used by the Mixtecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations. The manufacture and thinness of these pieces are astounding and it remains a mystery how they were made. I work with obsidian all the time, but I couldn’t imagine making a piece like this. And they didn’t have grinding wheels! Wow!