West Mexican Figurines with Art Historian Beth Wilson Norwood
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Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Mesoamerican Studies On Air. I am Catherine Knuckles. And I'm Tony DeLuca. And we are so excited to bring a fantastic interview with an art historian specializing in West Mexico.

Beth Wilson Norwood is an art historian specializing in pre-Columbian art, funerary art, and the art of ancient West Mexico. She's currently a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico and the editor-in-chief of the 15th volume of the journal Hemisphere Visual Culture of the Americas. She holds an MA from UT San Antonio and a BA from the University of Central Arkansas.

Her dissertation, Narrative Ceramics and Networks of Practice, West Mexican Visual Traditions in the Late Formative to Early Classic Periods, will focus on the issue of visual communication and the role West Mexican ceramic sculpture may have played in the expression of important cultural narratives and histories, as well as their use in performance and oral storytelling. So welcome, Beth. It's so exciting to have you here. Thank you for having me.

So as one West Mexicanist to another, how did you get interested in West Mexico? So at the University of Central Arkansas, we had a tiny collection of ceramics. And when I was looking for something to do for my senior thesis project,

my professor, Dito Morales, told me, he was like, why don't you go check out that, like all those boxes in that closet in the library, which was, I mean, literally they were packed in boxes, wrapped in newspapers from 1976 when they were donated, stacked like in collapsing boxes in a closet in a library. And so he knew that I liked ceramic figurines and

He knew that I was destined to be a Mesoamericanist, and so he sent me up there. And I spent a couple of afternoons just kind of unwrapping and looking through these little, like these boxes that had all these like fascinating figurines and objects in them, and there I was just hooked. So

Started to do more reading, got disappointed about the lack of scholarship, especially, you know, this was 2008. So got kind of upset about the lack of scholarship and got excited about kind of the mystery of like discovering something that, you know, hasn't really been thought out about a whole lot. And there we go. I was stuck. So, and the rest is history. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just, it's always surprising how much of the stuff is like squirreled away in museums and libraries, and it is understudied.

Partly because there's just a lack of like field work to help, you know, verify and do research on a lot of these alluded materials. Absolutely. And the lack of context has also, I think, put art historians off because a lot of art historians are not Mesoamericanists or Americanists in general, but a lot of our historians are like, you bring the context to me and I'll figure it out. And so we have to really kind of play

play archaeologist quite a bit. But yeah, so I think that the lack of art historical research in the area has also like really enchanted me and frustrated me. So yeah. Yeah. And this is something that was so exciting when, you know, when you said that you were willing to come on the podcast and talk about it, because this really does fill a gap, right? It's not...

You know, it's not common to find people working in West Mexico compared to other areas of Mesoamerica. And it's, you know, it's so rare that we get to have art historians come on and talk about their work. So why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your work broadly and the project that you're working on right now?

So over the years, like I said, I've been studying West Mexico since 2008. And so I've taken a couple of different stabs at making interpretations on the figurines, which has been my main focus. For my master's thesis, for example, I kind of looked at the idea of like identity and visual communication, in particular, like body art and adornment being used to communicate some aspect of identity.

I referred to it as like portraiture at that time, which I would never be

be that heavy-handed now as a PhD candidate, but as a young scholar, I kind of leaned heavily on that terminology. I still think that adornment and body art can be used to communicate some sort of like social identity, you know, not necessarily like the identity of a particular person, which is never something I really said to begin with, but

I think that social identity could be communicated through that. So I've always been interested in like signification, semiotics, the way that broader ideas can kind of be

communicated through in work of art. And that has led me to what I'm looking at now, which is, you know, greatly inspired by Elizabeth Boone's work. Looking at the idea that, you know, these figurines may record some sort of narrative or maybe repeated themes, maybe a better way of referring to it. So.

Yeah, fantastic. So are you looking at a specific subgroup of these figurines? Are you looking at all of the known figurines? I'm looking at everything. And so the way that my dissertation kind of evolved was that I was taking a class with Margaret Jackson on actually museums and the way that museums present ancient American artwork.

And we had to come up with this like pseudo exhibition or kind of mock exhibition. And so I was really kind of at a loss of what I was going to do. And I was just looking through images after image after image in books and online, you know, museum websites. And I after I think I stopped counting at like thirty four thousand objects,

I realized, oh my God, this isn't different things all the time, which has been kind of the argument that has always been made about West Mexican ceramics, you know, Hasso von Wenning, an anecdotal sculpture from ancient West Mexico. He talks about the idea, he kind of recognizes that they're

basic themes being seen, but he's like, ah, it's just day-to-day activity. There's too much variation to really make a good assessment of what's happening is what he said.

And so after looking at these like 34,000 objects, I recognized that actually I think we have a couple of different themes being presented. So I noticed that we have scenes that take place in ball courts and depict ball players. We have scenes that take place in ceremonial circles. We have scenes that take place in structures, probably the structures that surround those ceremonial circles. We have pole climbing scenes. We have funerary scenes.

And so I've kind of started to explore the idea that maybe we're seeing narratives being repeated. So with the ball courts, this is something I noticed looking at a lot of pieces on museum websites, especially the LACMA ball court that they have. I noticed that

everyone in the model has like a headband, like a candy cane headband, except two, which have pointed hats. And I always wondered in the back of my head, is this the hero twin myth? Are they playing the ball game, trying to rescue their uncle that's in the underworld? And I wanted to know,

Have you noticed that? Or have you thought about that? Because it kind of seems like it would fit in. So I haven't noticed the fact that there were just two. I've only got to, I got to look at that ball court model, but I haven't got to visit any other collections yet. So part of this research is going to involve looking and recording the adornment and the gesture and the posture of each of these figures and the locations where they are.

But I have noticed like reoccurring characters. So in a lot of ball court models, you have a figure that might be elderly, they're kind of hunched over. And some of them, they have a blanket wrapped around their body. And I've noticed that we keep seeing those in ball court scenes.

We also see those in individual figurines. So we see a lot, I think one of the things that I did notice is that, and also this comes from Chris Beekman's research, he mentions it in Unseating the Shaman, his chapter from 2020, that some of the figurines or some of the figures you see in the models, you also see in individual figures. And so I'm kind of

grouping, like analyzing the broader kind of multi-figure vignettes and then using that to look at the individual figures. I still have a lot of research to go before I can really do that, but that's kind of the process that I'm looking at. Yeah. I have...

So many questions, so many thoughts going through my mind. One thing that I think would be really useful for listeners who might not be as familiar with West Mexican art, it's really important, I think, and really significant, right, that West Mexican art shows so many things.

different scenes and it's a very different category of art than what people might be familiar with from you know the post-classic central Mexico and you know the Maya the Maya Heartland over in the east what sort of categories do you usually see in West Mexican art?

So really, it looks like ceramics were the favored medium. Sure, there were probably some sort of perishable forms of artwork that we just don't have access to now. But what we can look to in the archaeological record, it looks like ceramics was really kind of what they leaned towards. And I mean, they even covered their structures in clay. And so this was something they were really, really great at and something that they used a lot.

In West Mexico, we see kind of multi-figure tableaus. So these are often, or sometimes they're described in the literature as models. So these are often, you know, multi-figure scenes that have, you know, architecture associated with it, oftentimes kind of placed on a slab. Then we also have a

figurines and figures. So we kind of refer to the solid kind of smaller figurines as figurines, objects as figurines, and then larger hollow ceramic figures is the terminology that we lean towards. In this, you have 17 different visual styles.

So the 17 different visual styles were originally thought to come from different geographic regions, but we have figured out that's not really the case, that you may find what was originally a Kalima style figure in Jalisco or Nayarit and vice versa.

So that's one of the things that kind of really has always really fascinated me is like, why do we have 17 visual styles? Why are they used all over the place? And then kind of the idea that they probably recognize repeated themes and subjects just, I mean, kind of blew my mind and really inspired the work that I'm doing now. So, yeah.

So you're working with a huge corpus, just, I mean, a huge amount of data. So what does the process look like for carrying out this research? So right now I'm in the process of visiting museum collections, really to focus on the models. So

So most of what, you know, most of the multi-figure tableaus or models are found in museum collections today. For example, our lab at Teochitlan has no models. We have really a handful of figurines. So we've got a lot of figurine fragments, which I am looking at also.

So I'm looking at the models and in each model I'm recording kind of the location where these scenes are taking place.

and each figure that's depicted within them and the actions that they're performing. So when I look at a model, it feels very unwieldy right now because I'm recording like sometimes 30 data points. But once I have all of the kind of information about these figures that we see in these group scenes, I can use that to kind of examine how these individual figures and figurines may have been used. Mm-hmm.

So one of the things I've noticed on like the archaeology side and having an interest in symbolic archaeology is that West Mexican art is a little difficult to decode. It's that emic versus edict kind of aspect, insider versus outsider. Like, you know, you go to the Maya area, you have the Stila, they're meant to be seen. You know, you have like public murals, they're meant to be seen. West Mexican art,

I mean, it's meant to be seen, but not in the same way. And definitely, it feels like it's not meant to be seen by outsiders, really. So like, how do you go about classifying some of these, you know, these pieces to make your research make sense, but also to try to like, figure out how they may have been classifying things, you know, especially like the art, like the features and like,

like the clothing and stuff? Well, to start off, one of the things that I'm looking at is scale. So it seems to me that the way, or it seems obvious to me that the way that, or the size of these objects kind of dictate the way that they're going to be used.

So we have the, you know, Cushequesco Ortiz's style figures that are only, you know, anywhere from sometimes five to maybe 10 centimeters tall. And then we have much, much, much larger ones that can be two or three feet tall that are large and hollow.

And so those will be used in different ways. So one of the things that I'm doing is kind of thinking about scale, thinking about also the type of object. A lot of those smaller figures are also whistles and rattles. So how would they have been used in some sort of like public performance or, you know, storytelling event, given the fact that they actually make music or make sound?

So one of the things that I'm looking at, like I said, is scale. I'm also looking at the context in which they're found, if at all possible.

That's where our figurine fragments at Los Cochabantones come in. So at the Interpretive Center, there are tons and tons of bags of figurine fragments that have not been really examined or looked at. But we have the context of everything recorded.

And so I'm going through and kind of recording what type of figure it is. Is it a hollow, you know, larger figure? Is it a smaller figurine? The colors that are being used and then the site that they were found in.

I only started that towards kind of the tail end of my visit last summer. But even after like two days of doing this research, I started to notice like, you know, in some structures they favor cream colored figurines and in some structures they favor red figures. And so I'm going to kind of use all of that to figure out how they may have been used in, you know, that kind of space. Like, you know, the smaller figurines are

It feels like they're going to be used in a more personal kind of private type of event. But the larger ones that are, you know, two or three feet tall, one of which was found on the corner of a structure at La Jolla, kind of overlooking the Arroyo, how, you know, that feels like it was made for display.

And so, yeah, so I'm just going to kind of look at the context or look at the context and see if I can make any sense of it based on what we're seeing. You're talking about the one from structure eight, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, so for those that don't know, we have fragments of a figurine. It's so big. I could fit my arm in the arm. Absolutely. Which is, it's really unusual for West Mexico. I mean, we, we get like three foot tall, like

you know, figures that are, you know, it's complete, but this was like a whole arm. And there was one season where I spent time hunting through the crates, looking for more pieces, much to Chris's dissatisfaction, but I did find more pieces, but we noticed, we noticed that there's no decoration on the outside of this figurine. And it's so big, you know, we were talking, you know, like over dinner and in the evenings, like,

what if they put clothes on it? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I was just, I was looking through my Zotero like before the break and I ran, I came across an article that was about fabric fragments found in tombs in West Mexico. And I think it's one of the ones on the Huitzilapa excavation. And I think it,

Gattaca probably late 1996 is when it came out. But yeah, I mean, if they're finding what looks like impressions of the fabric in the tombs, which we know is like a minor context for West Mexican figures, then it stands to reason that a lot of these would have probably been dressed. If you look at the Lagunillas style e-figures in particular, a lot of them have holes in their ears, but no material there.

So I wonder, I've always kind of thought that maybe there was something in there that was perishable that's gone. Then you have the ones where it looks like they should be holding a vessel, but there's no vessel. And I always like thought, oh, it's an action figure that lost its accessory. Like maybe those little copas and oyas and stuff that we find, which are like three, four, five centimeters like wide, right?

No practical use, but they could fit in the palm of a figurine. And there's a bunch at the Casa de Cultura in Tala. For anyone that wants to visit in Jalisco, check them out. They're action figure size. And they're beautifully painted, too. They didn't skimp on the decoration just because they were tiny. Absolutely, yeah. And then we see on some of those...

some of the, you know, so-called "Kulima" styles, where there are some figures that have helmets that come on and off. So it seems totally reasonable that these were being kind of arranged in different ways. Not to, I mean like, Barbie's on the brain, because Barbie's on a lot of women's brains right now. It was a great film.

Anyway, so I think about how they could have been used and maybe arranged to kind of recreate narratives, maybe recreate myths or stories. Yeah.

you know, this is such a unique subset of Mesoamerican art. And we, you know, we do have figurines, right, from different parts of Mesoamerica, but these are so unique. And the scenes that they portray are so unique that it really, it sheds light on different aspects of daily life that, you know, might have been completely unique to that region of Mesoamerica, but maybe they were also unique to other parts of Mesoamerica and they just weren't

recorded in the same way. Absolutely, yeah. So I'm curious, as you've been going through this project, I know that West Mexican art in particular, you know, throughout the 20th century was a very popular category of art, right? We have Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo collecting, and we have a multitude of forgeries, fakes, imitations being created.

How have you been addressing that in your research? Have you come across it? Have you been able to find a way to sort of filter through most of it? How are you dealing with this in your work?

So there are kind of two avenues of thought on this. We've got Robert Pickering, who has developed a methodology for authenticating these figures. But it involves, you know, it's not a foolproof methodology, obviously, but involves looking through several different points. You know, you look kind of at the interior of the object, the exterior of the object in particular for mineral stains and for insect pupara.

or like the remnants of that. And so he's really dedicated to the idea of like looking through all of these different aspects. We have Chris, on the other hand, who recognizes that we have

God untold numbers of these objects in the archaeological record and in museum collections. And so he's a little less concerned about the issue of authenticity. I mean, he is, but he always kind of reminds us that there are a lot of these that should tell us that, you know, this is a real tradition. The likelihood of, you know, one particular genre being totally faked seems a little off.

Additionally, talking to Christian DeBrayer at the Fowler Museum, he is the conservator and he's also a PhD candidate who's been doing some research on kind of clay bodies and things.

the creation of these objects and then kind of the source for the clay for them. He always kind of, or one of the things that he told me is that a lot of the time he doesn't think something is totally 100% faked, but it may have been altered. And he seems to see more alterations than foolproof or, you know, 100% fakes. So with all of that in the air, it's a lot to consider.

So what I've done is I had Bob Pickering kind of, you know, mentor me through the process of authentication. I have my own little boroscope or endoscope that I take with me whenever I go to museum collections so I can look at the interiors of them. I bring a loop so I can look at the mineral stains and so I can look for, you know, pupara remains.

And then also I just go with what I know about, you know, the style of these figures and the types of things that we tend to have depicted. And so, you know, using a really kind of quick and dirty assessment, I've been ruling out anything that appears fake. And at every museum collection I've looked at, I found questionable objects.

Yeah. So not as many as I had originally feared, you know, maybe 10 years ago, whenever it was before I kind of learned Bob's technique, but yeah, it's something we always have to contend with. And I always make sure to try to do my due diligence and make sure that we're looking at what I think is probably authentic. So, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think it's a really balanced way of approaching a really complicated issue. And it's a good way to, you know, to sort of recognize that, you know, they might exist, but how much will it actually skew the data? And obviously, when it's when there's something that's very clearly, you know, fake or forged, it's

you know it's easy to discount but yeah I think that's a really good moderated approach yeah when you know we've got a thousand year of this for a thousand years of this tradition yeah um it would take I mean I know hoarders can be pretty busy but it would take a lot to kind of fabricate it's just the vast number that we have yeah when I was in San Antonio one of the

postdocs asked me if I could help with some of the figurines there because they had these really tiny figurines only like like a couple inches and she was struggling to try to find any kind of source in the literature on them and I you know I remember seeing them and I was like I've seen them before I've seen them before where was it and I'm like going through all my articles

And then I finally found the source, and it's an article by Olay Barrientos and her excavations at a guachimontón in Colima. And they found the same style of figurines, which are flutes, they're really tiny flutes, in a tomb.

And so it was like, it's such an obscure style, like no one's going to forge it. I mean, as easy as it could make, as easy as it is to make because it's so small, like it's so obscure, like it has to be real. Yeah, well, and they can, you know, forgers do invent kind of

out there things. We have a lot of Colima dogs with masks on their faces. And Bob has found at least, I know one for sure, I'm sure more than that, to be fakes. So the Colima dog is real, but the mask was added on later.

So they can be pretty inventive and creative, but we also see these kind of repeated things over and over and over again. The thing that I'm like the most enchanted with right now are these shark impersonators.

There are these figures that are standing. A couple of them all have the same garment. So it's some garment that has little like, looks like incisions, kind of random incisions across the front and the sides of the garment. And then it has a visible strap in the back.

They are also, they have their hands raised and their hands on the head of this shark. And it's a full bodied shark. And we see that in the Trucequesco Ortiz's style. We also see it in the, like the Komala style. So the larger hollow shape.

figures that are attributed to Colima. But we see them over and over and over and over again. There's one that the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology has at UNM that looks just like one that is in Jackie Gallagher's publication from 1983.

It's Companions of the Dead. So, I mean, they're identical. There are some like really ugly kind of, you know, look, maybe quickly done versions that I found. But yeah, so I'm collecting images of these shark impersonators. They're my Jeff right now. I love them so much. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the Maya have like crab people at Bonampak. Why not shark people in West Mexico? Why not? Yeah. Like you mentioned, you're in the process of gathering this data, of parsing through it. So, you know, obviously there's not an overarching conclusion right now, but has there been anything that's come about or anything that you've noticed as you've been going through this data that's been maybe surprising or not what you expected? Yeah.

Just the idea that we're not seeing this like endless variety of day to day activities. That's something that has been talked about in the scholarship over and over and over again. And it just, it seems like it's much, much more limited than that.

um right now and I recognize that it may expand it probably will as I do research um right now I've identified six or seven themes I'm kind of debating about whether or not uh pole climbing and central trees are the same kind of concept um but

So yeah, so that has just that really shocked me because that's not what people have talked about. You know, we've talked about there being some similar ideas, you know, the idea Christy Butterwick says that some of these figures depict ritual feasting, which, yeah, absolutely. But

What is that kind of feasting? Is it a particular theme, particular narrative being depicted? Is it just the generalized idea of feasting?

And it seems like if this was day-to-day activity, we would see more actual day-to-day things. Like we would see women grinding corn. We would see people farming. We would see, you know, childbirth. We would see, you know, more day-to-day kind of activities, which we do have.

you know, scattered examples of that. Like I know one example of a woman grinding corn. I haven't got to see it in person, so I don't know if I can judge it as authentic or not. Um,

And then there's some random things I've seen online of like women giving birth, but again, haven't found them, you know, haven't looked at them personally. So I don't know if they're accurate. Also, you know, if you have a tradition that depicts human beings in ceramic form over a thousand years, you're going to have some random things as well.

So yeah, so that really just sort of shocked me that it wasn't what we've always been told. And one of the inspirations behind kind of the way that I started to think about this is the art of the moche. So my advisor is Margaret Jackson and she works on moche ceramics. And among the moche, they have

something that I think parallels what we have in West Mexico, where they've got somewhere around 30 different narratives being depicted using these reoccurring casts or this reoccurring cast of characters. And I mean, it seems reasonable that, or well, based on my research, it seems reasonable that we might be seeing something parallel in West Mexico. So still a lot of decoding and parsing through the data needs to be done, but

But really parallel with all of Mesoamerica. There's only a few one-offs elsewhere where they're showing something that's not related to mythology or kingmaking or something. The market murals at Calakmul, it's talked about so much because it's the only time the Maya really deviated from their bread and butter, so to speak.

And so it just kind of reaffirms that West Mexico is not so different from the rest of Mesoamerica. They just did things a little differently. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, and now with all we're learning about the connections with South America, also, we can kind of use what we know about ceramic communication or just visual communication in both regions and think about how it may relate to West Mexico. It makes me think about how, you know, if you look at Maya hieroglyphs, for example, right, it looks like there's

thousands of glyphs. But really, if you break it down to what the diagnostic characteristics are of each individual glyph, there might be 15 different variations of the shark glyph for the syllable oo. But really, it's just this, it's the same shark, but it's just as long as the diagnostic features are there, the scribe was able to sort of play with the rest of it. Mm-hmm.

at their discretion. And so, yeah, it sounds like there's some sort of similar thing happening where you have this common theme that's being represented, but the surrounding features or the actual execution might change a little bit here and there. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, sorry. Artistic jazz. There you go. It's like handwriting. Yeah. But anyways, we can all write the same sentence and it's going to look slightly different for each of us. So. Yeah. And I love the connections with South America too. I think that's something that's, that's very yeah. It's, it's, it's something that's very unique to maybe not entirely unique. Right. But it's something that West Mexico has that I don't think is, is as clearly established for the rest of Mesoamerica.

I've seen some figurine poses like from Nicoya and Ecuador, where I'm like, hmm, I've seen, I've seen that someplace. Oh yeah, in West Mexico and I was like, maybe there's some exchange going on even if it's just...

some artistic styles. Absolutely. Well, you get the Chorera and the Colima figures. You look at those, put those next to each other. And I mean, how...

how could you not think that there might be a connection? And thankfully, we have good archaeology now that shows that it existed. What blew me away were the multiple earrings in the Chorera figures. I was like, no one else does that. Like, why Ecuador? I still don't know. But like, I've just never seen the multiple earrings and nose rings anywhere else.

Yeah, I love it. Have you read Waves of Influence yet? No, but that's that. But I was at the symposium. I poured through it and it is just the most fascinating book. Like the idea that the spondylish trade kind of really kind of

forced people from Northern South America kind of upwards to find spondylitis sources around West Mexico. And the idea that the folks who are traveling back and forth because of the way that the Humboldt Current works would have to spend a four to six month hiatus

um in their kind of foreign lands so if you were coming from Ecuador up to Colima or Jalisco uh you would land you would have to spend four or six months there and so that's a great opportunity for cultural exchange I mean that's the reason we see a lot of these similarities it's the reason we see similar species in different areas I was obsessing about an article about the is it the

some form of like jay bird that you really only see in um west mexico and in northern south america interesting so so you know there's the cholo weeds quaintly in in mexico and peru has a hairless dog but that's that was introduced in the colonial period right i think what i

I've read an article again in my comps prep talking about how they may, they genetically diverge enough to where they may be kind of independent species. So, but that's just one article on many others that say that they're somehow connected. So I think maybe the jury's still out on that one. I'm just like, I think a good smoking gun for the connection would be like,

having metallurgy south american metallurgy in like kalima before the accepted date because they had metallurgy in in south america for a while and i'm just i'm always wondering like why didn't you know if they're trading they're interacting why didn't they bring some trinkets they didn't have to show people like how to make it that early but like why don't we see like

you know just just some bronze stuff or if they are spending that time uh in west mexico when are we gonna find a guachimontan in ecuador you know like maybe they're there they're just hiding under the forest absolutely we just need lidar everywhere that's what we need yeah and the lidar

Well, that's another fascinating thing about West Mexico is the area that we call West Mexico, you know, Nayarit, Colima, Jalisco is not West Mexico. We have Guachamantonis in all sorts of different locations. Tony and I were emailing about different locations where we've found them crop up recently, including like Zacatecas. And so, yeah. But, and the weird thing is it's not like a, a, a,

like a consistent spread out. It's little pockets, you know, where they're concentrated in the tequila valleys and then boom, you have a cluster down in Kalima. And then boom, you got some like in Guanajuato, like there's a really convincing looking one at La Gloria. And I'm just like, what about everywhere in between? Like, yeah, maybe they're like on the river trading, but you got to stop at some point, like,

Why aren't there little outposts? Like, just, I don't, the distribution confounds me. And one of the things I want to try to answer. Well, maybe they're there, right? Like, there just hasn't been enough archaeology in our area to determine that. So, and luckily more and more is coming up. Like, one of the things that this, well, this summer was the first time I got to visit Teochewland. And

And I'm out doing survey with Vare and Sarah Lomas. And we're seeing all of these, like, I'm just looking out landscape and I'm like, oh, there's one, there's one, there's one, there's one, there's one. The density at Teotihuacan just kind of amazed me. And so what is underneath all those agave fields that has, you know, maybe been bulldozed, but that we're just not seeing yet. So, so.

I feel like West Mexico is a rife, you know, there's very fertile ground for this question. So I'll pose it to you. What would you say are some misconceptions about the work that you do that people generally tend to have about West Mexico?

Well, Tony already touched on one that we're not associated with Mesoamerica when very clearly we, you know, West Mexico is part of Mesoamerica. West Mexico also appears to be part of parts of South America as well, you know, or just seems to be integrated with that. So that's one of the things that really kind of fascinates me and I'm really interested in. And that also kind of goes back

to a long dispelled idea in academia but the simplicity complex as phil weigand talked about it um the idea that west mexico was kind of the you know idiot neighbors you know like the redheaded stepchild of mesoamerica they didn't have for a long time they thought that west mexico didn't have large-scale architecture boy is that wrong um that west mexico didn't have you know they've

attached all this meaning to stone sculpture, which, you know, maybe they sculpted in stone, but just weren't good at it. So, yeah.

So yeah, so the idea that West Mexico was like somehow underdeveloped is one of the things that I think is still a barrier that we come up against. Every time I go to museums, I look at the labels and it still kind of holds some of those antiquated ideas. Or it talks about antiquated interpretations that have long been, you know,

kind of disavowed. So Peter first shamanism concept, you know, Peter first said that every figure that had a horn on it was a shaman. And he, you know, used cross cultural analysis with China to prove that in his writing. That's stuff we just don't do anymore in our field.

um you know what that horn looks like to me it looks like like an axe that's like strapped to the forehead which there's like a maya deity that has an axe strapped to their forehead and no one calls that a shaman no absolutely well um mark miller graham says that maybe they're uh conch shells yes so a symbol of status um

But anyways, so like some of our kind of old fashioned ideas about West Mexico not being, you know, developed or a so-called high culture. And then some of our bad interpretations like the shamanism interpretation, which, you know, we know that first fabricated quite a bit of his data. So, yeah.

Anyways, that's really hampered us. So hopefully one of my big hopes and I'm meeting more and more young scholars who are interested in West Mexico that we can maybe rewrite the story. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. And I do see, you know, in the classes that I've taught, I have seen a lot of interest in, you know, younger students when they're actually introduced to West Mexican art. It's something that at least initially it seems a bit more accessible to them, right? Not to say that it doesn't have any of the cultural complexity because it absolutely does. But I feel like sometimes

with Maya art in particular, right? The heavy iconography, all of the regalia, and also, you know, just like the stone, the two-dimensionality of it all, I think sometimes it's a little inaccessible. But it seems like the, you know, the ceramic medium seems to be a little bit more accessible to students. Absolutely. Yeah.

Sorry. I was going to say like Kalua has a bunch of figurines in their ads in the 60s. Yeah. But they were playing more of the exotic aspect, but it is, it was like, I've looked at those ads. There's something endearing about them. Oh, they're fascinating. And to bring it around to Barbie again, there's this fabulous article. I don't remember what it was.

what it was on, but by Cecilia Klein, where she talks about like dolls, she introduces it by talking about the idea of, you know, playing with dolls as a child and how these like human objects or human looking objects fascinate us. And I think that's something about West Mexican ceramics, or at least the figurative ceramics that attracts people is that we're looking at these little people doing little things 2000 years ago. And, you

For me, I'm like, what can we learn about them by looking at, you know, the stuff that they made depicting themselves? So, yeah. To wrap it all up, what do you love most about the work that you have been able to do in West Mexico? Um,

First, again, getting to go to Teotihuacan for the first time this spring or in June. Getting to spend time with other scholars in my field recently has been really amazing. You know, in art history, we're kind of isolated to begin with. But then when you're in a field that, you know, I know of like two art historians who study West Mexico, only one of which I have their email.

You know, to be able to spend time with people who study what I study and kind of speak my language, so to speak, has been so wonderful and rewarding and just fabulous. I can't speak more highly of it. And then I just love the kind of detective work of art history. Yeah.

the figuring out something that, you know, taking all the pieces, the iconography, the context, the formal aspects of it, putting them all together to understand how a work of art makes meaning.

And so kind of asking those questions and maybe finding some of the answers has been so rewarding. And it makes me hope for this field in the future that maybe once art historians have something really solid to say about these objects, we can attract more young scholars to our world. Yeah, I love that.

Well, is there anything that we haven't covered yet that you wanted to share before we wrap it all up? I don't think so. No. Awesome. Well, Beth, thank you so much for sharing your work with us, for sharing your passion for art, for West Mexico. It's been lovely to hear about the research that you're doing and, and,

I know I'm looking forward to seeing more and reading more about what you discover as you sift through this huge corpus of data. I'm sure it's going to bring a lot of really interesting insights. Thank you for having me.