Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans: Snake Anthropomorphy in the Great Basin, the American Southwest and Mesoamerica 9781800739734

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Abbreviations
Chronology
Introduction
Chapter 1 In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans
Chapter 2 The Uto-Aztecan Homeland
Chapter 3 The Primordial Snake Religion
Chapter 4 How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function?
Chapter 5 Anthropomorphy of the Uto-Aztecans, Animism, and Animalism
Chapter 6 Temporal Horizons of Uto-Aztecan Iconography
Chapter 7 Hunting Tool Iconography
Chapter 8 The Coso Anthropomorph and Its Untold Secrets and Mysteries
Chapter 9 The Circular Snake of Time
Chapter 10 Outlier Indices in Aztec Icons
Chapter 11 Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío
Chapter 12 The Binding Liberating Chain of Chupícuaro Pottery
Chapter 13 Mother-Earth Snakes
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

ICONICITY OF THE UTO-AZTECANS

ICONICITY OF THE UTO-AZTECANS Snake Anthropomorphy in the Great Basin, the American Southwest, and Mesoamerica

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay and Alan Philip Garfinkel

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay and Alan Philip Garfinkel

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mukhopadhyay, Tirtha Prasad, author. | Garfinkel, Alan Philip, author. Title: Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans : snake anthropomorphy in the Great Basin, the American Southwest, and Mesoamerica / Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay and Alan Philip Garfinkel. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022054580 (print) | LCCN 2022054581 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800739727 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800739734 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Uto-Aztecan Indians—Religion. | Serpent worship. | Idols and images. | Anthropomorphism—Religious aspects. Classification: LCC E99.U85 M85 2023 (print) | LCC E99.U85 (ebook) | DDC 299.7/845—dc23/eng/20230208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054580 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054581

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-972-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-973-4 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800739727

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Foreword Frederick Turner

xviii

Preface

xx

List of Abbreviations

xxii

Chronology

xxiii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans

7

Chapter 2. The Uto-Aztecan Homeland

20

Chapter 3. The Primordial Snake Religion

33

Chapter 4. How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function?

64

Chapter 5. Anthropomorphy of the Uto-Aztecans, Animism, and Animalism

76

Chapter 6. Temporal Horizons of Uto-Aztecan Iconography

86

Chapter 7. Hunting Tool Iconography

99

Chapter 8. The Coso Anthropomorph and Its Untold Secrets and Mysteries

115

Chapter 9. The Circular Snake of Time

132

Chapter 10. Outlier Indices in Aztec Icons

146

Chapter 11. Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío

159

Chapter 12. The Binding Liberating Chain of Chupícuaro Pottery

175

vi • Contents

Chapter 13. Mother-Earth Snakes

187

Conclusion

205

References

213

Index

234

Illustrations Figures 0.1. The plumed serpent motif at Templo Mayor, remnant of Tenochtitlan (sixteenth century CE), Mexico City. Photograph by Armando Perez. 0.2. Mictlantecuhtli the Aztec snake god of death and the afterworld, from Templo Mayor, Mexico City. Photograph by Armando Perez. 1.1. Map indicating first PUA movement and settlement before the Holocene (8000–2000 BCE). White arrows indicate population flows to the south and east, where Uto-Aztecan speaking groups like the Kawaiisu and the Takic-affiliated appear in the contemporary time frame. Drawing by authors. 1.2. Common visual codes of a concentric circle head, a zigzagging snake adjacent to a shamanic master-figure, hunting tools, animals, and so forth evinced in a Northern-Uto-Aztecan expression at the Coso Range petroglyphs area, California. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 1.3. Snake motif from Coso Range petroglyphs, eastern California. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 1.4. The linguistic locations map of the Uto-Aztecans following Glottolog 4.5 feed of native American languages. Drawing by authors. 2.1. An old photo from the Gila River Basin geological region, Arizona. Pregnant Pima Indian woman carrying an olla (water jar) on her head representing characteristic snake water visual metaphorization, Gila River Reservation, ca. 1900. Photo Courtesy of the California Historical Society Archives (CHS-768) of the University of California, Santa Cruz. 2.2. Map showing initial transitional routes of the Uto-Aztecans based on correlations between subsistence patterns and iconography of bighorn sheep (northwest), deer (north) and maize (south) in their respective regions. Drawing by authors.

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2.3a. Photograph of Tev Gui, a Snake chief, half-length portrait, facing front, in ceremonial dress for antelope priest in snake dance. Courtesy of the Edward Curtis collection. Library of Congress Control Number 93501151 Reproduction Number LCUSZ62-106760 (b&w film copy neg.). LCCN Permalink https://lccn.loc.gov/93501151, retrieved 27 April 2022. 2.3b. D-Strech representation of petroglyph with strong resemblance to snake dance shamans as in the previous photograph of Tev Gui. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 2.4. Snake patterns in Hopi Basketry. Photograph of basket on display, photographed ca. 1900. A small legible label on the basket reads “Frank M. Covert, 329 5th Ave., N.Y.” Legacy Identifier: CHS-3949.tiff. Unique identifier: UC141418. Courtesy of University of California Santa Cruz digital library. 3.1. Quintessential snake or water-like curvilinear formation indicating an indexical serpent body typical to the great Uto-Aztecan geo-culture of the American Southwest and the Middle Americas, from Little Petroglyph Canyon, California. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 3.2. A concentric circle head set atop a snake body image, Coso rock art complex, Inyo County California. Photo by Alan Garfinkel. 3.3. This petroglyph panel is from south of the current Zuni Pueblo (a Tanoan Uto-Aztecan population subdivision). It has patterns associated with serpents. Image derives from drawings taken on the spot by the authors; John Barber, and Henry Howe; Cincinnati, Ohio; P. A. Howe, Successor of Henry Howe; 1865; p. 764. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 3.4. Coso Peak solid body and projectile-pointed figures. Snakes appear in both hands. Snake left to panel exhibits a bifurcated tongue. Evident female gender of anthropomorph referenced by pendent labia genitalia. Avian feet appear with tri-une digits. Dart points are Elko Series (Nevada) projectile points, dating from about 4000 BCE to the Classic period of Mesoamerican archaeology, namely 400 CE. Dot blow-out digital reconstruction by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 3.5. Horned figure holds a snake in its right hand and a staff/ baton, ceremonial/religious scepter in its left (Grant et al. 1968). 3.6. Parrish Gorge petroglyph panel in the Coso Range, we have suggested that the panel is a portrayal of the journey of ascent (Garfinkel 2009; Yohe and Garfinkel 2012).

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3.7a. Decorated avian-human snake figures. Note quail plume top knot adornment on the right side of the head and characteristic triangular/diamond rattlesnake pattern that emanates out of the genital regions of the figure. Drawings by authors. 3.7b. Picture of a hair whorl petroglyph motif, accenting gender. Drawings by authors. 3.8. Rattlesnake element with triangles and diamonds ascending from a portal in California petroglyph of the pre-Numic groups. Drawings by authors. 3.9. Snake figure association with basket and deposit of seeds/rain (notably abundance, renewal, ascent and descent, snake/bird feather fringe at base of figure), avian-style feet, concentric circle face. Drawing by authors. 3.10. Coso Decorated Human “birthing” a snake or referencing fertility and first menses with prominent Hopi style hair whorls. Drawing by authors. 3.11. Deco-bodied animal humans with fringe skirts (tail feathers/ snakes). Prominent inverted chevron diamond rattlesnake pattern over the entire torso visible. Drawing by authors. 3.12. Kawaiisu baskets with the rattlesnake symbols as adornment (zigzags, diamond chain, and triangles). The baskets with necks on the top are taaragabadi, a small quail-plumed necked jar traditionally employed for brewing the jimsonweed (Datura wrightii) drink in order to enter an altered state of consciousness, obtain favor with the spirit world, and to gain a guardian spirit to help with life issues. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 3.13a. Coso quail feather plumage on concentric circle head formations. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 3.13b. Original quail feather plumage reference. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 3.14. Chemehuevi hunter wearing traditional Native dress and mountain hat with quail plumes. Courtesy of image from Legends of America. Courtesy of image from Library of Congress. 3.15. A snake-water motif alternating with a simpler, slightly curved line in Chupicuaro pottery. East of México-Bajío, Cuerámaro, River Turbio Location from the Classic period (400 CE). Permission of image granted by Museum of Arts, Irapuato, Mexico. 3.16. Hopi Indian altar with symbolic paintings of human-like figures, ca. 1900. Note the snake head projections and the deification

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of the snake with incorporation of an anthropomorphic divinity figure sitting on the snake. Image courtesy of California Historical Society (contributing entity), California Historical Society Collection, 1860– 1960 (collection), Title Insurance and Trust, and C. C. Pierce Photography Collection, 1860–1960 (subcollection). Date created: 1900. 52 3.17.  The zigzagging Tlaloc lightning shape and snake water morphs from Bajio Guanajuato. Photograph by Armando Perez. 53 3.18.  Snake representation in Jornada Mogollon style rock art at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, near Sierra Blanca, New Mexico, USA. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 54 3.19.  Xochicalco ritual pyramid panel. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 55 3.20.  Map of snake-like symbols as distributed across Uto-Aztecan territory. The patterns are positioned in reference to Uto-Aztecan cultural region in the last 2,000 years of its history following the Preclassic Period iconographic motifs in Mesoamerica. The snake symbolism inherent in these patterns ranges from dramatically simpler hunter-gatherer snake divinities to established patterns for sacred ceramics and sculpture. Drawing by authors. 57 3.21.  Classic pottery in water-intense lake regions around Acambaro on the northern frontiers of Mesoamerica, bordering the states of Michoacan, Jalisco, and Guanajuato, Mexico. Photo courtesy of City Museum of Irapuato, Mexico. 59 3.22.  The snake-water interlocking chain. Yokuts (PUA adjacent group) basketry (ca. 1900 CE). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.60 3.23.  Pottery from South Central Mexico (Classic Period 400 CE). Courtesy of City Museum of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. 60 4.1.  The projectile point forager and gendered formation prototype from California, Nevada. Drawing recreation of a forager petroglyph by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 66 4.2.  Snake patterns on rock surfaces at Caborca Sonora. Drawing by authors. 67 4.3.  Snake torso and snake portal and atlatl combinations in forager petroglyphs from Mojave Desert. Drawing by authors. 67 4.4.  Emotional valence generated by exaggerated or aggrandized features (Pasztory 1974; Siebe et al. 2005). Vessel with mask of Tlaloc, the serpent rain syncretic entity. Museo del Templo Mayor. Photo by Atrix Kreiger, 2 March 2018. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.68

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4.5. Emotive communication achieved with singular eye and FAPS-like ocular characters. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 5.1a. The detailed mat (calendrical or ritual) patterns evinced in reproduction of a Little Petroglyph Canyon image from the Coso Range, Mojave Desert, California. Drawing by authors. 5.1b. The second squarish bodied PBA comes from Sinaloa, Mexico. Drawing by authors. 5.2. PBAs, both deco-bodied and mat-like torso in-fill and solid-bodied, animal human conflation have avian-like bird feet, figures from the Coso Range, Mojave Desert, California. Drawing by authors. 5.3. PBAs from the Coso Range, Mojave Desert, indicated serpent patterns embedded within torsos of the deco-bodied figures with quadrant configurations. Drawing by authors. 5.4. Decorated, pregnant, bird-woman figure. Two quail plumes feather the top of her head. Pendent labia hang from the bottom of her torso emphasizing her feminine gender. The enlarged and bulbous torso exhibits dots within her belly—these are references to either seeds or rain and are another manner indicating that she is pregnant. Note avian-style feet and the serpent figure with a triangular head above the main (panel left) figure’s left arm. Panel is located in Big Petroglyph Canyon, California. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 5.5. Amazing diamond-shaped concentric head foreshadowing the Huichol nierika, from a different time frame on the Coso (Numic) iconographic cultural expanse. Drawing by authors. 5.6. The Huichol ‘eye of god’ (nierika) motif in contemporary handicraft. Also see comparative study of Hopi Huichol intersections (cf. MacLean 2012; Preuss 1904). Photograph by Armando Perez. 5.7. An Aztec feather-shield. Courtesy of Creative Commons Attribute 4.0. 6.1. Map indicating regions of settlement and time frames of the Uto-Aztecans. Drawing by authors. 6.2. Conceptual map of emigration routes in the pre-Holocene. Drawing by authors. 6.3. Trade locations of obsidian and precious stones based on the recent literature on the Puebloan Periods (ca. 700 CE and after). Drawing by authors.

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6.4. Aztlan, the origin of Uto-Aztecans, as interpreted by Keraudren. The Codex Boturini has been considered as a sourcebook for Uto-Aztecan migrations from a phase of Numic group migrations in the first millennium before the Common era. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 7.1. Projectile points (series), Lake Mojave (a, b), Pinto (c, d, e), Gypsum Cave (f ), Elko (g, h). A cultural resource management plan for the Fossil Falls–Little Lake locality. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 7.2. A sample projectile point petroglyph characteristic of forager ritual motifs. Sheep Canyon, Coso Range, California. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 7.3. Snake association of projectile icons. Sheep Canyon, Coso Range. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 7.4. Anthropomorph adorned with projectiles. Coso Range. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 7.5. Elko Eared, Humboldt basal-notched points and Elko corner-notched projectile point with related attribute terminology. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel. 7.6. Drawings of Nevada Elko Eared and Elko corner-notched style projectile points (Thomas 1981). Drawing by authors. 7.7. Anthropomorph with the projectile head decoration. Drawings by authors. 7.8. Gendered with pendent labia. Drawing by authors. 7.9. Snake skirt archetype of the Uto-Aztecan mother-earth or snake-mother deity. Drawing by authors. 7.10. Iny-43/at Parish Gorge. California. A probable Kawaiisu archetype of the mistress keeper of animals. Drawing by authors. 7.11. Tezcatlipoca Azul, the God of the Aztecs with the Obsidian knife. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 7.12. Obsidian knife, Mixtec (ca. 1200–1500 AD). Exhibit in the De Young Museum, San Francisco, California, USA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 8.1. Coso Rock Art District, Little Petroglyph Canyon. Photo by Craig Baker at Wikimedia Commons. 8.2. The Kawaiisu animal master Yahwera Figure. Drawing by authors.

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8.3. Hohokam Caborca rock art motifs, Sonora-Arizona border, appearing to imply some sort of animal keepers and snake motifs. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia commons. 8.4. Huichol ‘eye-of-god’ motif. A drawing of a standard motif by authors. 8.5. PBA-like formations in Caborca, Sonora. Photo from NavaIsrael courtesy of Wikimedia Commons license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. 8.6. These three PBA examples are typical of Coso relational symbols of animal-human figures with objects like shafts, head ornamentations, and other objects like atlatl, digging stick, and snake (associated with extreme right image), etc. Drawings by authors. 8.7. Concentric circle motif with multiple possible associations in the folklore. Photograph by Armando Perez. 8.8. Circular knob eyes in the middle of a concentric circle shaped face is exhibited in a large number of Coso PBAs. Drawings by authors. 8.9. Map showing the distribution of Numic (Kawaiisu, Coso) and Takic groups in California and the Great Basin. Dotted line and arrows represent hypothesized Uto-Aztecan movements through the Sonoran Desert towards northwest Mexico and the Chichimec Sea. Drawing by authors. 9.1. The bird snake visual metaphor at Tula, an example of astronomical positioning of relief features on architecture. Image courtesy of CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0). 9.2. The Hopi basketry pattern. Oraibi Mother with baby in cradleboard. The J. Paul Getty Museum (description). Photographer: A. C. Vroman (American, 1856–1916). Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984. 9.3. The Coso PBA body head with calendrical ornamental marks in cardinal directions that anticipate the calendrical marks on the concentric circle motif in the Codex Borgia. Drawing by authors from original photography. 9.4. Moctezuma’s Stone at Tizoc. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons License 3.0. 9.5. The cosmic Disk at Chalcok. Sculpture representing the market glyph or tianquiztli. These objects were fixed on small platforms within the markets in the area devoted to the worship of the god of markets and fairs. Drawing by authors.

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9.6. Codex Borgia, page 9. Directional almanacs, each cardinal direction representing four deities (Tlaloc, Xipe Totec, an unidentified Mixtec god, and Mixcoatl). This directional almanac is related to death, associated with four deities in different directions. The scheme functioned as a means of prophecy about death and thus entry through a ludic portal. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 9.7. Codex Borgia, page 30 repeats the four cardinal directions and a center labeling the creation of the sun theme. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 9.8. Codex Fejervary-Mayer, page 1. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 10.1a. “Creation of the Sun Panel,” Lunar Goddess with five primordial pilgrims, sky bearers, raising the heavens to create the sun in the cosmos—lifting up the sky with “clouds.” Little Petroglyph Canyon, Coso Range, California. Photo by Alan Garfinkel. 10.1b. Creating the Sun Panel with the five-pilgrim sky-bearers and the lunar goddess in the Coso Range, southwestern Great Basin, Little Petroglyph Canyon, China Lake, California. Drawing by authors. 10.2. Map showing centers of trade in precious stones. Hence, jade may have been mined and carried northward from ChichenItza in the peninsular regions of the Gulf of Mexico. Turquoise was mined in Mojave and Chaco Arizona and brought across through the south. Drawing by authors. 10.3a. Pinyon Creek motif. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 10.3b. Drawing showing details of same panel. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr. 11.1. Vessel displaying snake rain icon Tlaloc from Templo Mayor, Mexico City. Dated to Tenochtitlan thirteenth century CE. Photo by Dennis Jervis. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0. 11.2. Map of rock art occurrences from the del Bajío sink, south of the Aridamerican desiccated system, in the central mainland region of Mexico (based on Anzures and Morales 2008). 11.3. Los Hernandez pictogram site, Municipality of Salamanca, State of Guanajuato, Mexico. Part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, these panels seem to have pre-existed from a post Cretaceous layer of sedimentary rocks. Photograph by Armando Perez.

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11.4. Anthropomorphic pictograms at Los Hernandeza. (A) Geometrical calendar; (B) vulva-like formations; (C–D) anthropomorph; (E) water-snake mark, and (F) Tlaloc preconfigurations along with calendrical markings. Drawings by authors. 11.5. Evidence of shapes from Los Hernandez, Salamanca Guanajuato, Mexico: (a) variations on calendrical markings and anthropomorphs; (b) snake-water linear formations. Photographs by Armando Perez. 11.6. The Plazuelas ruins at Guanajuato, Mexico (inhabited between Classic 600 CE and 900 CE). Photograph by Armando Perez. 11.7. The Tlaloc symbol: (a) a rudimentary but powerfully suggestive anthropomorphic (curved arm feature) symbol of an ethnographic rain deity; (b) Tlaloc symbolism from Las Plazuelas, in the State of Guanajuato, Mexico. Drawings by authors. 11.8. Convoluted, curvilinear formations do not add up to any specific image and are probably solar calendars with some metaphoric deific pareidolia. Photograph by Armando Perez. 11.9. High Aztec rain (snake-patterned) prayer artifact in polychrome shell. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License of property of the Walters Art Museum, Maryland, USA. 12.1. Map showing location of the highly sophisticated Chupicuaro pottery culture. Drawing by authors. 12.2. An interlocked zigzagging line grid on Chalchihuites pottery. Photo by Thelma datter. Creative Commons-Share Alike 4.0. 12.3. Incised snake line decor. Geometric. West of Mexico in the Bajío, Cuerámaro, Turbio River. Classic (400 CE). Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum. 12.4. Classic (400 CE) period container. Mud modeling demonstrating the unwinding Fibonacci-type line from Bajío Mexico. Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum. 12.5. Conch-shape decorative motif with inclined parallel lines throughout the body. Abasolo, Mexico. Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum. 12.6. Quadrangular Fibonacci snake line grids on container. Mud modeling. Incised and polished. Décor West of MexicoBajío, Guanajuato. Huanímaro. Classic. Photo Courtesy of Irapuato City Museum.

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12.7. Hohokam pottery in Arizona, Mexico border. Wikimedia Commons. 12.8. Diamond rattlesnake shape deep in Western Mexico, from the Classic period of 700 CE and after. Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum. 13.1. Tapuat earth-mother symbolism of Hopi petroglyph evidences. Drawing by authors. 13.2. Kukulkan Maya Itzaean snake-deity evolved from the Aztec Maya interactive phase of the first millennium in the Common Era. Wikimedia Commons. 13.3. Distinctive labia and hole motifs from the American Southwest. Drawing by authors. 13.4. Drawing of Coatlique representing fertility. The sculpture was discovered at the Antigua plaza mayor, Historical Center of Mexico City, and is preserved at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia. 350 × 130 × 45 cm; 24 tons. Drawing by authors. 13.5a. Photograph depicts a woman wearing squash blossom whorls in her hair, a common Hopi hairstyle. Photo courtesy of Museum of Art, BC, Canada. 13.5b. Hopi hair whorl recreated in early portrait of the goddess Xochiquetzal depicting a whorl tradition in the Aztec tradition. Rufinio Tamayo Museum. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Attribution 4.0. 13.6. Quetzatcoatl. God of life, light, wisdom, fertility, and knowledge, patron of the day and of the winds, and ruler of the west. Codex Borbonicus, pp. 21–22. Bibliotheque del Paris Bourbon 39 × 39.5 cm; 24 tons. Drawing by authors. 13.7. Artist’s rendering in outline of relief of Coyolxauhqui dismembered by her brother, Museo del Templo Mayor (diameter 320 cm). Drawing by authors. 13.8. Drawing reproduction of original from Little Petroglyph Canyon, California reveals snake divinity with hand held snakes and associated feminine snake-deity. Both divinities are seen wearing snake-skirt vests. Drawing by authors. 13.9. Codex Borgia, page 56. Bone crusher mother goddess of the Aztecs. Wikimedia Commons. 14.1. The snake-water mimetic or archetypal prayer pattern on different cultural manifests of the Uto-Aztecan civilization:

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Coso (California), Yaqui (Sonora), Jornada (New Mexico), Caborca (Sonora), Caborca-type pottery (Zacatecas), Mixtec relief in architectural styles and the definitive snake arms or adornments of the Codices, like the Codex Laud (as shown here). Drawing by authors. 14.2a–d. The evolving Uto-Aztecan snake-water line. Drawings by authors. 14.2a. The elemental line. Drawing by authors. 14.2b. The perpendicular indented snake water line modification. Drawing by authors. 14.2c. The sharp angular snake water transformation in pottery and related artifacts. Drawing by authors. 14.2d. The grid-like snake water relief patterns common to architecture. Drawing by authors.

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Tables 1.1. Adjunct visual features added to basic body type of representations that function as semiotic markers, gender beliefs, sustenance practices, and ornaments, all indicative of a set of core visual indices. Drawings by authors. 18 3.1. Snake species relevant to Uto-Aztecan art and symbolism. Drawings by authors. 35 3.2. Common core of abstract ideational iconic inscriptions based on iconicity of the snake consciousness. Drawings by authors. 61 5.1. ‘Head’ features of the Coso, Nevada, Mojave, and American Southwest anthropomorph complex. Drawings by authors. 79 7.1. Iconography of the projectile-point depictions, Great Basin (Eastern California and Desert West). Drawings by authors. 106 11.1. A chart of Bajío rock art sites related to possible groups that might have created the inchoate iconography of the whole region. 170 13.1. A list of mythological or sacred narrative legends originating as earth-mother names and their possible reappearances through visual metaphors in recent epochs. 190

Foreword Frederick Turner

There is rising interest in the pre-Columbian world in both the Americas and Europe (especially Britain, Germany, France, and Spain). The trend toward the sociology and politics of postcolonial studies might well adopt this book on iconicity as an example of the appropriate elevation of the “subaltern.” The authors gather together a very large body of archeological, anthropological, iconographic, mythological, historical, art-historical, economic, linguistic, genetic, ecological, and psychological scholarship, previously limited by locality, specialization, and temporal period, and combines it coherently to present a big picture of a world that has been greatly neglected relative to its importance for human history. More generally, the book makes an informed human statement that applies not only to the understanding of a particular population of historical humans but also to us as human beings subject to the same deep forces and huge affordances as its ancient subjects. Far from being problematic in this respect, the authors’ argument could be an important corrective to the unintentional violations of ethics inherent in earlier studies that tended to reduce the human lives of its subjects to the position of object rather than subject. This book helps us see the world through the eyes of its subjects and thus recover their subject status. The rich and far-ranging collection of illustrations introduces us not only to the visual genius of a range of related peoples, but also to the live evolution of their art, ritual, philosophy, and spiritual awareness. The discourse also establishes good grounds for resolution of a major controversy in pre-Columbian studies: that is, whether the Uto-Aztecan cultural nexus originated in the North American Southwest, and migrated or diffused south-eastward into Mesoamerica, or the reverse. It establishes the former position as the best fit for the evidence. Among the literate public is a growing audience interested in the Native American world: such works as Dennis Tedlock’s Popol Vuh, with its iconographical and anthropological background, have blazed the trail. Camilla Townsend’s recent Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs also would lead to what authors are saying in this book as well. Even Townsend’s book,

Foreword • xix

though a fine addition to the field, does not explore the connection with the earlier hunter-gatherer tradition of the American Southwest. The virtue of this book is that it pulls together many specialist studies into a whole that is greater than any of its parts. Frederick Turner, poet and author, was Founders Chair Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. His works include books like Natural Religion (Transaction Press, 2006) and The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit (The Free Press, 1996).

Preface This book started while we were first considering the rock arts of the American Southwest, especially the Death Valley and Mojave Desert geographical systems. These regions present some of the most interesting rock art specimens of a non-extant but probable Uto-Aztecan group of peoples whose contemporary descendants include the Shoshone and the Paiuté tribes of the Great Basin along the Nevada-California border. The genealogy also includes the peoples of pre-Columbian antiquity who survive to this day and the Tarahumaras of Chihuahua in Mexico, the Huichol of north central Mexican Aridamerica, and—above all—the Aztecs and their living descendants like the Mexicas in south central Mexico. A closer examination of the visual symbolism adopted by these now unknown tribes of peoples reveals something of far-reaching significance, something otherwise occluded by the fact that these commonly threaded anthropological groups did not have a literate or writing culture. The Uto-Aztecans remained a culture without written inscriptions or typographical memorialization. The mythical history that survives and inspires the descendant Uto-Aztecan cultures of contemporary denomination however derive their philosophical insights into life and death, and the struggles of survival in nature, from an iconographic symbolism whose memory remains alive today. More than any other form of memorialization or textualization, visual resilience creates the cultural content for Uto-Aztecans. The Codices and oral traditions of these tribes also reveal a unanimous philosophical approach to life, war, conflicts, calamities of nature, and aggression. But this belief was mediated through visuality and visual resilience—of what we believe—is a method of ritual codification achieved with iconicity. We further tried to identify how the iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans helped in remembering, invoking, and memorializing the history of these groups, and their negotiations with death and mortal forces, and their belief in mediating divinities. Our initial studies commenced at the Death Valley and Nevada petroglyphic sites. Some of the so-called tomes of iconography were made available to us by scholars who had been working in the region for several decades. Their contributions had already enriched our knowledge of visual

Preface • xxi

archetypes in the American Great Basin and the greater Southwest. We already had several publications on the theme of iconographic impact, especially on the impact that visual signs have on human psychology. The project became more interesting as the methods of representation in that iconography were parsed out through the complex iconic sculptural motifs of the southern cultural expressions of Mesoamerica. The project could be successfully carried out in various locations of the Mesoamerican frontier, especially in the states of Guanajuato, Hidalgo, and the Federal District of Mexico among others. Our association with the California Rock Art Foundation (CRAF), the Bradshaw Foundation, and the University of Guanajuato should be noted here as having made the interaction with scholars, artists, and archaeologists in the academy and elsewhere possible for us. The City Museum of Irapuato in Mexico shared information and photographs and evidence appropriate for the cultural expressions of the Classic (400 CE and after) and later prehistoric phases of Uto-Aztecans in Mesoamerica. Indeed, in a sense, our research guided us in a direction somewhat opposed to the science of material culture evidence as we place greater emphasis on unity of perception in the imagery than on the diversity of history and media. The theme of an overarching belief in the efficacy of certain symbols makes our findings worth considering. Perhaps it is up to the realm of museological studies and the fine arts to identify the central revealing aspect of the art of different anthropologically known groups of the region. Hence the evidence of a thematic uniqueness—whether in pottery or rock art pictogram—helps us draw the one conclusion that the art of the Great Basin is connected to that of the Aztecs. We acknowledge our gratitude to all the people in several locations and museums across California, Arizona, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Mexico City, among others, whose contributions and feedback helped us along the way. Most of the research was conducted at the University of Guanajuato and the California Rock Art Foundation. Some of the processes that led to the formation of this book are available in podcast conversations on the Archaeology Podcast Network and is available on media like Spotify and other online platforms.

Abbreviations BCE

Before Common Era

CE

Common Era

NOH

Northern Origin Hypothesis

NUA

Northern-Uto-Aztecan

PBA

Patterned Body Anthropomorph

PNUA Proto-Northern-Uto-Aztecan PUA

Proto-Uto-Aztecan

SUA

Southern-Uto-Aztecan

Chronology Pinedale Glacial Maximum

22,000 BCE

Western Pluvial Lakes

12,000 BCE–8,000 BCE

Late Pleistocene

12,000 BCE–10,000 BCE

Altithermal

9,000 BCE–4.000 BCE

Holocene

8,000 BCE–2,000 BCE

Pre-maize Iconography

7,000 BCE–1,000 BCE

Little Lake Desiccation

8,000 BCE–1 CE

Archaic

4,000 BCE–-2,000 BCE

Numic Spread

1,000 BCE–0 CE

Basketmaker

500 BCE–700 CE

Preclassic

2,000 BCE–300 CE

Newberry

2,000 BCE–700 BCE

Puebloan Period

900 BCE–1,500 CE

Classic

400 CE–900 CE

Epiclassic

650 CE–1,100 CE

Postclassic

800 CE–1,400 CE

Introduction

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Uto-Aztecans comprise all ethnic groups that are connected by the same etymologically originated languages in North and Central America. The iconic practices of Uto-Aztecans may be studied integrally and from a unique perspective if we are to bear in mind that their religious iconography is a product of human behavioral reflexes toward nature and the environment. Through extensive studies, we can reveal a rich backdrop of cultural reference, and especially the emotive practices and visions of the Uto-Aztecans. The cosmic thread that illuminates their cultural symbolism has not been previously presented in an unambiguous context or—better yet—emphasized as a key determinant of religious values in these cultures. We believe that the religions of pre-Columbian Uto-Aztecans, whose presence has been noted in the entire geographic expanse from west of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin to the southern fringes of Mesoamerican topography, have all been eco-critically conditioned by the snake and its isomorphic representations. Uto-Aztecans used the snake as a central hallmark for the forces that guide human life and destiny. As a fierce animal, it symbolized the inevitability of death and the possibility of resurrection as key themes of human existence. Specifically, the snake provides a metaphorical analog for this consciousness. Indeed, the belief was so fundamental that it provides one of the unique instances in human iconographic practice on a global and temporal scale, and marks a sense of continuity and resilience for symbolic behavior. The attempt to study

2 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

a snake simulacrum as an abiding and evolving trope of survival behavior thus constitutes the basic objective of this book. We must admit that a long, all-embracing iconicity of snakes and related snake motifs are evident in Uto-Aztecan art, and the tradition of rich handicrafts, textiles, chromatic representations and utility artefacts, that are all evinced in products of the varied populations of the region. The term ‘iconicity’ as used in the present work refers to a human potential. It is at once a subjective prerogative of the human animal to create a motif or expressive form and to fall back on it as a resource for socially meaningful, interpersonal communication and as a model of quotidian or existential valorization. The snake has been recognized as a panoramic symbol in the founding scholarship of some European and American scholars. Walter J. Fewkes, who studied the Hopi snake dance rituals in his important paper of 1893 drew attention to the potent influence of a snakehealing motif and a snake-rain analogy. Fewkes’s more neutral and empathetic insight into the Hopi ceremony is of interest because it is the first time that a large Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) snake oral tradition became prominent in academic literature. Fewkes’s studies, in essence, now invite the question whether the Aztecs themselves had any inner diachronic knowledge of the snake among their related populations. Indistinct and discretely manifested snake expressions were almost always epitomized in all Uto-Aztecan-affiliated populations. These include the distant Pima or Luiseño in the northern coordinates (California) and the urbanized Uto-Aztecan groups of south-central Mexico. Uto-Aztecans incorporated contesting entities like the in cuauhtli, that is ‘jaguar’ or a ‘warrior-spirit,’ whose existence was fraught with battles, territorialization, hunting forays, and conflicts that punctuated the course of their rivalry and appropriation of resources. But the snake’s metaphorical meanings transcends those conflicts, becoming a hallmark symbolic signature and causing an iconic display among these factions and peoples. Although there is no record of any written script, it may be assumed that a snake narrative was not developed to the extent that there could be a tradition of reflexive commentaries and religious consolidation of the idea of the snake per se. Uto-Aztecan religions present multiple layers of iconographic socialization, but there is no indication of a self-consciously cultivated doctrinal element except in some of the variants of sacred folklore. Like the plumed serpent and the mother earth tropes delineated by scribes who wrote the Codices, the snake was ultimately represented in the last chain of surviving iconography. The iconography was elaborated in stupendous architectural expressions in the urbanized domains of the Toltecs of Tula, the Xochicalco people, and in Tlaxcala, or in the southern Nahuatl speaking groups like the Mixtecs of Mictlan.

Introduction • 3

What we have tried to respect in this volume of essays is the role played by the snake among the various layers of Uto-Aztecan prehistory. As Keraudren (2016) shows, the Codices, especially the Boturini, fashioned in the fifteenth century, provide a reflexive map of the Aztec creation stories of their homeland—that can be read as a rudimentary history of their ethnogenesis. We move from the Archaic or even more ancient early Holocene (3rd millennium BCE) to the later urban military cultural centers of Teotihuacan (fourth century CE) and Tula (seventh century CE) among others. The snake death semiotics may be traced in the various cultural artifacts in different locations along the Mojave Desert trail in the Mojave Desert in the Sonoran Desert and the inland mountains of Mesoamerica’s Sierra del Sur. Our approach to this thematic study lies in identifying snake metaphors in the visual culture elements on different layers of archaeological and cultural artifacts, of which the earliest examples are rock art, petroglyphs and picto-grammatical markings. But the snake symbology appears more compelling when one considers the American Southwest and into Mesoamerica. The chapters deal with this connecting theme in a variety of expressions. As a functional hypothesis, the snake imagery alone helps explain the religious value and priority given to the visual index in the different forms of its utility and social life, as ritual symbols and even totemic representations. We suggest that the snake uniquely determines the visual theogony. Humans have not been imagined independently of their snake association. There is no other instance of such proximity of a single animal life form in iconographic practices—not with such consistent dedication. The iconicity is a collective trait that has been carried over from the most ancient Uto-Aztecan artificers. Thus, the architectonics of the snake in the governed habitus of these peoples—in the pyramids, totemic pillars and well-wrought reliefs and mural patterns abound in examples of such incorporation. It was integrated in two steps. First, there is evidence of an iconicity that is sensitive to astronomical movements and effects. Second, it was achieved through the preponderance of mathematical knowledge. Further, Uto-Aztecans became aware of the efficacy of precious stones, like obsidian, jade, and turquoise, which were traded in many denominations and locations. In every instance, the art was elevated by the fierce existential theme of the snake and its potential referentiality of death. The snake was configured in a celestial world as an object of veneration. No iconography is valid without its emotional impact, and hence the artist’s sensitivity to the more profound and positively valenced structures of artistry are represented. Uto-Aztecans exploited the snake’s fearsome reminder as a portal to the emotion of death coupled with a belief in divinely connected afterlife. The journey of the

4 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

human soul is presented with the animistic guardians that guide us while they act as seminal power-brokers in human affairs. What happens when the events of the real world are viewed through this transcendent and animistic lens? Human life becomes a moment, or a temporal event, and thus relates to a larger trajectory of time, creating a rational context for constant experiences of war, death, and human sacrifice among the Uto-Aztecans. Hence, the snake image enables this death consciousness and continuity to arrive and thrive. It rationalizes human sacrifice. The snake image was thus at once the cause of the growth and consolidation of an idea but also a sensorial cause or trigger for a death view that rationalizes killing and sacrifice. In this latter sense, the snake rituals also caused discontent and fall of the Aztec way of life. The iconicity of Uto-Aztecans is thus conditioned by this transcendental vision of death and, as such, this consciousness alone emerges as a profoundly human achievement. The essays in this book present the notion that Uto-Aztecan iconicity is a death-dealing memory, driven by simultaneous imagination of fear and transcendence for life in a hereafter that the shamans shared, visualized, and interpreted. The shamans accomplished this aim to implicate their followers in their vision. If the abiding symbol

Figure 0.1. The plumed serpent motif at Templo Mayor, remnant of Tenochtitlan (sixteenth century CE), Mexico City. Photograph by Armando Perez.

Introduction • 5

is that of the snake—and the related snake-water eco-symbol—then its meaning lies in the human play with death, survival, and heroic furor in the animistic continuum. Our certitude of this belief also comes from the empirical interviews and exchanges we had with the practicing shamans of their culture. The ethnographic bearing of this culture anchors to consciousness of continuum through life, death, and communication with the

Figure 0.2. Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec snake god of death and the afterworld, from Templo Mayor, Mexico City. Photograph by Armando Perez.

6 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

spirits. Individual shamans, even today, connect not just to nature, but also to machines and technology. Technological instruments are also informed with a spiritual life. Philosophically, Uto-Aztecan piety is best realized in the perception of the ontological experience of a continuity among separate things and entities. The way a radio functions, or a sensor responds to an input, is associated in Aztec shamanism with guiding spirits. Shamans and commoners, both men and women, are behaviorally sensitized to this level of experience. In contemporary Mexico, animism co-exists with Christian spiritualism in a syncretic mélange of Catholicism with Indigenous theology. The snake sensitizes and opens the portal to the next world—a supernatural and ethereal world. Its artifice however is visible in the objects around the whole of life, both here and now.

Chapter 1

In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans

R

The Exodus from the Great Basin Uto-Aztecan Indigenous cultures extend from the Great Basin and American Southwest to the southern frontiers of Mesoamerica. The Native ethnolinguistic groups comprise a largely contiguous cluster of people who shared similar material culture for thousands of years. The existing UtoAztecan linguistic stratum suggests that prehistoric groups broadened out of the horizons of their existence from a very early common habitus in the north, around the land wedge between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern Sierra Nevada (Fowler 1983; Grayson 2011; Tausch 2004) (see map in Figure 1.1). Movements initially occurred after changes in a postglacial age climate. Dramatic environmental changes started to affect the human biome about 15,000 years ago. The transition is indicated by human interaction with the natural environment, during a period of melting ice and gradual exposure of a wet northern savanna. The Pinedale Glacial Maximum reached its minimum temperature gradients around about 22,000 BCE, after which a culturally indistinct generic population emerged. However, it was really in the Late Pleistocene (of the last 12,000 years) that the broader Uto-Aztecan culture materialized. This rather unique expression developed in part owing to the onset of irreversible environmental conditions. Prehistorians generally suggest a definitive southward movement (around 10,000 BCE and after) in which populations migrated within the vast Great Basin territory and the greater Southwest, including

8 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 1.1. Map indicating first PUA movement and settlement before the Holocene (8000 BCE–2000 BCE). White arrows indicate population flows to the south and east, where Uto-Aztecan speaking groups like the Kawaiisu and the Takic-affiliated appear in the contemporary time frame. Drawing by authors.

In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans • 9

California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and south Texas. Such a scenario is supported by the presence of a “pan-American DNA haplogroup” (Achilli et al. 2008e: 1766) for populations of these regions (Kemp et al. 2007; 2010). Study of these Pleistocene fauna and ancient material culture by Hale (1958) and Grayson and Cannon (1999), and most importantly by Strauss and Goebel (2011), also support the thesis that these population movements were spawned by climate change. The rise in earth’s temperature (after the last Maximum of 22,000–15,000 BCE) provided a warmer and salubrious environment. Following the Altithermal (i.e., the subsequent 8,000 to 4,000 years before the Common Era), there may have been counter-movements in divergent, reverse, and parallel directions that determined settlement locations and the precise footprints for population concentrations in the Greater American Southwest and Mesoamerica. Again, relatively late movements (4,000 to 3,000 BCE) from Oceania or Africa may have reached out into South America, and even Central Mexico (Bentley and Ziegler 2011). Olmecs of southeast Mexico, who manifest Australoid anthropometry, is a case in point. The Olmecs present a genetic anthropometry distinct from Uto-Aztecan haplogroups. But the origins of such isolated peoples and how exactly they intermixed with their northern counterparts are largely unknown.

Ethnogenesis of the Uto-Aztecans The exact genesis of Uto-Aztecan languages however remains a curiosity of Great Basin geography. Material culture remnants from between 9,000 to 5,000 BCE, consist of (a) coarse hunting tools, (b) cutting instruments, and (c) flaked stone debris of natural or roughly crafted obsidian, chert, and other conchoidally fracturing toolstone. Rock art depictions from this general time span include decidedly time-bound cultural referents. Depictions of projectile point hunting and cutting stones represent the ritual art of cultural groups that derive from the Great Basin and the adjacent ancestors of the eastern Sierra Nevada. These are the earliest unambiguous referents of an Uto-Aztecan iconography with consistent adherent indications of their religious beliefs. Again, this petroglyphic symbolism of Stone Age tools is also the first evidence of a forager chapter in which elements of Uto-Aztecan iconography stand independently of any association with referents from agriculture. This is exclusively a symbolism of hunting tools and hunter-gatherer cultures. The only elements of the depiction of these early symbols that reappear in later Uto-Aztecan cultures are humans, animal-human conflations, and animals like the snake, bighorn sheep or

10 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

deer. So, in addition to hunting and cutting tools, there are of course key indications of human and animal associations—but no representations of maize or other economic plants. One of the most basic animal symbols that operates within these earliest expressions is that of the snake, which often entwines or dangles adjacent to depictions of the lithic cutting and hunting tools (see Figure 1.2) (Garfinkel and Pringle 2004). The Uto-Aztecan early occupation abided in a ‘transverse’ homeland, appearing mainly across California and Nevada, and carry abstract geometric elements in association with ‘bighorn sheep’ depictions, which are at first so rudimentary in appearance that no inference regarding cultural continuity from earlier times can be made. Rather, they seem to be locked in the affordances of a local huntinggathering culture and are absent from other Proto-Uto-Aztecan depictive systems. Another animal symbolism complex is evident in the transmarine region spanning from Baja California Sur to the La Pintada rock art sites of western Sonora, in Mexico (López and Barragán 2006). Here, too, we find ‘deer,’ ‘stag,’ and ‘fawn’-like depictions that are scarce or absent in later time strata of the Uto-Aztecan expressions, whether in Aridamerica or Mesoamerica. Whether these lithic culture animal symbols were pecked in a period of antiquity that had already discovered maize cannot be known

Figure 1.2. Common visual codes of a concentric circle head, a zigzagging snake adjacent to a shamanic master-figure, hunting tools, animals, and so forth, evinced in a Northern-Uto-Aztecan expression at the Coso Range petroglyphs area, California. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans • 11

with certainty. But they independently stand as a symbolism of UtoAztecan foragers who either did not know maize cultivation or lived in a habitat too distant in time or place to have been affected by agriculture or domestication. Visual symbols may be associated with recognizable animal shapes and natural objects that were available in early Uto-Aztecan environments. However, the depictions (such as of hunting tool icons) from California, Nevada, and the northern fringes of Arizona give us a basis for tracing visual culture associations in several distant parts of a hypothetically remodeled Proto-Uto-Aztecan geography. The symbols reappear across a vast canvas of emerging and vanishing cultural groups engaged in temporal migrations, all linked in traces by a protolanguage bond. The inter-relations adhere to what Johann Karl Buschmann, in his seminal 1859 research, called the “Uto-Aztecan family of languages” (Buschmann 1859: 62). The iconography of this ancient family of cultures has been studied in splendid detail, but there has not been any major attempt to trace diachronic links across extensions out of the glacial meltdowns of the northern Great Basin.

The Desert West Foragers Period How then are forager rituals in the Desert West in any manner connected to the more evolved southern renaissance of the ‘Aztec’ culture of south Central Mexico? The northern rock art templates of these icons, or other perishable vignettes, are quite different in their outward appearance— though not so in themes and motifs. Icons’ names and identities do not survive in later (extant) ethnic, mostly oral, narratives either. What survives across these temporal sheets are remnant Proto-Uto-Aztecan visual symbols in a moving mosaic of newer cultures and contemporary ethnic practices. Recent expressions, in basketry and textile patterns, retain the visual syllabary of an iconography with amazing clarity and continuity in time. Hence, contemporary Native American iconography in the American Southwest evinces an evolutionary life. We hypothesize a common stock of icons or an ‘iconicity’ of almost timeless scale among affiliated cultures in the Great Basin, American Southwest, and Mesoamerican populations. Later complex and elaborate visual iconography, denoted in Aztec Codices, for instance, contain more complex and informed versions of these early ‘templates’ that were born among the foragers. This process is thus a fascinating example of what we call ‘cultural iconicity’ of an abiding and evolving cultural-linguistic group. The word iconicity may not have existed in the sense we use here: iconicity is a subliminal competence that leads to expressing oneself culturally and hence consists of a set of signature

12 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

expressions that repeat themselves. The symbolism is reified in time and in different populations through layers of prehistory so that some cultures are able to hold onto that symbolism and anchor themselves to a system of beliefs around the icons. Human iconography has evolved over centuries and even millennia as it has in the traditions of the archaeologically high Aztecs. As such, the cultural iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans precisely constitutes the theme of this book. The literature on Uto-Aztecan visual iconography is thus based largely on forager practices and is generally bound by ethnographic considerations relating to a narrow spectrum of investigation. It is also quite difficult to create a panorama of the locations and the extremely elaborate details and ornamental features in one extensive thesis on Uto-Aztecan iconic practices. ‘Iconicity’ implies a degree of competence or success in creating an iconographic culture—hence, we consider only selected regional expressions to illustrate the depth, as well as the range, of Uto-Aztecan iconicity. We can first identify forager geometrical patterns that enable the collective production of motifs and related variations in later period practice. In this effort, we are indebted to the extensive studies of scholars like Taube (1991), Saunders (2001), and Smith (2015), and in general to Levine and Carballo’s discussion on Obsidian Reflections: Symbolic Dimensions of Obsidian in Mesoamerica (2014), centering in part on forager hunting material culture remnants, for formulating links between obsidian geology and the early expressions of Uto-Aztecan groups in the western Great Basin and eastern California (Fgure 5.5, 7.9). One of the main thrusts in the present analysis focuses on ‘anthropomorphic’ animal-master and mother-goddess-type figures, which are closely related to Aztec religious iconography of the Tenochtitlan culture (fourteenth century CE). Anthropomorphic icons of the early Uto-Aztecan petroglyph culture (in the American Southwest and Great Basin) are inter-related to motifs from northern Mexico, especially the Huichol cultural tradition (Table 1.1). Ethnographic accounts and sacred narrative refer to visual parallels (Fewkes 1893; Lumholtz 1904; Preuss 1904, 1905, 1912). But recent literature has also focused on some remarkable continuities. Such early forager depictions now give us clues to understanding the meaning and impact of certain patterns that have remained largely undeciphered.

Emergence of The Grand Snake Motif Our research notes the interpretive simulacrum in the early geometrical depictions of the ‘snake’ motif, which gradually evolves from the deep-time culture stratum to a complex female iconography of the snake-mother. The

In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans • 13

snake stands as the independent grand symbol of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan cultures. But it can be visually associated with anthropomorphic shamanic figures, animal-master images, and be seen to coexist in a symbolic relationship of both divinity and nature. Significantly, the Uto-Aztecan snake hallmark recurrently morphs into divinity, which points to something deeply metaphorical in human imagination—as ideas liquify and are molded and reappear in creative ways. The snake was often conflated, manifesting as the earth-mother goddess herself, with central and intimate associations in the Aztec religion. The splendid Epiclassic period evidences of Chupicuaro pottery (300 BCE to 400 CE), indicating 2,000-year-old antiquity, and the religious symbolism of Classic Teotihuacan culture (400 to 700 CE) echo archetypal representations of Uto-Aztecan beliefs in the equivalence of the snake’s life and motility and in the simulative properties of life-giving water. The snake is certainly deified as both a human and divine being in the Aztec imagination. Hence, the iconicity of the ‘snake’ manifests in the transformation of the early petroglyphic zigzag line. Snake depictions of Toltecs (c. 300 CE) in later antiquity present reciprocal influences inter-animated by seminal forager symbolism as much as those of maize-related iconography of cultivator cultures, as in the basketry and katsina-doll-shaped ancestor figurations of the Puebloan Hopis. Carolyn Boyd’s studies on the parallels between both Lower Pecos (south Texas) and Baja California rock art motifs and motifs in the Aztec-

Figure 1.3. Snake motif from Coso Range petroglyphs, eastern California. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

14 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Mixtec iconography (Boyd 2003), and Schaafsma’s (2001) studies on interrelationships between Hopi and Hohokam expressions of the Greater American Southwest and Aztec culture provide a basis for correlations between the snake metaphor in the American Southwest and Mesoamerica. These observations provide evidence for a distinct visual paradigm that also reappears in sculptural dimensions such as in Aztec depictions of Tonantzin, or Coatlique, a snake-mother, or Quetzalcoatl itself, the ‘plumed snake’ deity. These famous icons demonstrate an evolution from the simple two-dimensional palette of northern foragers and related semiagricultural early cultures deeper into Mesoamerica to the south.

The Uto-Aztecan Family of Languages The early phases of Amerindian micro-transformations gave rise to a distinctive, linguistically interconnected culture that today we refer to as the Uto-Aztecan language group (Caballero 2011; Dakin 2003; Shaul 2014). Furthermore, genetic haplogroup studies strongly suggest that UtoAztecans were of a similar chromosomal origin as distant cultures like Navajo and Apache, whose language systems are considerably different (Watson 2010). Uto-Aztecan transitions and physical boundaries and affiliations between Native American groups around the Great Basin periphery are in fact more blurred than distinctive from the anthropologist’s point of view. The classificatory identity of an Uto-Aztecan ‘stock’ or ‘family’ of languages was already proposed in the nineteenth century by anthropologists who suggested the existence of a common morphology of related languages and dialects in a vast homeland of these populations. Of several early field specialists, mention should be made of Beals (1982), Preuss (1904, 1905, 1912), and recent scholars like Neurath (2002, 2005, 2015). Neurath is recognized for his substantive contributions to the study of the oral traditions and sacred creation narratives of the Huichols—probably one of the more important linguistically identified ethnic groups in the west of Mexico. Swadesh (1954, 1959), Campbell (1997), and Campbell and Kaufmann (1976, 1985) suggested that the Uto-Aztecan languages (of which there are almost twenty-eight variants and dialects) are concatenated with dialects and morphological variants of a Macro-Mayan language family. A very large geographical area dates to an almost humanly inconceivable period emanating from the Paleo-Indian time frame. This Macro-Mayan stratum includes Maya and Aztec dialects, but also OtoMangue, Mixe-Zoque, Totonacan, and Chibchan language groups and their related geographical territories. Preclassic Uto-Aztecan influence on

Figure 1.4. The linguistic locations map of the Uto-Aztecans following Glottolog 4.5 feed of Native American languages. Drawing by authors.

In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans • 15

16 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

the Mayans (from at least 3,000 BCE to 1,000 CE), was likely influenced by southbound Uto-Aztecans who gradually developed the famously centralized and hierarchical political organization of Tenochtitlan, in the Valley of Mexico. In the first millennia (CE) of this more recent Mesoamerican history, Uto-Aztecans, especially of the Hopi Shoshone-Corachol spectrum, continued to imbibe a counter-influence from the expanding Maya renaissance that included itinerant traders. Proto-Northern-Uto-Aztecan cultures (Hopi Shoshone-Corachol and related Pima and Yaqui) have certain similar generic features to Mayan visual culture and architecture, including archaeological elements observed at Itzaean and Tulum sites (in the Yucatan peninsula). The overarching Macro-Mayan-Uto-Aztecan cultural representations might best be envisaged as an interactive stratum between these various planes of populations. Yet, it might still be possible to identify and trace visual culture vertices through that entire geocultural habitus. Maya peoples were closely related and derived a plenitude of material culture elements from the Toltecs of the first millennium of the Common Era. The Toltecs were evolutants of southbound Uto-Aztecans (Keraudren 2016). The transfer of technologies from these Proto-Uto-Aztecan Toltecs marks a state of reciprocal diffusion between Aztec and Maya groups. The Olmec layer, which is non-Uto-Aztecan, reached a climax in the late Preclassic period of 300 BCE—around the full expanse of south Central Mexico. It spread across distant horizons to the south and east in the Mayan territories, and comprise, in this sense, a dynamic foundation for Aztecs as well as the Mayans of the Chichen Itza-Uxmal history. But Olmec culture is indistinguishable from its synthesis with Aztec expressions of the later Classic period, having undergone a near total syncretic introversion in the Aztec way of life.

A Common Typology of Visual Elements Leaving this Olmec expression aside, we see that even within an extended Macro-Maya territorial continuum, cultural iconography is neatly typological from the Great Basin to the obsidian-rich planes of Mexico. If lithic Uto-Aztecans were closely tied to the north, then one cannot deny the more developed stylistic abundance of the Huasteca maize-farming culture in northern Mexico, which interacted and evolved in a cyclical and evanescent migratorial landscape of thousands of years. Similar cultural motifs, beliefs, and mana reappear in the south, in the 3,000 to 2,000-yearold Uto-Aztecan semiotics in central southern Aridamerica and Meso-

In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans • 17

america with far more complex variations in representational media, whether in advanced sculpture, architecture, relief urban planning projects, or other manifestations. The geographical territory within the elevated latitudes of the Great Basin 40.6667° N and the lower tropical Mesoamerican coastal latitudes 1.8312° S were thus dominated by Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples who endured numerous migrations, population movements and replacements, political conflicts, ascendancy, and decline. Early studies of scholars like Buschmann (1859), Preuss (1904, 1905) and Lumholtz (1904), anticipate a wide-ranging, visually performed ‘ethnography’ of individual cultures that can be linked within the Uto-Aztecan macro-territory. ‘Uto-Aztecan’ may be acceptable nomenclature for identification and discussion relating to this overarching and inter-related visual culture. There is substantial evidence that Uto-Aztecans carried forward a ranging set of key cosmogenic references in their ‘culture core’ (see Table 1.1).

Conclusion Uto-Aztecan iconography is remarkably similar and derivative of certain structures of earlier documented and materially sensitive behavior, especially when these elements can be inextricably linked within their immediate ecological niche. The similarities in key symbolic motifs (like the cosmological concentric and spiraling circles) were likely a response to certain defined attributes of their physical environment, which combined both early forager and later sedentary or agricultural activities with nature, climate, and regional biodiversity. The central thesis that connects the extended essays in this volume recommends that there is a ‘core’ iconicity of Uto-Aztecan symbolic culture, cutting across time and space. This identifiable ‘core’ detailed in Table 1.1 below is a visual cluster composed mainly of arrays of hunting instruments, like atlatl, bow, arrow, animal shapes like ‘snake,’ and features like ‘water,’ or even knives, maize, feather, and so forth, and their related isomorphic elements. Further, we suggest that the Uto-Aztecan spectrum responded, adapted, and nuanced these elements in adaptation to the local ecology, and hence vary with specific environmental niches.

18 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans Table 1.1. Adjunct visual features added to basic body type of representations that function as semiotic markers, gender beliefs, sustenance practices, and ornaments, all indicative of a set of core visual indices. Drawing by Jorge Bautista.

Depict

Forager

Agrarian

Forager Regions Where Found

Agricultural Regions Where found

Atlatl

Stick like dart weapon, mostly hand-held in rock art

Absent

Coso, Nevada, Great Basin, Far Western

Absent

Bow shaped curved line

Arms appended to Gods like Huitzlopochtli

Bow

North America

Coso, Nevada and Mojave rock art concentrations

Codices

Greater Southwest Hopiland

Cutting stones / Hunting/ Weapons/ Obsidian

Head Crown shapes, projectile point images in rock art

Mirrors attached to Gods

Coso, Arizona, Lower Pecos, Nuevo Leon,Tamaulipas

Codices, Teotihuacan South-Central Mexico

In-migrations of the First Uto-Aztecans • 19

Maize

Largely absent or indistinct

Blessing carried by divinities in Codice drawings, sculptural manifests

Nayarit

South-Central Mexico, Puebla, Tula, Teotihuacan, Xochimilco, Mictla Oaxaca

Skirt

Avian Feet

Snake like zigzag lines below anthropomorphic figures in rock art

3 or 5 feet like non-perspectivised projection

Sculptural manifests, Codice representation of divinities

Absent

Coso, Inyo County, Death Valley California, Mojave Desert, Arizona Rock art sites

Divinities wearing skirts in Codices, Sculptures, Teotihuacan,

Coso, Arizona, New Mexico, Desert West

Absent

Hopi Navajo. Nation sites, Arizona Colorado, Utah

Tula

Chapter 2

The Uto-Aztecan Homeland

R

Linguistic Clues to Origin of Uto-Aztecans Recent discovery of certain south central California rock art clusters compels us to reconsider important questions on dating and diffusions of Uto-Aztecan iconography. Features from eastern California suggest forager formats primarily in this regional niche within the Southern CaliforniaArizona deserts systems. This expression may have diffused by cultural network outward to the east, toward the Hopi-Puebloan land extensions of the American Southwest, and then to the south, to its northern fringes of Mesoamerica, extending to Lake Chapala-San Luis Potosi or the Huastecas (an indigenous territorial denomination) frontier. The presence of— what we shall call—a ‘visual index’ here suggests a pre-Holocene forager association, implying its manifestation in a period before known UtoAztecan-speaking groups were transmigrating in California from about the Archaic 4000 BCE timeline. Our research implicates the much-debated question of the hypothetical geographic location for the Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) phase homeland, which has so far been mostly modeled on synchronic evidences of language communities in the region. Conventionally, the Gila River Basin in Arizona is considered the PUA homeland (Fowler 1983): but this fundamental PUA origin theory was recently challenged by Jane Hill and her colleague (Hill and Merrill 2017). There are broadly two different schools of opinion about the Uto-Aztecan ‘homeland’ based on linguistic evidences. The first of these is the view adopted by Fowler (1972,

The Uto-Aztecan Homeland • 21

1983), who suggested that the speakers of PUA, which may have been an ancestral language denomination (at least as hypothesized), were known to have originated in America, near, as we just said, the Gila River Basin northwest of Arizona and east of the Central Valley of California. Such a perspective was early-on advanced by Hopkins (1965) and then again by Fowler (1983), Bettinger (1998), and others. This view is also known as the ‘Northern Origin Hypothesis’ for PUA. This camp endorsed the findings of Klar (1980) and Nichols (1981) and further supported Fowler’s tabulation of word cognates creating a convincing basis for the presence of similar words in more language group variations in the north than in the south in Mesoamerica—a position summed up by Fowler herself: In 1965, Hopkins proposed a general model of Uto-Aztecan prehistory based on distributional and genetic evidence that placed the ultimate Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland north of the Great Basin, at an unspecified locality, presumably on the Columbia Plateau. He then suggested a basic division in the proto-family in this northern sector at roughly 4,000 BP (based on glottochronological counts for Shoshonean versus Sonoran), with the Northern Uto-Aztecans moving through the Great Basin and along the flanks of the Sierra Nevada and the Southern Uto-Aztecans skirting the area on the east and moving to the Southwestern United States and ultimately to northern Mexico. (1983: 228)

Yet, contrary to the Northern Origin Hypothesis (NOH), Jane Hill (2012) takes a diametrically opposed position. In numerous studies based on the idea that the Uto-Aztecans were exclusively cultivator groups and based on the diffusion of words referring to corn or maize, she argues that this early expression played a key element in central Mesoamerican regional cultural developments. Hill proposes that maize, as it originates in Central Mexico (River Balsas region of Michoacán, Mexico), was carried northward through the alluvial plains of Sonora. The validity of this argument rests on language borrowings, the absence of maize in the AztecTanoan languages, and the possible loan of that word into the American Southwest. Hill’s method is dependent on the bio-taxonomic literature of Uto-Aztecan and its geographical presence but it differs from earlier positions because of the set of examples that Hill now considers critically relevant. Hence, for Hill, the argument is as follows: The PUA (proto-Uto-Aztecan) community included primary cultivators, located within the zone of maize domestication in central Mexico at around 5600 BP These cultivators experienced rapid population growth but could not move to the south or east, the way being blocked by OtoManguean- and Tarascan-speaking peoples (and, further east and south, by speakers of Mixe-Zoquean and Mayan), who presumably also became

22 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

cultivators at a very early date. The only route open to expansion was thus north through western Mexico into the Southwest, where the expanding Uto-Aztecans encountered communities of foragers, not cultivators. On this model, the Corachol and Aztecan peoples are not newcomers to Mesoamerica but instead are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the northwestern quadrant of the region. The Uto-Aztecan peoples of northwest Mexico and the US Southwest are therefore not foragers who adopted agriculture but are, instead, primary cultivators who migrated into their present range. Nonagricultural Uto-Aztecan peoples in the extreme north, such as some Numic and Takic groups and the Tubatulabal, are foragers because they abandoned cultivation: because they entered regions inhabited by groups with well-established foraging techniques that were even more productive than cultivation (the acorn-collecting complex in California) because they moved into regions where their technologies did not permit cultivation (as in the northwestern regions of the Great Basin or the deserts of eastern California), or because they abandoned maize agriculture when climatic change made it hopelessly unreliable and retreat from the newly arid zones was impossible (the southern and eastern regions of the Great Basin and most of the Colorado Plateau). (2001: 916)

Whatever the time frame presupposed for this transition, the basic paradox remains too alluring to dismiss. Uto-Aztecans, if they had to be based in a maize-growing culture, would have found it difficult to travel to the extent that they appear in the Great Basin, with a culture that was markedly forager and migratory in character. With more recent mitochondrial DNA data, it is now difficult to sustain an original migration from the south northward to the American Southwest (Roth 2016). For us, too, this position remains problematic, as the visual culture evidence—especially of rock art made by the Uto-Aztecan groups in this region—exhibits visual indices common to nearly all Uto-Aztecan-affiliated groups both in the north and in the south of Mexico. If the northward route is to be accepted then it does not explain why the northern iconography, which is both of earlier and later time-frames, is a more simplified manifest and does not retain certain key elements of the Mesoamerican visual indices. Common sense suggests that the visual narrative should have retained southern Mesoamerican (Aztec) features like knife, mirror, definitive divinity icons, and other elements in Hill’s time-mixed forager-agricultural protopopulations of the northern Sonora-Arizona and Desert West. The data for the northern icons invite the viewer to consider that these depictions pertain to a very early common ancestral linguistic stock that shared a semiotic network of hallmark indices. These key indexical semiotics contain such references as that of a simple but distinctive snake index and a water index. We recognize snake, sun, and moon and related ‘geometrical

The Uto-Aztecan Homeland • 23

representationals’ in the north, indicative of purely pre-agrarian sustenance patterns. Indexical semiotics, based on more deconstructed rock art and related characteristic culture elements support comparative linguistic data for an early Uto-Aztecan homeland in the western Great Basin, in Southern California, east of the Sierra Nevada. Again, most recently, several researchers have stridently proposed a similar linguistic reconstruction of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland by rejecting Hill’s thesis of a Mesoamerican origin for Proto-Uto-Aztecan groups (Shaul 2014). The latest reconstructions based on linguistic evidence for the location and timing for the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community homeland provide growing evidence supporting the ‘Northern Origin Hypothesis’ (Klar 1980; McNeil and Shaul 2018; Nichols 1981; Shaul 2014). Shaul (2014) argued that the temporal and geographic dispersal of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan groups is orchestrated somewhere in western North America, in contrast to Hill’s model positing a southerly Mesoamerican homeland. Recently, models supporting a Proto-UtoAztecan heartland located in the Mojave Desert, the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, or western Nevada have been advanced (Shaul 2014). These novel interpretations posit that Uto-Aztecan dispersal occurred from the North American Far West prior to the acquisition of farming (including that of maize) and hence resulted in a split between Northern and Southern branches of Uto-Aztecan. The Northern Hypothesis further posits that some forager groups may have spoken an ancestral proto-Hopi (a Northern-Uto-Aztecan linguistic isolate) language. Shaul (2014) supports such a specific reconstruction and posits a Northern-Uto-Aztecan ancestral speech community in a homeland in the southern Sierra Nevada vicinity or in a relatively nearby location in western Nevada. Even if we consider some of the latest research on Uto-Aztecan origins, the basic standpoint of their origin in the Great Basin coordinates is accepted across lines of evidence, from the initial studies by Lamb (1958) and Kroeber and colleagues (1960), to later, more contemporary studies (Brown 2010; Merrill 2012). The great thrust on theoretical grounds for a possible Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland comes from ecological evidence, and the corroboration of words in the language vocabulary, which also suggests that the groups shared etymological roots for fauna and flora. That early, Archaic, Uto-Aztecan groups may have departed and disseminated out of the Great Basin and overlapping regions in the Sonora Chihuahua sector remains a standard suggestion, as Fowler’s study of the words for bio-geographical fauna and flora identified that common words of the dialect chain indicate a specific geographical origin (Fowler 1972, 1983). Fowler holds the implicit belief that the Proto-Uto-Aztecans must have been a desert archaic hunting civilization with some agriculture. Unfor-

24 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 2.1. An old photo from the Gila River Basin geological region, Arizona. Pregnant Pima Indian woman carrying an olla (water jar) on her head representing characteristic snake water visual metaphorization, Gila River Reservation, ca. 1900. Photo Courtesy of the California Historical Society Archives (CHS-768) of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Uto-Aztecan Homeland • 25

tunately, Fowler did not recognize the presence of words like ‘snake’ and ‘maize,’ which have become rather important in the current debate about Proto-Uto-Aztecan origins. But, we must acknowledge that Fowler’s early research does emphasize an archaic time period based on metate and atlatl. There is also a corroborative factor here in the appearance of atlatl among several rock art clusters of the Uto-Aztecan affiliates. Another intriguing aspect of this debate driven by Hill and colleagues is that Proto-Uto-Aztecan origins are typically suggested only if in that stage of their development they were originally cultivators. Researchers have focused on cultures from this early time frame when they cultivated maize. But this presents a difficulty in our assessment because maize is not ubiquitous in the iconography of very early descendant Northern-Uto-Aztecan groups that derive from the hypothetical Proto-Uto-Aztecans. Notably, when Hill (2012) proposes “new evidence in support of the hypothesis that Proto-Uto-Aztecan was spoken by a community of cultivators in the northwest quadrant of Mesoamerica,” (Hill 2012: 916), then supporting this claim does not align with claims of archaeologists working on visual semantics. The earliest and most ancient Uto-Aztecan-affiliated cultures must have included purely forager groups, excluding maize cultivators at such an early date. It is more likely that linguistic evidence cannot account

Figure 2.2. Map showing initial transitional routes of the Uto-Aztecans based on correlations between subsistence patterns and iconography of bighorn sheep (northwest), deer (north) and maize (south) in their respective regions. Drawing by authors.

26 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

for the presence of maize in Proto-Uto-Aztecan cultures (Brown 2016; Hill and Merrill 2017). “Despite Hill’s claim, it is by no means certain that a Proto-Uto-Aztecan word for ‘maize’ existed” (Brown 2016; Hill and Merrill 2017; Merrill et al. 2010). Merrill suggests further that it is impossible to reconstruct a definitive agricultural vocabulary for ProtoUto-Aztecan as a whole; that it is only possible to do so for a southern Proto-Uto-Aztecan expression in which the vocabulary is scripted in detail (Merrill 2012).

Evidence of Dating from Rock Art Archetypical templates, including especially rock art, grew around a system of cultural symbolism of these linguistically defined early cultures ( Jenkins and Erlandson 1996). A strategy of comparing visual semiotics for understanding population movements is somewhat novel and has not been highly developed in earlier studies. We comment in this volume on the debate around Proto-Uto-Aztecan origins, employing shapes of indexical animals as an approach to evidence finding. The method of visual semiotics was first elementally adopted by Rule (2010), most notably through the identification and deconstruction of visual patterns in the context of Australian rock art. In this instance, types of animals represented on rock surfaces comprise a central clue to understanding of how such animals were named in locations linked to their hypothesized origins. Further, such analysis illuminated how culturally affiliated groups interacted with animals in their environment, and how each group crafted culturally patterned symbols as signature hallmarks. The presence of these visual indices among different ethnolinguistic groups might suggest that one index, and its etymological counterpart, reappears in another geocultural location with a different set of indexical shapes. By including the same indices or excluding them, or including them with other additional indices of objects in the biotic environment, one can trace the patterns, their evolution, and geographic trends. The animals would then indicate how certain groups may have either derived or retained elements from their local ecologies—and if additional or different indices of objects that may have been invented later in the timeline fostered a cultural-semiotic chronology of other related groups. An example may be an animal like the chuckwalla, or the snake itself: these animal templates appear in petroglyphs along with the hunting bow, for example. But the ‘chuckwalla-bow’ does not appear with other symbols like that of the ‘maize,’ for example. Hence, there would be grounds to believe that the ‘chuckwalla,’ which is typical to forager hunting, loses its associative value in a ‘maize’ culture.

The Uto-Aztecan Homeland • 27

Again, ‘snake-without-maize’ (for a hunting symbolic complex), contrasted to ‘snake-maize’ within the same iconic narrative, suggests that snake is more widespread and antedates ‘snake-maize’ (i.e., agricultural and sedentary symbolic cultures), or that a simpler snake-without-maize’ may exist independently as a more elemental template. Notably, ‘snake-without-maize’ appears with both seemingly male and female deities, hunting tools, feathers and astronomical features in Uto-Aztecan hunting complexes. However, in settlement economies ‘snake-maize’ is the norm, and appears with male and female deities and their visual attributes, and with symbolic associations of birth, death, and cosmological-diurnal events. Indexical animals, plants, and zoomorphic shapes—like that of ‘wild sheep,’ ‘snake,’ ‘bird,’ and ‘deer’ in various Uto-Aztecan group manifests—appear both synchronically and in a timeline relating to the locations and settlement-patterns of sustenance as well as migration for cultures interacting with biota. These variations follow cycles of resource abundance and depletion. These ecological cycles are a reality for groups in a region extending from the Great Basin through the American Southwest and into Mesoamerica.

Alternatives to Linguistic Modeling Iconography may contain a clue to wider anthropologically relevant phenomena. Hence, at no time can we neglect to consider the effects of cultural footprints, and it would be prudent and valuable to study their shifts in time. To discover the niche therefore is important as it ensures cultural preservation and multiculturalism within dominant anthropological types. Armin Geertz suggests that the consciousness of gender might be one of the most productive motifs in the understanding of the growth of a common Uto-Aztecan religious foundation (Geertz 1996): “The problem for Uto-Aztecan scholars will be to define an area of cognizance that lies between the universal and the specific and somehow manages to make itself identifiable as peculiarly Uto-Aztecan” (Geertz 1996). From the point of iconography, we conclude that there are two kinds of iconic presentations: (a) the distinctive non-maize, forager and hunter-gathering iconography of the entire Greater American Southwest and sometimes very elementally of Mesoamerican editions of forager cultures in locations as far down as Michoacán and Oaxaca in southern Mexico; and (b) the maize iconography in the rest of the Uto-Aztecan macro-geography— although it is true that gender is undoubtedly one of the only universal elements in the iconicity of these separate cultural manifests, especially indicating toward the existence of a mother-earth consciousness. Yet, preNumic groups (consisting of ethnolinguistic groups in California-Nevada)

28 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

seem to suggest that it was probably not just gender but also the notion of a pure caretaker spirit that is crucial to Uto-Aztecan culture. Beyond the gender element, or at its primitive aesthetic depth, is the ‘spirit’ anthropomorph, often but not always a snake-affiliated human figure that is unique and almost universal in Uto-Aztecan cultures. It also appears that this snake-affiliated anthropomorph is a giver, sustainer, ensurer of rain and water, keeper of animals or maize, and a descendant, often male or female or gender-equivocal spirit deity, from the celestial world. The significant question is how this anthropomorph offers a clue to the possibility of an early or archaic Uto-Aztecan presence. The anthropomorph, or more appropriately a snake-affiliated anthropomorph, is rarely absent from Uto-Aztecan iconographic practices, hence its rudimentary footprints—if they were to point to a timescale—would still indicate a very early seminal Uto-Aztecan emergence. Taking a cue from Bettinger (1998), Geertz (1996), Hays-Gilpin (2004), and Webster and colleagues (2006), we suggest that the association of hunting gears with snake anthropomorphs is a clear sign of elementary perceptions of collective life, and are antecedents, as they do not necessarily tell the same stories of ritual death and birth that appear in the elaborately scripted narratives of later Uto-Aztecan (Nahuatl speaking) civilization. These Great Basin icons of California-Nevada are relatively uninfluenced by the gods and goddesses that were common to maize collectives (such as are described by Bernardo de Sahagun in his General History [Sahagun and Anderson 1975]). Pressure was created by decreasing numbers of formerly plentiful animal resources probably influencing their seasonal movements and further causing them to migrate to areas of greater resource abundance. Through time, the snake index is increasingly associated with water-utilizing agricultural Uto-Aztecan cultures. All in all, the snake anthropomorph manifests two different technological levels, and thus could have only been unique to foragers who were not affected by the advanced narrative memories of high Aztecs and their magnificently detailed material life. With the notion of identifying cultural origins, it is more logical to claim that Uto-Aztecan iconicity was initially represented by a simpler, idyllic, and somewhat naturalistic expression in certain Great Basin and American Southwest ecologies. The latter remained so for millennia before morphing into somewhat revised cultural manifests. Indexical visual signals of an animal shape, as represented within a semiotic framework of cultural symbols, can directly stand for certain cultural ideas (Atkin 2005; Lury 2012; Rappaport 1999). Indexical representation communicates visual information about objects and their spatiotemporal environments (Lury 2012; Niiniluoto 2012, 2014). The index supports the notion of a direct presence of an object behind an image (Niiniluoto 2012; Soler et al. 2014).

The Uto-Aztecan Homeland • 29

The ability to identify an animal shape is the result of a human cognitive reflex to the animal or a human shape whose meaning is visually communicated (or at least suggested) and may be corroborated by correlated ethnographic evidences. Ethnographic references could of course reinforce what symbologists following precepts suggested by Charles Sanders Peirce call the ‘iconic’ meaning of the object, an additional cultural meaning that is attributed by discourse narratives to the basic indices of primal visual representation. However, indexical representation is cognitively primitive, and is directly recognized by the cognitive system as an ambient structure connected to the natural world of the observer. Such distinctions call forth deeply functional instincts of survival in a challenging environmental setting. The invariable appearance of a ‘biomorph’ (Bednarik 2016; Neumayer 1997), like the ‘snake’ biomorph, indicates a priori the presence of such an animal in the community’s physical world. The reason that that animal may be part of the group’s belief-system ( Jenkins and Erlandson 1996) is of further relevance. Rappaport demonstrates a process of adaptation of indexical shapes in the Maring rituals of New Guinea (Rappaport 1999). Lury, in her important work Bringing the World into the World: The Material Semiotics of Contemporary Culture (2012), suggests that the weight of indexicality may be used to understand contemporary cultural phenomenon—especially for groups that tend to adapt themselves in relation to an emerging environment. Lury forwarded an even more persuasive argument in favor of the indexicality of animals, and similar animal-like shapes, as direct visual evidences of the total mind-life of individuals. She suggests that their sense of fight or flight is in fact insistent on such visual triggers or patterns. In a sense, a visual response to an animal shape, even if it had to be cognitively extracted from an incomplete contour or outlines, would carry subcortical reflexes similar to those harbored toward a humandominated biological environment. Significantly, the latent power of the indexical shape to influence human actions leads Guthrie to consider animal totemism and animistic practices to be a causal factor in the birth of the world’s oldest ritual systems (Guthrie 1995; 2002). In this volume we actively compare indexical semiotic approaches to contexts of ethnographic symbolism in the Uto-Aztecan strata. The approach helps us trace the fundamental indexical features for a large group of linguistically homologous cultures and thus provide a fresh perspective on how the groups carried an indexical figure. Such an indexical figure was either transferred to another culture in the contiguous groups or received by other groups that would have adapted it to their belief-system. Such is the case even where the groups may have existed in distinctive historical phases. The presence of these indices can therefore show which index shared greater antiquity and would have belonged to earlier time. In this

30 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 2.3a. Photograph of Tev Gui, a snake chief, half-length portrait, facing front, in ceremonial dress for antelope priest in snake dance. Courtesy of the Edward Curtis collection. Library of Congress Control Number 93501151 Reproduction Number LCUSZ62-106760 (b&w film copy neg.). LCCN Permalink https://lccn.loc.gov/93501151, retrieved 27 April 2022.

The Uto-Aztecan Homeland • 31

Figure 2.3b. D-Strech representation of petroglyph with strong resemblance to snake dance shamans as in the previous photograph of Tev Gui. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

case again, we shall look specifically at the snake index, an animal index that has enjoyed an almost reverential antiquity in Mesoamerican cultures, and somewhat less so, in the northern counterparts of the Uto-Aztecan groups. Fewkes’s (1893) extensive nineteenth-century research on snake symbolism in Hopi and Mesoamerican cultures like the Aztec-Maya cultural complex compels us to imagine that the snake must have been part of a religious archetype. Fewkes even pushes us so far back as to consider whether it was a kind of Proto-Uto-Aztecan index of infallible antiquity. However, the notion of a protolanguage for these languages had not consolidated itself at the time of his early research. We now believe that Fewkes was right in predicting that the snake or snake-like s-shaped figure might be an index for archaic, and even pre-archaic groups, in the Great Basin, American Southwest, and Mesoamerica. “Sahagun had described a ceremonial with certain events suggestive of the Hopi Snake Dance” (Fewkes 1893: 265). Sahagun also refers to the “snake circuit” of the Hopis and an entire group of Uto-Aztecan-speaking people like the Tusayan, Huichol, and Moki, among others—peoples with whom he had traveled and made records (Fewkes 1919).

32 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 2.4. Snake patterns in Hopi Basketry. Photograph of basket on display, photographed ca. 1900. A small legible label on the basket reads “Frank M. Covert, 329 5th Ave., N.Y.” Legacy Identifier: CHS-3949.tiff. Unique identifier: UC141418. Courtesy of University of California, Santa Cruz digital library.

Conclusion Our investigations reveal that the snake-index creates a direct and nearly universal interpretive guide to understanding the geographical trajectory of Proto-Uto-Aztecan locations. The diasporic migration of Uto-Aztecan groups carried the symbol to more distant peripheries. The empirical evidence for the snake index is provided by means of its occurrence in ProtoUto-Aztecan geography. Associated with a central snake index are other historic ethnographic narratives, especially creation stories and related mythic beings that, when integrated, provide a convincing Proto-UtoAztecan ‘origin’ thesis.

Chapter 3

The Primordial Snake Religion

R

A Snake-Filled Landscape How was symbolic behavior of the first Uto-Aztecans conditioned by a snake ecology. As Hultkrantz (2011), and other important scholars like O’Connell (1982), Janetski and Madsen (1990), and Madsen and Simms (1998) suggest, the more nuclear kinship communities that originally populated the Desert West were not organized under larger administrative systems. Their habitat was not ready for social accommodations of that kind. But those family units were not impoverished or lacking in resources; they had access to fauna and flora typical to shrub desert topography of the area. The early intermontane geo-ecology of the Great Basin is assumed to be a landscape of moderate to large abundance and diversity: one that sustained large game and allowed for the original hunting religion and a society of early foragers. But the semidesert landscape (of the Great Basin, Mojave Desert, Sonoran Desert, and the Chihuahuan Deserts) also reveals a snake-intense region (Table 3.1; also cf. Corbit 2015). Among many other animals that survived the glacial melting within the populating landmass between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, the snake seems today to have been one of the most versatile and competitive. What was the relationship of the Native people in this xeric terrain to the snake-filled landscape—what kind of immediate impact did this animal have on their psychology and lifestyle, in a largely fauna-dependent ecology? This question leads us to appreciate the directed natural ecological

34 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

determination of symbolic behavior in the geocultural region. This correlation was studied by the pioneering anthropologist Julian Steward (1940). Hultkrantz’s (1987, 2011) critique of Steward advances the latter’s model of cultural-ecological determinism through which Steward (1940) traced Great Basin material culture to the early human contact with its initial wetlands environment (Hultkrantz 2011). According to Hultkrantz: Since Steward’s theory [of ecology of culture] first appeared, there is in my opinion no better foundation for the elaboration of a program on (an) ecology of religion. . . . Steward suggests that “environment has indirectly not only a negative, restrictive but also a positive, creative influence on culture. It is possible to reconstruct the ladder of religio-ecological integration, illustrating the indirect, step-by step progression of this process: Primary integration: environmental adaptation of cultural core features (economic and technological) and associated social and religious traits. Among the latter beliefs and rituals coupled with subsistence activities. Secondary integration: religious beliefs and rituals reflecting the social structure, which in its turn reflects economic and technological adaptation to environment. Morphological integration: religious concepts are traditional but borrow their forms from phenomena within the biotope. (2011:139)

Exact dating of the emergence of any particular Great Basin rock art motif may not be possible. Yet the first typological element that emerges from the deep time strata in the last 9,000 to 5,000 years of Uto-Aztecan iconography (aka the Holocene Climatic Optimum and the Altithermal) is the undulatory and interlocking wave symbol, a zigzag line symbolizing both water and snake. It can be considered an early axiomatic manifest of the indigenous art and a very likely religious motif (Figure 3.1). Heizer and Baumhoff (1962) counted a possible 443 ‘Curvilinear Meander’ forms in their wide-ranging Desert West rock art compendium. They noted 11 ‘Convoluted Rake’ designs resembling the snake icon and 388 ‘Wavy Lines’ formations. These are possibly some of the first indexical references to the snake form in a forager culture that likely became a focal snake anthropomorphic icon (like that of a plumed serpent or rain deity) in advanced stages of civilizations in Middle Americas. Archetypal examples of these early manifestations are located on rock art panels incorporating curvilinear elements concentrated in Little Petroglyph Canyon, in China Lake Naval Ordnance Testing Station, California. There is also abundant occurrence of distinctive curvilinear features in wide-ranging forager and Puebloan iconography including Newspaper Rock in Utah and the Petroglyph National Park in New Mexico. The zigzag line motif

The Primordial Snake Religion • 35

Table 3.1. Snake species relevant to Uto-Aztecan art and symbolism. Drawings by authors.

Common and Scientific Name of Snake

Region

Native American (Uto-Aztecan) Indigenous Name

Great Basin gopher snake, Pituophis catenifer deserticola Or Bull snake Great Basin, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah Gogo (Shoshone) Coatl, cihuacoatl (Nahuatl)

Common and Scientific S Namee of Snake Western diamond-back m mond-back rattlesnake or Texass diamondback, Crotalus ottalus atrox Region R i Native American (Uto-Aztecan) Indigenous Name

Arizona, Colorado, A i CCalifornia, lif i CColor lorad ado, do, NNew ew MMexico, exiciicoo, OOklahoma, ex klklah aho homa, andd Texas T Chimacoatl (Nahuatl) Wimmer 2004

(continued)

36 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans Table 3.1. Continued

Common and Scientific Name of Snake Great Basin gopher snake, PPituophis catenifer deserticola OOr Bull snake Region Great Basin, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah Native NNa Nati ati tive vee AAmerican merican me (Uto-Aztecan) (Ut At ) Indigenous Name

GGogo (Shoshone) Coatl, cihuacoatl (Nahuatl)

Common and Scientific Name of Snake

Region

Native NNati ati tive ve AAmerican mericcann meri (Uto-Aztecan) (U Uto-Aztecan) A Indigenous Name

Tancitaran Dusky Rattlesnake, Mexico, Crotalus Pusillus

Mexico, Michoacan

Tepocolcóatl (Nahuatl)

The Primordial Snake Religion • 37

Common and Scientific Name of Snake

Southern Souu Mexico rattlesnake, Croot triseriatus Crotalus

Region

Mexx Veracruz, Michoacan, Morelos, Mexico, Hidaa Puebla Hidalgo, Na a American Native (U U (Uto-Aztecan) IIndigenous n Name KKogoa og (Kawaiisu), Tcua, (Hopi), Ko (Te e (Tepehuan), Ku (Huichol), Coatl (Nahuatl)

Common and Scientific Name of Snake

Region

Native American (Uto-Aztecan) Indigenous Name

Culebra de agua de espalda de diamantes –Mesoamerican snake, Nerodia rhombifer

Central Mexico, Puebla

Culebra de agua de espalda de diamantes (Spanish) Acoatl (Nahuatl) Alfonso de Molina 1571.

38 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

is recognized as transforming into an evident and more easily identified snake symbol. We believe that the snake is one, if not the oldest, of surviving Proto-Uto-Aztecan iconic forms that co-exists and is intimately associated with anthropomorphic figures. Of course, the real antiquity of snake icons is inexplicably remote and unknown but it is prominently seen in the Uto-Aztecan spectrum of images. It is one of the defining symbols for early and late Uto-Aztecan semiotics. Furthermore, its provenance has something to do with one of the most active ophidian geologies of the world. Great Basin geography, or Oasisamerica (Kirchhoff 1952, 1954), displays this megadiversity of fauna, and the desert snakes of the Southwest, especially Arizona (Crotalus scutulatus ), the Great Basin Gopher Snake (Diamondback Gopher) (Bertram et al. 2001), the rattlesnake (Western Diamondback, Crotalus artox) (Klauber 1956, 2020; Campbell et al. 2004) and other reptilian life (Campbell et al. 2004) and the Culebra de agua de espalda de diamantes (Diamond Back Water Snake)—which is the ubiquitous Mesoamerican snake Nerodia rhombifer, with its range of indigenous names: nauyaca, in Nahuatl, nahui-yakatl or four nosed, that is, the diamond-shape chain formation; mahuaquite in Mexico and the rest of Mesoamerica; the Ik’bolay of Maya Q’eqchi’ (Guatemala); and guayacán or terciopelo in the Caribbean (Venezuela)—we find ample reflections in the wide-ranging and spatially disparate iconography. The snake-dense environment pitted humans against the most dangerous geofauna of the region in the primitive natural setting in which they lived (Corbit 2015; Stanley 2008). The snake, especially when it was so poisonous (the rattlesnake with a notable triangular head would have been the most deadly) would have implied death for inhabitants of the territory.

Figure 3.1. Quintessential snake or water-like curvilinear formation indicating an indexical serpent body typical to the great Uto-Aztecan geo-culture of the American Southwest and the Middle Americas, from Little Petroglyph Canyon, California. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr.

The Primordial Snake Religion • 39

Figure 3.2. A concentric circle head set atop a snake body image, Coso rock art complex, Inyo County California. Photo by Alan Garfinkel.

40 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Water Semiotics If snakes posed a threat to survival, the other peril was posed by the imminent scarcity of water in the desert climate. Whereas post-Glacial Altithermal would imply an abundance of water or marshland savanna, the landscape of the several millennia following only exhibited periods of extended droughts. In the American Southwest the lack of regular and predictable rainfall, and water-deficient environments meant that human solicitation for water resources was a crucial element of survival desires. The affinity of snake symbolism for water reflects a visual-metaphorical tendency: the science of visual metaphor requires the dissolution of one idea into another in a cohort of visual mixes (Hodgson 2013; Pearson et al. 2008): The visual system takes from the target shape the maximum number of available diagnostic lower-order features that help facilitate immediate detection. These are then matched with already accumulated information in higher-order visual imagery/memory which allows an image of an object to be held in mind and confirms what lower-order feature components may suggest. Imagining an object is also useful when the prevailing sensory stimulus is ambiguous as this helps bias perception through expectation. In other words, visual imagery can prime perception. Hunter-gatherers needed to constantly employ visual imagery in order to search and identify both predator and prey. In circumstances where environmental signals are ambiguous, the visual system therefore possesses the advantage of being readily primed to regard any camouflaged feature or ambiguous surface (such as a rock face) with the slightest suggestion of fauna as an animal, which is consistent with the human visual system tendency to complete partial figures. (Hodgson 2013: 3)

Due to its fluid movement, the snake pattern would imply the movement of water. Also, it is likely no coincidence that snakes came out and are seen in the greatest number when rain fills their burrowing holes. Hence, in indigenous thought, the snake is often synonymous, in action, with rain. Both have that sine wave flowing character that seems to have captured the imagination of people who negotiated with a snake ecology and scarcity of water. Klauber’s early studies on rattlesnake symbolism in the Southwest indicate that the speed with which rattlesnakes preyed suggested lightning to the symbolic imagination. As Klauber (1956) explains, “The resemblance of lightning to the snake’s strike, and of thunder and the hiss of rain to its rattle, made inevitable the connection by the symbolically minded Indians, of the rattle-snake with the rainstorm” (266). This mixing and matching of snake/water symbolism—as we shall see in later chapters—was realized through a metaphorical dualism of singular images, like the snake-

The Primordial Snake Religion • 41

rain deity composite, which is a consistent and central ritual prayer object among Mesoamericans. Moreover, this snake-rain or snake-water image syncopated with both death and the possibility of a more water-abundant life and therefore a predominantly divine snake-mother symbol (Klauber 1956). But rattlesnakes, as Klauber observes, could act as punishers for dereliction of ritual duties and cause floods, and hence had to be appeased as protectors. The Shoshone, Luiseño, and Paiute all subscribe to this composite system of beliefs. The dualism was elaborated in the cosmogonic structure of evening, darkness, night, and dawn—all in accordance with a cyclical scheme of day-to-night diurnal turning and the seasonal flow of life (relating to the movements of the sun and the moon as well). The Uto-Aztecan groups south and west of Mexico (Tepiman, Zacateclan, Nahuatl, and Huastec, Mixtec, and adjoining several dialect-chain speaking locations of the Central Nahuatl) have an elaborate expression of the snake-mother icon in several representations of their culture. But they also appear as very attractive symbols among the forager northern Numic peoples of eastern California (Timbisha, Western Shoshone, Northern Shoshone, Tubatulabal, Kawaiisu, Yaquis, and Paiute), and the Great Basin (Paiute, Ute, Shoshone). Additionally, the linguistic isolate of the Uto-Aztecan Hopi has remarkably similar representations in which snakes are central and combinatorial symbolic elements (Figure 3.3). One of the earliest forager layers within the migration flickers of at least 9,000 to 2,000 years ago is concentrated in the Northern-Uto-Aztecan Mojave Desert and adjacent regions. These visual shapes are accessible in the form of both petroglyphs and pictographs, especially in the American Great Basin (40.66° N, 117.66° Aridamerica), California, Nevada, and the Mojave Desert (40.66° N, 117.66° Aridamerica). Quasi-semantic glyphs, of a primal archaic Uto-Aztecan stratum (3000 years BCE and earlier), are found in the southwestern corner of the American Great Basin. Several archaic sites appear in Baja California (especially Rumorosa, Anza Borrego) and Sonora (La Pintada) in northern Mexico, with similar characters prevalent in the California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah rock art clusters. The entire cosmodrome, in conjunction with its natural and terrestrial installations, offered limited but definitive opportunities to respond to the universe in which Uto-Aztecans lived. These symbols evolved from a deep time substratum, yet the optics continued to affect later cultural practices by means of token modifications in their iconic grammar (Boyd 2003; Mukhopadhyay and Garfinkel 2016; Mukhopadhyay et al. 2017). Hence the snake was retained as one of the chief iconic deities. Its motherlike matrilinear caregiving character was reified in the hybrid and shifting context of survivalistic occupations. With the advent of a scripted and technologically advanced society, prehistoric images of patterned human

42 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 3.3. This petroglyph panel is from south of the current Zuni Pueblo (a Tanoan Uto-Aztecan population subdivision). It has patterns associated with serpents. Image derives from drawings taken on the spot by the authors; John Barber, and Henry Howe; Cincinnati, Ohio; P. A. Howe, Successor of Henry Howe; 1865; p. 764. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

configurations, undulatory snakes, and game animals were modified in outline and tome but did not lose their contemplative functions. This patterning also illuminates why the mother archetype of Christianity would retain this symbol for integration and collective mainstreaming within the changing racial histories of Uto-Aztecan cultures.

The Snake-Affiliated Avian Humans: Pre-Numic Rock Art In Coso Range rock art imagery and more generally in eastern and Central California snake depictions, we often see illustrations of simple long and slender meandering lines with or without head or tail additions (Figure 3.4).

The Primordial Snake Religion • 43

Figure 3.4. Coso Peak solid body and projectile-pointed figures. Snakes appear in both hands. Snake on left of panel exhibits a bifurcated tongue. Evident female gender of anthropomorph referenced by pendent labia genitalia. Avian feet appear with tri-une digits. Dart points are Elko Series (Nevada) projectile points, dating from about 4000 BCE to the Classic period of Mesoamerican archaeology, namely 400 CE. Dot blow-out digital reconstruction by Bernard M. Jones, Jr.

44 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

A circular nob is sometimes portrayed as the head; other times a sinuous ladder of diamonds or triangles implies the snake form. Grant and colleagues (1968) depict a collection of bighorn sheep-horned figures (Figure 3.5). One of these horned figures holds a snake in its right hand and a staff/baton, ceremonial/religious scepter in its left. At the end of the baton is a tripartite, bisected, V-shaped element. There is a circular knob on the other end of the wand (Figure 3.5). There are depictions of a slain bighorn ritual sacrifice representing death, and the standard postmortem, mortuary ceremony showcasing the skull of the slain bighorn, with a dashed line (snake-like serpentine trail and concentric circle-like portal metaphor) alluding to the descent of the bighorn spirit into the underworld and its ultimate ascent back to the land of living by rebirth Figure 3.5. Horned figure holds a snake in its right hand and a and ultimately into the hands of the hunter staff/baton, ceremonial/religious as he reaches for the symbol of his craft—a scepter in its left (Grant et al. weighted atlatl (Figure 3.6). 1968)

Figure 3.6. Parrish Gorge petroglyph panel in the Coso Range, we have suggested that the panel is a portrayal of the journey of ascent (Garfinkel 2009; Yohe and Garfinkel 2012).

The Primordial Snake Religion • 45

The snake theme does however appear to be intimately involved in the expression of many female animal humans, indeed more female than male as recent research shows. We recognize a female (note hair whorls), quailplumed, decorated snake with a concentric circle face (Figure 3.7a and b). Close attention to the rightmost figure reveals that it possesses Hopi/ Pueblo-style hair whorl hairstyle, visual shorthand communicating the feminine gender (Figure 3.7b). We recognize a decorated anthropomorph holding a snake (Figure 3.8). A rattlesnake winding pattern appears with extraordinary patterning in which the lowermost figure is a snake figure descending into an underworld habitat in intimate association with a decorated animal-human and small spirit-being depositing seeds or rain into the adjacent basket (Figure 3.9). These Coso Range snake figures are often intimately associated with the iconic decorated-bodied and solid-bodied bird-human, supra-mundane beings. An image of a spirit-being birthing a snake suggests the indexical character of the metaphor and the possibility of imaginative reconstruction of the rock artist’s messagings (Figure 3.10). In Coso, at least twenty-nine X-ray-styled, deco-bodied avian animal humans sometimes even have curvilinear meandering snakes inside their torsos.

Figure 3.7a. Decorated avian-human snake figures. Note quail plume top knot adornment on the right side . of the head and characteristic triangular/diamond rattlesnake pattern that emanates from the genital regions of the figure. Drawings by authors.

Figure 3.7b. Picture of a hair whorl petroglyph motif, accenting gender. Drawings by authors.

46 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 3.8. Rattlesnake element with triangles and diamonds ascending from a portal in California petroglyph of the pre-Numic groups. Drawings by authors.

Figure 3.9. Snake figure association with basket and deposit of seeds/rain (notably abundance, renewal, ascent and descent, snake/bird feather fringe at base of figure), avian-style feet, concentric circle face. Drawing by authors.

Figure 3.10. Coso-decorated human “birthing” a snake or referencing fertility and first menses with prominent Hopi-style hair whorls. Drawing by authors.

The Primordial Snake Religion • 47

Rattlesnake Design and Avian Figures The principal decorative design embellishing the bodies of these patterned figures mimick the ornate bodies of the rattlesnake themselves (the triangle, zigzag, and diamond chain patterns). These are similar to the rock art symbols ethnographically attested for certain California Indian groups including the Takic Uto-Aztecan representations of the rattlesnake symbol associated with female reproductive symbolism (Slifer 2000; Whitley 1998). These same diamond chain, zigzag, and triangular symbols are commonly attributed by Native Californians as the rattlesnake symbol applied to Native basket decorative elements (Figure 3.14). These embellishments are employed as the ornate detailing on the bodies of an extraordinary number of decorated animal-human figures (166 pattern-bodied anthropomorphs exhibit rattlesnake designs within the Caroline Maddock sample of over 400 hundred individual figures [n = 450]). This frequency of deco-bodied figures provides a total estimate of 41.5 percent of the assemblage in California and Mojave rock art clusters of the Uto-Aztecan group denominations (Maddock 2015).

Figure 3.11. Deco-bodied animal humans with fringe skirts (tail feathers/snakes). Prominent inverted chevron diamond rattlesnake pattern visible across the entire torso. Drawing by authors.

48 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 3.12. Kawaiisu baskets with the rattlesnake symbols as adornment (zigzags, diamond chain, and triangles). The baskets with necks on the top are taaragabadi, a small quail-plumed necked jar traditionally employed for brewing the jimsonweed (Datura wrightii) drink in order to enter an altered state of consciousness, obtain favor with the spirit world, and gain a guardian spirit to help with life issues. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Primordial Snake Religion • 49

Quail Plumes and the Feathered Serpent Mesoamerican religious theology is dominated by the concept and artistic representation of a paramount feathered serpent deity known as Quetzalcoatl. The word quetzal refers to the ornate plumage of a shimmering green bird. In Nahuatl, the Native language of the Aztecs, the word quetzal was a term that, when broken into its basic parts, meant “upstanding” referring to a tall, upstanding plume of feathers. Coincidentally, a modest and diminutive bird of the mountains and deserts of California has perhaps a remote equivalency with its prominent topknot. Such regal plumage appears to have caught the fancy of the Coso-Mojave ancients, as it is a definitive adornment on a significant number of decorated animal-human figures. Some of these heraldic embellishments are represented as a bevy of plumage that surrounds the entire visage of these impressive figures (Figures 3.13a-b). Why Figure 3.13a. Coso quail feather was the common and diminutive quail and plumage on concentric circle head formations. Drawing by Bernard its plumage so earnestly displayed? M. Jones, Jr.

Figure 3.13b. Original quail feather plumage reference. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

50 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Feathers are particularly characteristic of divine beings and supernatural powers. We have identified 103 decorated animal-human figures in Coso rock art that have variously shaped projections, appearing to be feathers, emanating from their heads. In a number of instances (n = 23), it is rather apparent that the distinctive forms of these elements specifically represent the topknot feathers of the quail (cf. Hedges 2001). These are sometimes very realistically depicted as angled rays, while others are drawn more crudely as a single curved line or sharply angled emanation. Some figures have many such embellishments: more than fifty images have between six and twenty such feathers. Others have only one to five. The ethnographically recognized Natives of the eastern Mojave Desert, the Chemehuevi (Southern Paiute, Uto-Aztecan linguistically affiliated Natives of the Great Basin) had a class of ritual specialists known as bighorn sheep dreamers (Kelly 1936: 138–42; Laird 1980; Matthews 2010; Yohe and Garfinkel 2012; Martinez Gonzalez 2019; Vander 1997). These sheep dreamers were especially adept at charming game animals. Hence, these were shamans of the hunt (Kelly 1936; Martinez Gonzalez 2007); Martinez Gonzalez 2019) describes these sheep dreamer / game charmer / hunt shamans as having visions of rain, bullroarers, and quail-tufted caps of mountain sheep hide. These caps were the most prestigious headpieces of the Chemehuevi. This mountain hat (kaitcoxo) was a critical component

Figure 3.14. Chemehuevi hunter wearing traditional Native dress and mountain hat with quail plumes. Courtesy of image from Library of Congress.

The Primordial Snake Religion • 51

Figure 3.15. A snake-water motif alternating with a simpler, slightly curved line in Chupicuaro pottery. East of México-Bajío, Cuerámaro, River Turbio Location from the Classic period (400 CE). Permission of image granted by Museum of Arts, Irapuato, Mexico.

of the costume for a hunter or chief (Kelly and Fowler 1986: 373, Fig. 2, bottom left; Laird 1976). The hat was traditionally sewn with a prominent tuft of many quail topknot feathers on its brim. The modificatory process is syntagmatic: a slight modification of one particular visual array morphs into a more complex or substituted character ensuring a kind of valorization. The snake assumes exceeding complex polyemous and multivalent symbolism in the southern Mesoamerican expressions. Notably the snake’s head can transform into an anthropomorphic divinity with its sheer power and visual fright effects. Yet these refinements were all achieved under a common canopy of mythological references in which the snake becomes a kind of central defining character that attributes a wide-range of meaning and significance to the focal iconographic symbol. The anthropomorphization of the snake, through additional arrays to the basic zigzag and interlocking line of pictogrammatic representations, seems to be the originating fuel for the massively loaded iconography of the snake in the Aztec world. Yet, the root cause or power behind the complex texture may best be recognized in Codex iconography. Variant drawings executed with pigment media are thus abundant in Mesoamerican Codices. Some have more commonality with outer Maya themes and contiguous Maya speech group iconography like the Itzaean.

52 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 3.16. Hopi Indian altar with symbolic paintings of human-like figures, ca. 1900. Note the snake head projections and the deification of the snake with incorporation of an anthropomorphic divinity figure sitting on the snake. Image courtesy of California Historical Society (contributing entity), California Historical Society Collection, 1860–1960 (collection), Title Insurance and Trust, and C. C. Pierce Photography Collection, 1860–1960 (subcollection). Date created: 1900.

The Primordial Snake Religion • 53

Nevertheless, as in the image below (Figure 3.17), a rain deity like Tlaloc provides evidence for this theme, recognized in Epiclassic representations in sculptures or reliefs of the Chichimec (Tarascan groups in central Mesoamerica and in the Codices [Codex Florentine and Borgia] developed with the help of Nahuatl scribes).

Figure 3.17. The zigzagging Tlaloc lightning shape and snake-water morphs from Bajio Guanajuato. Photograph by Armando Perez.

54 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

The Tlaloc symbol constitutes the most interesting example in the context of bajio or the ‘sink’ Mesoamerican topographic region inhabited by Tarascan (Purepecha), Aztec (chichimec), and Otomi groups. By the Epiclassic period, these peoples were generally agricultural and technologically quite advanced. The snake-water interlocking icon metamorphosed into a prototypical ‘Tlaloc’ rain-god among the Tarascan-Otomi-Chichimec denominational groups. Tlaloc was a fierce deific archetype of thunder and rain among the wide extensions of all Mixtec and Nahuatl-speaking groups of south Central Mexico since a considerable period, especially after the embeddedness of Uto-Aztecans in rain-abundant Mesoamerica. But Tlaloc often features the same formative attributes seen in the northern forager Uto-Aztecan iconography: (a) circular eyes, (b) fangs of the snake, and finally, but perhaps more importantly, (c) often exemplifying a body twisted like a snake. Shockingly beautiful and underlying cognitive discharges in iconic variations over time remain to be explored and admired. We would

Figure 3.18. Snake representation in Jornada Mogollon style rock art at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, near Sierra Blanca, New Mexico, USA. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Primordial Snake Religion • 55

not hesitate to propose that there exists a series of nearly ‘universal’ visual prototypes in Uto-Aztecan pictorial layers. A vast amount of literature has been dedicated to these visual elements individually, both in northern and northeastern Uto-Aztecan expressions (Boyd 2003; Schaafsma 1986, 1999, 2001), along the Mexican Uto-Aztecan regions of Sonora and Chihuahua, as well as verdant geographies of the bajio, and Mesoamerican states of Chiapas, Yucatan, and Guatemala (Bech 2011; Viramontes Anzures and Crespo 1999; Viramontes Anzures 2000, 2005). Many of the elements related to the cosmological aspects of the iconography are often mnemonically transferred onto the imagery of the Codices with striking parallels. The snake-human association is the first to be noted in such great iconic depictions as that of the Codex Florentine, compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (De Sahagún and Anderson 1975). The snake-mother deity—or the snake-deity, and the projection of Tlaloc in Codex Florentine—supports the view that archaic semiotic elements are retained. Sahagún, who refers to Tlaloc as ‘the Jupiter’ of the Aztec canon (De Sahagun and Anderson 1975), is viewed sideways, but not any less impactfully. Tlaloc displays archaic feather additions and adornments on the head. Visual characters in the Aztec scrolls are similar to the CosoMojave archaic snake and matricentric avian-human-snake embellished depictions (cf. Figure 3.1). In the Little Lake petroglyph complex on

Figure 3.19. Xochicalco ritual pyramid panel. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

56 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

the western edge of the Coso Range and in the Little Petroglyph Coso Rock Art locus, we have rattlesnake-shaped landforms, and we see snakehuman conflations with variations in the torso or trunk aspect of the icon’s body. Features of these Coso figures include feathers, head ornaments, and snake-fringed-skirts. The Coso figures appear to have similarities to snake frills associated with the dress of Tonantzin, the earth-mother icon also exhibited in Sahagun’s Codex. The snake is the basis of such civilizations as that of Xochicalco, an example of Classic and Epiclassic snake architecture. The snake metaphor, at least on the visual level, is rendered as an extremely flexible symbol, and therefore accessible to architects of Xochicalco civilization and appear as the Itzaean or Monte Alban snake-deity. The representation of the snake in Teotihuacan, Xochicalco, Mitla (Oaxaca), and the Codices evidence how the motif has been retained from its earliest forager versions.

An Ideational Snake Core Here we propose that a core iconography explains key motifs that are repeated in even the earliest symbolic iconography. These motifs aid us in understanding the Uto-Aztecan belief system from a visual culture perspective. Abstract, geometrical, two-dimensionally projected visual configurations are often repeated throughout different platforms of expressions: rock inscriptions, basketry, ceramics, and statuary reliefs—these are often identified as abstract geometrics (Grant et al. 1968; Whitley 1996). But interpretation of abstract geometricals has been sketchy and unconvincing. Their meanings appear more clearly when the adventurous abstractionism with which the Uto-Aztecan groups held on to their functional communications. Our current investigations moved beyond the early studies of Uto-Aztecan abstract symbolism to recommend that certain visual symbols are not devoid of semiotic meaning. The same symbolic motifs reappear in Northern-Uto-Aztecan groups, as much as in very early archaic to Preclassic Mesoamerican iconic practices. The snake, chain, abstract wave, and connected diamond formations are common to such distant polarities of Uto-Aztecan iconography as the Hopi (Arizona) and Mixtec (Mictla, Southern Mexico) (Fauguère and Beekman 2020; Flannery and Joyce 1983). The common core of abstract iconic inscriptions are listed at the end of the next section for a fuller understanding of the most elemental basis on which the early iconicity evolved in the Uto-Aztecan consciousness (Table 3.2).

The Primordial Snake Religion • 57

Figure 3.20. Map of snake-like symbols as distributed across Uto-Aztecan territory. The patterns are positioned in reference to Uto-Aztecan cultural region in the last 2,000 years of its history following the Preclassic Period iconographic motifs in Mesoamerica. The snake symbolism inherent in these patterns ranges from dramatically from simpler hunter-gatherer snake divinities to established patterns for sacred ceramics and sculpture. Drawing by authors.

58 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Snake Presence in Northern-Uto-Aztecan (NUA) Iconography For the Northern-Uto-Aztecans, much of the anthropological and ethnological literature reveals that snakes were simultaneously seen as liminal beings abiding both on the surface of the earth and below in holes, cracks, and crevices (caves and rock shelters) within the earth. As such and importantly so, the rattlesnake was recognized as a topmost ‘indexical’ animal of the underworld (Klauber 1956, 2020; Bednarik 2016; Hodgson 2013; Rule 2010). Goss (1972) recognizes the rattlesnake as a headman guardian of the sky waters emanating from earthen portals. In indigenous cosmology, the rattlesnake is then akin to a shamanistic animal master guardian and provider of all reptiles, fish, and amphibians for the Uto-Aztecan Numa (Ute) of the Great Basin (Goss 1972). Lower earth is the interface (the curtain) of the terrestrial world that hinges with the underworld. Others of that class of animals are also considered simultaneously ground dwellers inhabiting both the surface of the earth and the near underworld. Animals that typically associate themselves with this bilevel habitat include dragonflies, water turtles, chuckwallas, quail, and snakes. These animals would logically be the spirit guardians of the Netherworld and the spirit familiars of the Animal Master who presides over this lowermost land of animal spirits.

Snakes and Rain Iconicity in Mesoamerican Theology To appreciate the meaning of the snake, one must review the religious and symbolic metaphors of the ethnographic Kawaiisu (Southern Paiute) cosmology and, in a larger sense, reference Southern California and Great Basin Natives as a class of indigenous people that has a linguistic affiliation with the Uto-Aztecan stock. To some Natives, snakes were emphatic metaphors for rain. The Kawaiisu sacred narrative identified the sky snake as an undulating rain serpent—the being that one sees when looking at the rain curtain (virga rain) descending from the sky in the distance. That meandering darkened skyline image appears as a serpentine band with fringe-like fingers emanating downward from above. The latter is the visual trope for the sky snake (rain serpent, tugubaziitu-bu) of the Kawaiisu (Garfinkel and Williams 2011; Zigmond 1972a, 1972b; 1977, 1980; Zigmond et al. 1990). Also, two specifically identified snakes—a rattlesnake (tugu-baziitu-bu) and a gopher snake (kogo) are the entrance guardians, protectors of the Master of the Animals (Yahwera) Underworld home as presented in the sacred narratives

The Primordial Snake Religion • 59

of Kawaiisu mythology (Garfinkel et al. 2009; Garfinkel and Williams 2011: 65; Zigmond 1972b, 1977, 1980; Zigmond et al. 1990). The rattlesnake is a specific portal protector—a larger-than-life being described in the oral traditions as ‘big as a log.’ A common thematic juxtaposition of the northern hunter-gatherer Numic predecessors is effected by the ‘locked chain’ formation that likely represents a flowing water image and more transcendentally a snake-deity or icon (Figure 3.21). In the Archaic to contemporary Postclassic period iconography of the Mesoamerican historical sources, the undulatory rock art pattern often interlocks with a lateral projection composed of geometrical shapes. In our discussions of icons of the Uto-Aztecan cultures, the common interlocking wave pattern is a visual clue. This symbol plays out in different formations and transmogrifies into a human body. We can view this expression as the Tlaloc deity of the Postclassic Aztec and beyond. Tlaloc is the Aztec god of rain and thunder, what Bernardino de Sahagún (1981) describes as the Aztec equivalent of Jupiter (as alluded to in the Codex Florentino). These Tlaloc images abound in Preclassic architectural and relief sculptures from the northern frontiers of Mesoamerica (Pasztory 1974). The imagism of Uto-Aztecan glyphic icons depends on this interlocking wave curve not just in the Mesoamerican Tlaloc; it can also be recognized in the derivative expressions manifested in Hopi basketry design elements.

Figure 3.21. Classic pottery in water-intense lake regions around Acambaro on the northern frontiers of Mesoamerica, bordering the states of Michoacan, Jalisco, and Guanajuato, Mexico. Photo courtesy of City Museum of Irapuato, Mexico.

60 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 3.22. The snake-water interlocking chain. Yokuts (PUA adjacent group) basketry (ca. 1900 CE). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3.23. Pottery from South Central Mexico (Classic Period 400 CE). Courtesy of City Museum of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico.

The Primordial Snake Religion • 61

Table 3.2. Common core of abstract ideational iconic inscriptions based on iconicity of the snake consciousness. Drawings by authors.

Core Optical Feature

Snake

Forager Rock Art and Basket Patterns

Agricultural

Curvilinear, Chain, and

Actual frontal head manifest, Visual aggrandizement, and lateral flowing snake verisimilitude

snake form signaled in terms of head and body, diamonds and triangles

Regions

Region

(Forager Intense)

(Agriculture Intense)

Great Basin, Nevada, Oasisamerican extensions, Mojave Desert, Hopiland Arizona,

The Uto-Aztecan Geographic Continuum based in Desert West topography, Puebloan and Aridamerica, and Mesoamerican tropical highland

Aridamerica adjunct to Sierra Madre Occidental, Mesoamerica

Anthropomorph

Water

Stick or outline defining corporeal organs, distinctive hand, leg, human torso like characters

Flowing line formation, Separate non-adjunct line

Lateral Human verisimititudinal projections as in Codices. Defining gods, goddesses, divine manifests of prayers, and intentional stances (cf. shamanistic ancestor deities)

Zigzag formation, Sculptural templates in the images of Tlaloc

Great Basin and extended American Southwest, eastern California, Death Valley, Coso Range, Inyo County, Nevada, and throughout the Desert West

Mesoamerica, Oaxaca (Mictla),

Bajio, State of Mexico, Puebla, Central Mexico

Bajio, Estado de Mexico, Puebla Central Mexico

Central Mexico Puebla Teotihuacan, State of Mexico

(continued)

62 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans Table 3.2. Continued

Snake Water Binding Chain

Flowing concatenated lines on rock surfaces

Concatenated lines on pottery, basketry

Hopi Reservation, Hohokam, and Mogollon of the Greater American Southwest

Central and North Central Mexico, Durango, Guanajuato

Thunder

Zigzag line formation (scarce)

Geometrical sculpture and relief formations, zigzag chain with sides resembling shapes of thunder,

(Scarcely found in Mojave Desert West rock art typology)

Central and South-Central Mexico, Mesoamerica

Rock art, Southwest, Nevada, Fremont (square Kiva like concentrism) pictograms

Codices, Iconographic feature on body in Mesoamerica

Códice TellerianoRemensis, Codex Borbónico, Codex Xólotl, Codex Borgia Circle Concentric Circle motif in rock art Ojo de dios (Huicholes)

Circles, concentric circles, often concentric geometrical or diamond formations especially in rock art, references to holy and spiritual wind, orientations to the cardinal directions, oriented totems

Circles or concentric circles divided into cardinal directions, codices

The Primordial Snake Religion • 63

Conclusion The presence of animal features, specifically of the snake and birds, reappear in Classic depictions on the architectural reliefs and iconography in Mesoamerican Codices. The mother goddesses, female divinities in general and Codex ‘volatiles’ provide partial reflections of animalhuman figures, serpents with feathers, the quetzal-plumed features creating an iconographic world view of the Uto-Aztecan cultures (Griffith 1990; Huitzil 2018). They provide a glimpse of the ecology that was celebrated in the visual depictions and arts, and as such remain one of the greatest testaments of the symbolic religious practices that host various Uto-Aztecan cultural denominations.

Chapter 4

How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function?

R

What Is an Icon? A prehistoric icon is archaeological evidence available in the form of a visual pattern and mostly in the shape of a petroglyph or drawing; but it sometimes takes the form of a three-dimensional sculpture or other carved formats. This study is concerned mostly with two-dimensional representations in the cultural and symbolic evolution of Uto-Aztecan art. We shall also consider three-dimensional models (like pottery, sculpture, or reliefs on architectural monuments). The glyph-formatted iconic image survives from antiquity, of which there is little in the way of written or oral accounts to best define them. Although iconicity is understood in terms of supplementary historical or cultural information associated with these visual indices, such independent material is often rather scarce, especially with reference to precontact material. Isolated glyphic clusters do not connect to ethnographic evidence to support their interpretation. However, once any iconic prototype is identified on the basis of field research and observation, we can look for similarities and differences in the visual patterns and ritual formats among contiguous cultures. The study of any icon also depends on the success with which it conveys the idea of a corresponding object, emotion, or idea. The icon may thus be understood as a Gibsonian array of references to objects or ideas in human ecology (Gibson 1987; Cutting 2000). An icon is typically a visual array that supports identification, empathy, and understanding of actions based

How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function? • 65

on movements or qualities of existence inherent in its layout. The emphasis on a single symbol of a deity or icon, a sacred shape or representation, which is essentially visual in nature, is thus two-fold. On a primary level, it exhibits a ‘kinesic’ spatial manifest: essentially its basic layout signifies the movement of the body, helping us to identify a visual body language or effect (Burgoon et al. 2016). In communication technology a nonverbal kinesic representation simulates movement or motility of the human body or its external body parts. Emotive or Emotively Disposed Icons (EDI) function like clusters of embodied cognitive reflexes (enacting effects of ‘moving’ or ‘appearing from a distance’). These effects are naturally intelligible to conscious human responders. Based on this premise, we could identify a whole array of gesticulatory, ‘kinesic’ tokens in forager drawings. Icons, as in rock drawings of snakes, deities, and anthropomorphs, show physical movement, gesticulation, limbic reflexes and extensions, and hunting and taming actions, as is the case in Figure 4.1, in which a human-shaped body comes forward with a flourish of out-stretched arms. Most of the time (as in Figure 4.1) they hold recognizable objects like staffs, sticks, or blades. Depictions commemorating headdress and ceremonial stone tools probably refer ‘ritual hunting” or ‘cutting.’ Gesticulations, or action arrays, normally include semblances of raised, benedictory arms, avian ‘flotation’ features, or halo or glow associations (also known as the ‘nimbus’ surrounding the head). Such indexing anticipates the second significant aspect of visual iconicity. An icon is obviously related to stories within a culture (specifically oral traditions, sacred narrative, or mythology—that is to say, the sociolinguistic media of communications as a whole). There is then a socioenvironmental niche, out of which meanings are generated and shared (Burgoon and Hale 1984; Burgoon et al. 2016; Cutting 2000; Gibson (1987). For many unidentified prehistoric drawings of the Uto-Aztecan spectrum, we do not have the privilege of ethnographic cross-reference. Such samples as that of Preclassic or later (3000 BCE to 2000 BCE) ‘animal-master’ or ‘animal-human’ symbols (of western Mojave and northwest La Pintada or Caborca Sonora) are no longer part of any existing culturally defined, ethnic group. These visual icons fall outside the synchronic or customary representations of surviving UtoAztecan cultures in these same geographical regions. However, we can try to assemble some information from hypothesized, genetically linked descendant cultures. We can study how an icon might have evolved: for example, from one layer of kinesic iconicity in forager symbolism to a more sedentary maize-culture version of a similar function. Hence this early iconic symbolism signals a heightened interest in the object represented. We associate the Uto-Aztecan deities with an ‘animistic,’ ‘spiritual agency,’ as they frequently provoke a direct emotive engagement

66 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

Figure 4.1. The projectile point forager and gendered formation prototype from California, Nevada. Drawing recreation of a forager petroglyph by Bernard M. Jones, Jr.

with visual cues (Bird-David 1999; Maringer 1979). Indeed, visual perception is always valenced. Such neural image processing is not void of emotional valence. Icons, more than any other type, elicit a response that is interesting or ‘curiously’ embodied for the viewer (Fayn et al. 2018). Deities, totems, and masks create a ‘psychic’ impact with their heightened or exaggerated features (Mukhopadhyay 2005). Embodied cues, like a single circular and concentric eyes (as in the Coso figure—Figure 4.3) or as in ‘goggle eye’ motifs (as in the visions of the Mesoamerican rain god,

How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function? • 67

Figure 4.2. Snake patterns on rock surfaces at Caborca Sonora. Drawing by authors.

Tlaloc), stimulate emotive repercussions that imbricate meaning-recognition with ‘valence’ states of intense fear or surprise (Shaeffler 1996). Visual indices have always evoked psychologically valenced ideas of divinization. However, such ideas may also include an element of terror or fear of the sublime and of death-like frontier experiences. Graphic (or glyphic) icons were certainly employed in Uto-Aztecan rock art and reliefs as a means of visualizing the invisible. They have been used as visual short-hands for spirit entities, expressing the need for sacrifice or appeasement of a supernatural agency through the stylized animal-human visual systems. They

Figure 4.3. Snake torso and snake portal and atlatl combinations in forager petroglyphs from Mojave Desert. Drawing by authors.

68 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

are semiotic indices that are probably somatically embedded and exploited in communicative strategies through generations of human evolution in a hostile environment or in the lap of nature (Betts et al. 2015; Boyd and Kox 2016; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1993; Malotki and Dissanayake 2018).

Figure 4.4. Emotional valence generated by exaggerated or aggrandized features (Pasztory 1974; Siebe et al. 2005). Vessel with mask of Tlaloc, the serpent rain syncretic entity. Museo del Templo Mayor. Photo by Atrix Kreiger, 2 March 2018. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function? • 69

The Ethological Turn in Understanding Iconic Visuals When Deacon and Bickerton defined ‘iconicity’ in terms of animal (australopithecine) communication, they implied a development of tokens, like those of bodily ‘gesture.’ Gestural iconicity helps make sense of the world— of what Bickerton calls the niche—and generate comprehensible cognitive formations (Bickerton 2005, 2018). Bickerton speaks of a representational process on a ‘a natural scale’ in which more complex representations enable a more complicated grasp of higher order perceptions, including emotive perceptions that appear on the qualitatively superior projections on that scale. Bickerton’s primary example is of the differential responsiveness of an ape’s perceptions of ‘icons’ of different animals, like the ‘tiger’ and ‘cockroach.’ Existential primacy is attributed to the tiger’s movement: it is more valuable (or imminent) than the cognitive response to the threat of the cockroach. The scalar nature of representational behavior is created in part by conditioning, preparing the animal to respond more quickly to hierarchically relevant levels of stimuli. The fear element in cognitive response is of primal necessity for an ape, which has to fight with other species for dominance and survival. We can thus see why emotive reflexes would and should be ingrained or intimately associated in images that convey very deep relevance to stakeholders. In the case of Uto-Aztecan symbolism, the importance would lie in the way viewers would feel about these intention-bearing objects, like ‘animal-masters.’ Consider the example of a serpent-human face metaphor like that of Tlaloc (Figure 4.4 above), where effects of fear and threat to life are caused by exaggerated ‘goggle eye’ features, extended teeth or snake-fang combinations. Suprasensory iconicity must correspond to such embodied reflexes, which does not lead to a conflict with theories of evolutionary representational behavior such as those of Bickerton or Deacon (Bickerton 2018; Deacon 2006, 2007; Mack et al. 2015). Broader’s study of gesticulations were supported by Ramchandran and his colleagues’ views on reflexes from mirror neurons, which may be referenced with regard to supporting the emotive reflexivity of icons. Imitation and analogy, all arising out of the perceiver’s embeddedness in an environment, help in social conditioning (Pessoa 2008; Ramachandran 2000). Given these premises, and the supporting neuroethological data on responses to such patterns in human viewers, we can say that the icons of the Aztecs, like those of Tlaloc as cited above, as in all cases of visual divinity found in the Codices, express the horrific and subliminal emotions of transcendent divinity.

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Intentionality in Iconography But why ‘humans’ or the human body—why did ancient cultures find a simulacrum in the anthropomorphs? In addition to the belief that the dead persisted physically in some weakened, shadowy form in the netherworld, prehistoric cultures already thought of a compelling need for commemoration of the dead (or what anthropologists like Meyer Fortes [1966] call ‘geneonymy,’ which means commemorative cult of the dead or ancestor worship). Commemorative cults were and are designed to generate and sustain the recollection of the deceased in the minds of the living—both family and community. They have as their impetus the compulsion to avoid having to suffer the dreaded ‘death after death,’ or relegation of one’s deeds or personhood to eternal anonymity (Fortes 1966). Some psychologists, such as Boyer (2001), have put forward the idea that supernatural beliefs had their origins in the intention to invent a set of comforting divinities. Anthropomorphs are thus results of perceptions defined as ‘counterintuitive’ (Berring 2006; Boyer 2001; Pyysiäinen 2013; Pyysiäinen et al. 2003). They effect a reversal of the mind’s normal understanding of the world, which in fact makes them easier to remember. According to Barrett (2011) and Guthrie (1993, 2001), humans have a perceptual bias to attend to human-like forms or other information that might be caused by human-like beings. Guthrie casts the argument in terms of an evolved tendency that produces false positives for the sake of survival. As humans and other agents (such as predatory mammals) represent our greatest threats and promises for survival and reproduction in our competitive environment; it is better to assume that the rustling in the bush is an intentional agent rather than just the wind (Barrett 2007). In the attempt to study the cognitive construction of god-like anthropomorphs, scholars have used and debated this theory to justify religious anthropomorphy, including visual depiction and acceptance of god-like figures in human cultures. If we accept counter-intuitiveness as a measure of reinforcing certain behavioral expectations, like that of intentional godlike beings, then we understand that these entities are supposed to confer certain blessings and advantages in the struggle for survival (Barrett 2007; Dawkins 2006; Pyysiäinen and Anttonen 2002, 2013; Pyysiäinen and Honelka 2003). So, their presence is accepted for the minimal cost they accrue to the body. Counter-intuitiveness is generally adopted as the false promise that stabilizes the sense of conflict and futility—a kind of evolutionary adaptation to threats to existence. We propose that religiosity can also be well maintained not only by singular counterintuitive digressions but also by means of the dualistic recognition (and acceptance) of their falsehood. This cognitive dualism is important. The co-existence of

How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function? • 71

(A) the attentive reality of counterintuitive states and (B) the consciousness of obvious falsehood of these states show that in any act of religious nature both A and B may be simultaneously available. The confidence and resilience of religious experience lies in the fact that the delusional experience is perfectly understood and is applied in practice by its voluntary subscribers. In dualistic (or pluralistic) credence-systems, if belief ‘A’ is real, then ‘B’ can be real in the same or another domain. This means that if the existence of god-like anthropomorphs (i.e., belief A) were accepted as a ‘truth’ or reality, then the ‘fictionality’ of gods, which is based on real evidence of the natural world (say, belief B), could be accepted as being true in that same act of experience. That humans could believe and disbelieve at the same time is a cognitive prerogative. This dual ability must be acknowledged for many kinds of behaviorally valid situations, and most significantly for things like interpretation and valorization of narrative fiction and art. How do counterintuitive images affect the viewer with dualistic sensations in the percipient’s mind? We can speak of this, in a sense, in terms of the ‘structures of feelings’ generated by iconic fictions (cf. Halton 2008). The viewer’s sensations of viewing the tokens of configuration is very important because they define a way of negotiating the power wielded by such tokens. The culturally embedded eye should be trained to discern the emotive-cognitive tokens, depictive lines, and visual associations. Practice, coupled with acquisition of very intricate knowledge of representations and formal imperatives, and understanding syntactical correlations between separate visual components, make rock art viewing a very rewarding competence act. The reifying characters of rock art features (like eyes, noses, ears, brows, nostrils, earrings, etc., on a glyphic face) reveal the potency and deeper meaning of the imagery to the competent viewer who is able to enjoy accommodation of inter-relationships in the accoutrements.

Face Recognition and Threat Perception If we take the Upper Paleolithic, Cro-Magnon era roughly as the time frame in which either ancestral spirits or divinities began to be represented, it is also worthwhile to understand that such a period marks a reinforcement of the process of mirroring or accommodating the human self with its panoply of desires, potentials, and mitigations of threats and accidents. Metacognition is the process of symbolizing the total or holistic power of human entities by recalling one specific attribute or adjunct of that power. Symbology of the phallus for male reproductive potential and the vulva for female fertility create metacognitive feedback. There is always an excess of power, or affective agency at work such that it tends to determine

72 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

and counterbalance the token features to which they might relate. This hypothesis may be tested by considering the affect generated by visual appearances of faces and gestures. The power-effects that faces have on the child’s mind may suggest how such symbols continue to affect perception in adults viewing rock art scenarios (Piaget 1957; Poulin-Dubois 1994). In general, any act of psychological face recognition by subjects involves much more than just simple face recognition; it involves recognition of the affective values of the entity that the face represents (Hodgson 2013; Mukhopadhyay and Hodgson 2016). Animal gaze owes its origins to primitive forms of motor reflexes that elicit fear and predatory defense. Psychological experiments conclude that categorical perceptions of the face are acquired and increase upon more intense and multiple training or learning processes of recognition (Gosden 1999, 2005; Looser and Wheatley 2010). But it is perhaps more important to realize that learning does not explain the causes of rapid and reifiable attention that perception of faces and eyes elicit: ‘it is presumably not the face itself that interests people but the mind behind it’ (Looser and Wheatley 2010). The tipping point of animacy is best identified through the eyes. Human beings are highly attuned to specific facial cues, carried largely in the eyes, that gate the categorical perception of ‘life’ or ‘animacy’ (Elliott and Jacobs 2013; Looser and Wheatley 2010; Scholl and Tremoulet 2000; Smith 1985; Tanaka and Farah 1993; Tomalski et al. 2013). These findings in relation to face recognition are startling to say the least. If the cognitive capacities for face recognition are acquired, then, in non-innatist case

Figure 4.5. Emotive communication achieved with singular eye and FAPS-like ocular characters. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr.

How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function? • 73

studies, they are entrained by repeated instances from an infantile period (Goren and Wu 1975). The latter presumably enables humans to associate animacy with eyes. Thus, a non-eye feature that resembles a ‘face’ cannot be assumed to have a living character, or a mind behind it. Considered from that perspective, it would appear that a response to eyes is intrinsic to face recognition modules in the sense that when any normal subject tries to identify a cluster of regional features as an object resembling a face it takes both global parameters of the form—that is, the whole face as well as individual parameters such as the eyes—as constitutive features of the face (Gray 2007; Langton 2000; Looser and Wheatley 2010; Looser et al. 2013). Positive and negative emotional responses can be unconsciously evoked, as important aspects of emotional face-to-face communication can occur at an unconscious level (Baron-Cohen 1996; Theeuwes 1993).

The Living Gestures of Icons Rock engravings are thus said to have effects akin to hypnosis. The spirits depicted—like a bare silhouetted human figure with raised arms (BirdDavid 1999) or ‘the human with horns’—are precise instants that impose a psychological power in their ability to move us, and to force us to gaze at them with unqualified and uninhibited empathy (Halton 2008). The visual impressions created are precisely what Halton calls perceptively ‘living gestures’ (Halton 2004: 90). Such living gestures imply how a posture touches our deepest signifying nature, the self, and public life. For Halton, gestural bodily awareness, more than knowledge, connects us with the very conditions out of which the human body evolved into its present condition and remains a vital resource in the face of a devitalizing, rationalistic, consumption culture (Halton 2008). The formation of artistic shapes was evident in the later Holocene with full force and gave birth to ideographs and finally even linguistic inscription or orthography. The point is already grasped in the aesthetics of the ancient religions (Shusterman 2010; Wujastyk 2009). The manner in which bodily gestures can affect the viewer and act as a mode of communication is noted by Shusterman (2000:262). The visible form and movement—the simulacrum of the body itself as a type of language, at once embedded and signifying. Indeed, the body, in its moment, is represented by the Sanskrit word vigraha—also synonymous with the verb ‘shape’ or ‘shaping’ and carries that sense of not just saying but ‘doing’ something to the viewer—actively ‘assuming’ a state of mind. In evolutionary terms, the affect and cognitive power that visual signs communicate are significant. These representations are in themselves affective (emotive). Hence, for the great majority of rock art, and its cog-

74 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

nate forms (like sand-painting or effigies), representational elements often include functional, purposive gestures aimed at communicating a sense of amelioration, well-being, and, importantly, deification. Therefore, what has been verbally instituted is a concept of beneficence or grace—the agency of rock art images then relates to the attribution of some supernatural power or function of gods, and goddesses. A fascinating study has been undertaken by Schebesh (2013), archaeologist at the Nürnburg State Theater, who thought it possible to employ professional actors to consciously reproduce the basic attitudes or body language of the gestural postures of each of four Aurignacian and one Gravettian anthropomorphic figurines (20,000–40,000 years old) (Glunz-Hüsken and Schebesh 2015; Schebesch 2013). The actors/actresses could discern the emotional valency of the figures which they communicated with their body language by representing the deep-seated elements of love, affection, joy, warmth, strength, or depression. In an interesting and complementary line of research, Wilson (2011) explored what he terms an empathic theory of religion, specifically with an eye toward understanding the neurological basis for how the human mind and body process and embrace supernatural agents and religion. Wilson concludes that such neurological and physiological effects appear to have selective fitness values especially for small-scale cultures that might be able to better manage their natural resource base more sustainably. In essence, then, both studies (Schesbesh 2017; Wilson 2011) imply that the animal-human figures in prehistoric rock art have a communicative ability to affect their viewers with messages that are relevant for their systems of sustenance. They do so in both a mental and physical realm and have been suggested to communicate an element of the vital life-force and a physical sensation of emotion. The latter is sometimes identified with the concept of an embodied cognition (cf. Martin 2009). Hence, supposed Patterned Body Anthropomorph or PBA deities successfully contain a configuration of traits that forces the viewer to engage with them and feel their influence ( Joyce 2005; McGuire 1990; Walker 2008).

Conclusion Iconographic symbols wield an extraordinary effect on the cognitive process. These symbols sometimes create a ‘shock-effect’ that has been exploited in visual models of ritual objects as well as in related arts. The latter includes masks, totemic dolls, effigies, deities, and ultimately petroglyphs. Sometimes even users of such symbols claim to have the ability to create effects without evident visible connections of causality (Ehrenzweig 1999; Sagiv and Bentin 2001; Merrill et al. 2009). A comparison of global rock art

How Does Prehistoric Iconicity Emerge and Function? • 75

figures helps identify their psychologically emotive or motivating factor in visual representation. It constructs, as Margaret Conkey (1987) observes, a worldview-inferring consciousness. If, then, there is any one argument for understanding how a rock art image of an animal-human, a conflated figure communicates its power, we might refer to Brown and Walker (2008), Conkey (1987), Mukhopadhyay and Hodgson (2016), Mukhopadhyay and Garfinkel (2016), Porr and Bell (2012), Vinnicombe (1972), Wheatley et al. (2007), and Whitley (1992, 1998, 2009), as providing a broad range of literature recommending a cognitive approach to archaeology. Ancient rock art artisans were aware of this knowledge, and the figures we discuss in this volume, although vastly separated in geographic location and centuries and millennia of time, evidence a uniform and patterned awareness and exploitation of common techniques of making images and outlines sufficiently efficacious to generate surprise, shock, fear, and awe—even in a context-free contemporary viewer. Such conflations provide a consistent message of the enlivening power of these souls and spirits. The image itself is all, it corroborates the remarkable ingenuity and continuing vitality of the arresting, iconic Uto-Aztecan figures.

Chapter 5

Anthropomorphy of the Uto-Aztecans, Animism, and Animalism

R

Iconic Effects of Animal Forms The PBAs or ‘patterned-body-anthropomorphs’ of the Coso, Mojave Desert rock art representations as Grant (1968) and Whitley (1998) note, are, in fact, ritually indexed anthropomorphs. Aztec and Maya iconography represents a complex version of these basic Northern-Uto-Aztecan ‘PBA’s in the rock art figures in Alta and Baja California, the Mojave Desert, and Sonora. Holocene Middle America already exhibits the two-dimensional anthropomorphic figures that Campbell Grant called PBAs. Drawings of human-like figures are executed by means of an integrated visual syntax involving geometrical figures and anatomical extensions like arms, legs, heads, torsos, or, very rarely, eyes. They acquire the so called iconic effect (of divine or supernatural entities) with the help of in-built visual cues of gesticulations or what is now called ‘kinesic’ mannerisms in communication psychology. PBAs acquire such iconic-semiotic effects by being played out against a ‘stage’ that involves the entire cosmos (Sebeok 1969). It is within a world canopied by the stars and their movements that the PBAs display such interactive or deific gestures as arms raised in an adorant posture or orans (prayer making) or gestures of blessing and giving. The ‘anthropomorphs’ configure a two-dimensional ritual map of the visible universe— rather than by simple resemblance as a class of figures. These figures are often optically mandated by vision-at-a-distance and embody or mirror gesticulatory signals that closely resemble human anatomical projections (Figure 5.1). This human imagery appears in pre-

Anthropomorphy of the Uto-Aztecans, Animism, and Animalism • 77

archaic versions of hunter-gatherer societies in many of the NorthernUto-Aztecan (NUA) ancestral language group territories whose descendants today include Shoshone, Comanche, Paiute, Kawaiisu, and other contiguous Native American groups. We find that in all petroglyphic communications the three basic behavioral tendencies are as follows: [a] First, emotive communication. Ideograms suggest surprise and valence. Indeed, recognition of valence characteristics, especially for petroglyphs or pictogrammatic marks, are probably not readily realized at all (Mukhopadhyay 2005; Mukhopadhyay et al. 2017). However, we can recognize this phenomenon in the way eyes are represented in Aztec religious expression. Whether in an earthmother symbol or in a rain god-symbol, we see certain attributes and element patterns consistently present. Powerful and hollow, fear-evoking, reflexive eyes conduct the viewer through an emotive tunnel or pathway. The impact of getting ‘sucked into’ a centric hole or an eye-like (pupillary) aperture creates sensations of shock or the confrontational effect of human fears, which are also emotive triggers. In simpler words, such visual effects provoke allows danger and equilibrium, fear and faith, to co-exist in the same perception. [b] Second, the icon functions as a mnemonic code as it acts as a stable referent or code for religious memory through several generations into the future of these cultures. Petroglyphs repeat a visual format within defined geographical zones. The icon tells a mnemonic narrative with its characters—usually one of power relations or protection and discreet sacrifice for sustenance. Compare the Yahwera icon from South Central California (also as in Figure 5.5). The ethnographic reference suggests that this icon contains the same elements as any other Uto-Aztecan religious symbol. The protector of game animals and subsistence may be a variation of an earthmother trope, and in similar Uto-Aztecan contexts is more strongly tethered to a snake association. One basic mnemonic code is of a snake-mother or mother-earth prototype. The motherhood valence and association is perpetuated by gender-based visual codes. [c] Finally, ideograms or glyphs display a kinesic function, which determines a level of nonverbal communication as it shows how these human-like forms stand in relation to animal movement or other animal signals. More specifically, kinesic gestures are corresponding gestures of bodily movement. In the PBAs of the Mojave-Sonora complex, one repeatedly recognizes ethologically distinguished movement like that of a raised or driving arm, like a ‘flourish’—as if all these gesticulations are meant to create the postures of a shep-

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herdess, like a tending protector of flock. The snake-mother PBA (Grant et al. 1968; Wheatley et al. 2007) remains a demonstration piece for this exercise. Snake icons and other animal divinities also act as astronomical ciphers. Such associations appear in the scripted Codices and its ethnological narratives of seasonal transitions, rain, birth, harvest, and bounty.

Categories from the NUA Subset Human-like spirit motifs appear abundantly in the differentiated maizegrowing agricultural Hopi subbranch of the Uto-Aztecans in areas within Arizona, the Hopi nation. The complex iconographic clusters within scripted or glyphic drawings of the Codices that contain expressions of similar visual motifs in the history of the (fourth century CE) Preclassic to Postclassic Aztecans (700 CE and after) are really far advanced in terms of detail but continue to reify that long-standing functional symbolism. Here we find typical and strong expressions and consequences of complexity achieved with the basic tokens of human body drawings (Chapter 13). This Uto-Aztecan anthropomorphy is configured through geometrical shapes like quadrants, curvilinear contours, crosses and circles, intersections, and radiating lines, among other closed features. The geometrical array is carried forward into an assembly of formats whose gestalt communicates a very human character. Examples of these token manifests include: (a) The head piece, which may be simulated by a controlled and adorned circle feature (Table 5.1); (b) the torso, which is characteristically a geometrical mat-like formation; (c) recurrent avian or bird-feet associations with frontal, face-forward and static, floating, and numinous body orientations; (d) the category including circles and quadrants are supplemented by wave-like contours that represent snakes and flowing water features. This format in the Northern-Uto-Aztecan petroglyphs stand alone because of the fixity and reificatory semasiography (that is, writing with signs as a nonphonetic technique to communicate information without speech). The pattern, displaying considerable variation of detail, has as one of its functions representing animal associations for adjacent human body images that, together, build a humananimal juxtaposition; and (e) the geometrical body is adorned, nuanced, and transformed through gendering tokens (Figure 5.5 below).

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Table 5.1. ‘Head’ features of the Coso, Nevada, Mojave, and American Southwest anthropomorph complex. Drawings by the author.

Boca de Potrerillos petroglyphs, Nuevo Leon, northeast Mexico

Little Petroglyph Canyon, Lower Renegade California

Hopi Nation Reservation petroglyph, The American Southwest

Las Labradas, Sinaloa, Pacific Coast, Mexico

Figure 5.1a. The detailed mat (calendrical or ritual) patterns evinced in reproduction of a Little Petroglyph Canyon from the Coso Range, Mojave Desert, California. Drawing by authors.

Cochimi, northern Baja California

Alta Vista, Nayarit Mexico

Figure 5.1b. The second squarish bodied PBA comes from Sinaloa, Mexico. Drawing by authors.

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This range of features creates an atypical visual continuity in the specific motifs of the region, especially in the northern Proto-Northern-UtoAztecan (PNUA) manifestations, which are quite distinct as far as iconic technique is considered. These elements are rather distinctive especially compared to the similar motifs that reappear in southern Mesoamerica with its intricate typology of the gods or goddesses. Yet these later anthropomorphic images do carry their visually recognizable accessories such as maize or thunder—indeed, all equipment characterizing a sedentary, agricultural society without dependencies on animal food resources.

Figure 5.2. PBAs, both deco-bodied mat-like torso in-fill and solid-bodied, animal-human conflation have avian-like bird feet, figures from the Coso Range, Mojave Desert, California. Drawing by authors.

Figure 5.3. PBAs from the Coso Range, Mojave Desert, indicated serpent patterns embedded within torsos of the deco-bodied figures with quadrant configurations. Drawing by authors.

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Figure 5.4. Decorated, pregnant, bird-woman figure. Two quail plumes feather the top of her head. Pendent labia hang from the bottom of her torso emphasizing her feminine gender. The enlarged and bulbous torso exhibits dots within her belly—these are references to either seeds or rain and are another manner indicating that she is pregnant. Note avian-style feet and the serpent figure with a triangular head above the main (panel left) figure’s left arm. Panel is located in Big Petroglyph Canyon, California. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr.

‘Eye of God’ Motif in Uto-Aztecan Iconography Collating cultural signifiers in the ethnography of the broader Mesoamerican sink, we can conjecture about their inherent meaning. It would seem that—from a comparison of anthropomorphic imagery of the extended Greater American Southwest iconographic assemblage alone—anthropomorphs are figurative signs, presumably intended to provide a range of meanings including recognition as: spirits of ‘rain or weather,’ ‘medicine’ (Hultkrantz 1981, 1987; Roth 2016), and ‘hunting’ (Gilreath and Hildebrant 2008) or ‘animal-masters’ (Grant et al. 1968). The anthropomorph is half-human, half-symbol, a negotiator between two worlds and two forms of consciousness. In the numerous powerful depictions of these images

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Figure 5.5. Amazing diamond-shaped concentric head foreshadowing the Huichol nierika, from a different time frame on the Coso (Numic) iconographic cultural expanse. Drawing by authors.

found throughout the Southwest (Schaafsma 2001), or even as has been suggested at times, in deep time Anasazi cultural symbolic arts and arts found along of the Fremont region of Utah (Gilreath and Hildebrandt 2008), there is always a sense of ‘personhood’ associated with anthropomorphic figures (Bird-David 1999:68). These figures seem to ‘look’ at us with their concentric heads and monocular eyes, like an unusual protohuman shape, flourishing, and yet iconizing the fears and anxieties of the characteristic forager lifeway (Figure 5.6). They exhibit recognizable human gestures like [a] kneeling, and [b] standing with raised arms spread, or lowered arms, [c] often appearing as if suspended in space with a some-

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Figure 5.6. The Huichol ‘eye of god’ (nierika) motif in contemporary handicraft. Also see comparative study of Hopi Huichol intersections (cf. MacLean 2012; Preuss 1904). Photograph by Armando Perez.

what static display and a full-frontal and numinous pose [d] lacking human facial features yet [e] having a posture indicative of motifs of prayer or blessing (Nielsen-Grimm and Stavast 2008; Teiwes 2022). They represent standard motifs of ritual worship and therefore of psychological intensities that enforce the human desires and affinities incorporated within systems of collective relationship and belief (Berring 2006; Gosden 2005). Again, a visual comportment token of the California or Mojave Desert anthropomorphs is the presence within them of ‘rectilinear’ deities (Table 5.1). Their geometrical orientation grows out of perspectives of pecking developed earlier along the same region. The heads are metaphorically substituted by circular or spiral designs like those found in dreamcatchers

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Figure 5.7. An Aztec feather-shield. Courtesy of Creative Commons Attribute 4.0.

or more notably the Huichol nierika, consisting of the ‘eye of god’ motif, which seems to be almost an en corpus simulation of Mesoamerican iconography (Schaafsma 2001; Neurath and Bahr 2005). In almost all Mojave Desert area anthropomorphs, the Mesoamerican parallels or derivations are directly obvious. The ‘eye of god’ is indeed a very typical motif in which the path of vision exploits the image of the center of an ocular circle by attracting the attention of the viewer (see Table 5.1. And compare to Figure 5.6, below). As Hope MacLean (2012) suggests, the same shamanic designs from the Mesoamerican traditions are in circulation even at present in artifact productions of rugs and blankets, which repeat the same visual paradigm.

Conclusion The concentric head motif is surely typical to forager groups in the Mojave Desert and in eastern California, but they are also reified in the agricultural Huichol. The Mesoamerican Codices of the Aztec and Maya contain icons emanating from the Archaic Period (between 3000 BCE to roughly 1500 CE). On the larger time scale of Uto-Aztecan symbolic cultural evolution, foragers overlap with sedentary agriculture. Forager culture predates sed-

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entism in the Middle Americas but that the anthropomorph originated in forager culture cannot be held with certainty. The application of dating techniques is of some help here but is not conclusive. Considered from the point of iconography, all that may be said is that the northern anthropomorphs are more elemental and rudimentary and contain the complex knowledge of the Codex icons in an incipient format. Yet, the difference is visible in plain daylight. The Mesoamerican Codices, especially Codex Borgia, Florentine, Boturini, and Huichapan, incorporate a brilliant representation of the Valley of Mexico showcasing Aztec and Mixtec religions that came to their most advanced cultural phases in Oaxaca, Cholula, and Tenochtitlan (1300 CE). The latter contain the best specimens of these quasi-urban agrarian deities and their beliefs in supernatural political intervention. The divinities are arbitresses of power and control and of sacrifices of humans for their appeasement. The snake association of such gods as Huitzilopochtli and the gods demanding sacrifice are not essentially different, however. Similar motifs appear with more sedentary lifestyle features. The Aztec snake gods, for example, are all counterparts of forager hunting gods including their classic snake-wielding and snake-personified entities. The latter are at once fearful and death dealing and at the same time regenerative (Mathiowetz et al. 2015; Nielsen-Grimm and Stavast 2008; Schaafsma 2001). The snake with plumes motif, so scarce in forager manifests, are abundantly represented and of vast importance here, again securing the visual effect of arresting our gaze and providing behavioral intentional stances in powerfully reifying anagrams.

Chapter 6

Temporal Horizons of Uto-Aztecan Iconography

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The iconic practices of a wide and variable collective like that of the Uto-Aztecans may be studied with respect to the time layers. The evolution of material culture explains how the key motifs morphed relative to time and environment. The availability of tangible artifacts and substances, like mining products through the second millennium and after, changed the iconic character, introducing dimensions and cognitive effects by processing value-laden objects. The interposition of precious material elements like jade or turquoise for example determined the visual cognitive effects of iconographic representations. We could divide the timeline for UtoAztecan iconographic evolution into these important environmental phases: (a) (b) (c) (d)

Emergence of the Great Basin Amerindian 12,000–6000 BCE: Holocene Warming 6000 BCE Mining and Uto-Aztecan Maya Trade and Contacts 2000 BCE the Fall of Tenochtitlan

Emergence of the Great Basin Amerindian: 12000–6000 BCE The earliest Uto-Aztecan strata is the hypothetical collective of ProtoUto-Aztecans, deriving from an ‘Amerindian’ model migrant who settled in the Great Basin glacial prepluvial (14,000 BCE) (Hopkins 1967). These ‘Amerindians’ are believed to have moved into North America and ultimately toward Central and South America as Amerindian cultures with

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linguistically related affiliations. They included the likely hypothetical Proto-Uto-Aztecan, the Aztec-Tanoan language family groups, and the Quiché of southern Mesoamerican latitudes (Greenberg 1987; Greenberg et al. 1986). This initial in-migration can be identified as one of multiple diasporas—entering also into Southern California, south and west of the Great Basin, and the Southwest. These ‘Amerindian’ migrations occurred any time from about 16,000 years BCE. They point to a pre-Clovis period—which means that the stone tool evidence is not yet well-defined

Figure 6.1. Map indicating regions of settlement and timeframes of the Uto-Aztecans. Drawing by authors.

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for the period. This phase is presupposed to have actually existed by linguists Sapir (1921), Whorf (1954), and Campbell (1997)—although there are no definitive conclusions. But these earliest of relationships are generally accepted. Amerindians are genetically linked to the Uto-Aztecan gene pool of later generations in the history. The link between genomic equivalents are relevant here (Kemp et al. 2007). We can construct a tentative map based on these correlations of pre-Archaic origin Amerindians.

Clovis Next in temporal scale, early in-migrations into California and the Great Basin overlap to some extent with a period of transformation that archaeologists call Clovis, presumably ranging from 13,500 to 11,000 BCE. This phase in the archaeological culture sequence marks an element of the Western Pluvial Lakes Tradition (12,000–8000 BCE) when all lakes of the Great Basin may have appeared after glacial meltdown. In eastern California, this phase has left behind evidence of prehistoric cutting tools called (i) Western Stemmed Points and (ii) the Lake Mojave and Silver Lake point traditions. The dissemination of these Western Pluvial cultures into and then away from the Great Basin would have given rise to the Aztec-Tanoan-Zuni protolanguage strata, and subsequently the Aztec-Tanoan language family, which evolved more narrowly and is now believed to have provided the hearth for the first Proto-Uto-Aztecan expression or the PUA (c. 7000 BCE). Merrill and his colleagues (2009) believe that Proto-Uto-Aztecan may have already been developed about 9,000 years ago. These periods of culture may be broadly suggested in the region of Figure 6.1 marked as Holocene. The linguistic evidence is to be collated from the similarity of spoken language elements in the Great Basin cultures that rim the Sierra Nevada elevations and appear in the American Southwest at this early date. Of the oldest tribes identified in that Great Basin shift of cultures would have been the predecessors of the contemporary Hopi and Zuni whose more contemporary descendant expressions are the Timbisha-Shoshone, Paiute, Pima, O’odham, and southern Tarahumaras of American-Mexican transborder geography.

6000 BCE: Holocene Warming After the pluvial epochs, the next most important archaeological phase is the ‘Altithermal Holocene,’ which starts at 6000 BCE. A rise in temperature (since the first Great Basin phase mentioned above) produced

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desiccation in certain areas and stimulated a revolving secondary intermovement profile of some Proto-Uto-Aztecans who were impelled to leave the Sierra Nevada for the wider Great Basin and southern latitudes. Postglacial warming in the early Holocene caused the ice to melt rapidly and the inhabitants to move in these directions. At least two routes have been suggested in the literature (Gunnerson 1962; Hopkins 1965, 1967; Nichols 1981; Voegelin and Hale 1962). The first of these is traced through the Humboldt River pass between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern skirt of the Sierra Nevada chain (Map 1). Most of this route is hypothesized as existing close to cave and river geography of the Humboldt region: there is commonality in rock art depictions in Humboldt suggestive of groups that subscribed to hunting sheep and the use of atlatl technology. The second route is suggested where movement was fueled by the desiccation of postglacial warming that took place across a southward path toward the present-day Desert West from passages along Fremont and Sevier River ecology. Uto-Aztecans moved southward from the northern Great Basin as the Altithermal began; that they moved in two major branches which skirted the Great Basin, one along the Rocky Mountains, the other along the Sierras; and that, as the Medithermal set in, the Numic branch (northernmost Sierran branch) began to move back into the Great Basin proper, this movement being retarded until about 1000 years ago by the presence of horticulturists. This hypothesis is supported by correlations between lexico-statistical dating of the separation of Uto-Aztecan languages and the dates of climatic periods, and by the distributions of the major Uto-Aztecan branches. (Hopkins 1965: 48)

Assuming that the ancestors of Uto-Aztecans were negotiating postglacial increases in temperature and the desiccating landscape, they were also confronting two other realities: [a] water scarcity bound up with ecological negotiations of humans and springs and water wells in the topography (Sheehan 1994; Meltzer 1999). [b] proliferation of animals and especially snakes in the environment, which was a death threat but not always culturally counterproductive (Grayson 2011; Grayson and Cannon 1999; Holman 2000; Holman et al. 2011; Hultkrantz 2011). Game animals were frequently hunted, although the snake itself remained an existential threat for humans in the biome. The xeric territories of the Desert West form part of what is called Aridamerica (mostly located in northern Mexico), now recognized as one

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of the most snake-abundant regions in the world (Holman et al 2011; Hultkrantz 1966; Steward 1940; Sheehan 1994; Meltzer 1999). Snakeabundant topographies provide an interesting parallel for understanding the animal iconography of the people who abided in this environmental zone. Research on Holocene warming-period migrants (of this second higher temperature plenum) and their movements southward is limited. Some studies are indicative of Uto-Aztecan reverse migrations toward the California-Nevada highlands and refugia during the Little Lake Period of desiccation (6000 BCE), moving from northern tropical Mesoamerica to an even more northerly clime, even continuing from the early Holocene phases of 8000–6000 BCE to as late as 2500 BCE or after (Garfinkel et al. 2015). Both processes are simultaneously operative, one out of Desert West and another inward into Desert West and contiguities; biome modeling remains the primary source of this information picture. But later progressions toward resource-rich settlements demonstrate a preference for settlements across abundant riparian climate zones (Ewing 2012, 2016). Of more immediate interest is whether there were any relations between the survival adjustments of humans and the surrounding biota of Great Basin fauna. The late Pleistocene (12,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE) and the early and middle Holocene (8000 BCE to 2000 BCE) are probably best embodied in the late iconographies of snake-human dynamics, which would include the human biome in the period from 10,000 BCE to 6000 BCE of the Western Pluvial Lakes Tradition, and the Pinto, aka Little Lake period, of ca 6000 BCE to 4000 BCE. Holman (2000) suggests that snakes survived well in the postglacial warming period although many other species like mammoths perished in the rising temperature profile. More than any other species, snakes and reptiles demonstrate a remarkably static evolution and surprising persistence through time. Snakes would have been a normative threat to humans in the first Paleo-Amerindian phase as well as in later (Holocene) times. Does that mean that PUA ancestors—assuming they originated in the Great Basin outflux as migrants of the postglacial warming—were in contact with snakes and confronting them in numbers not seen previously (Corbit 2015; Stanley 2008)? Indeed, such questions have been raised and are, indeed, relevant to the consistent material reflections of snake icons in the region—on a scale that is unprecedented in terms of time and expressions within a territorial range. Because snakes are also riparian species that coexisted in desert as well as water-abundant ecologies, the human search for water and any counterfactual snake threat may have coexisted in a dualistic consciousness of Holocene warming cultures. The snake-water undulatory line and diamond and triangular markings must have been an example of early iconicity. They symbolize an elemental river motif. The zigzag line may have been a recognition of water as the indispensable element of life and basic tether to

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movement and vitality. Both snake and water contain a kinetic equivalence and are entwined as a trope of survival. Such imagery may well have given rise to the chief snake deities for Uto-Aztecan cultures in later years. The snake, like the jaguar for the East Gulf Coast Olmecs, served as a powerful example of death (snakes and jaguar are akin to apex predators bringing death) and therefore of supernatural associations. Death and, by implication, life are of course also signified by water and the search for water as a locus for abundant life associated in riparian environments of the Holocene. The snake-water symbol is so strongly felt because Uto-Aztecan protagonists would ultimately live in an ecosystem of abundant riparian

Figure 6.2. Conceptual map of emigration routes in the pre-Holocene. Drawing by authors.

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associations within a large snake-rich geography. Snakes, however, were also very common to the canyon highlands and just as characteristic for the xeric American Great Basin and American Southwest. Further, snakes are ubiquitous all along the eastern skirt of the Sierra Nevada and Mojave Desert, which runs southward along the Sierra Madre Occidental and its adjoining canyonlands in Arizona and Chihuahua. The latter geography meets the bands of Mesoamerican geography in the Sierra del Sur of South-Central Mexico. Could the geography and timing of human cultural in-migrations into the Americas and the collateral prehistoric population movements across the Desert West and Mesoamerica have been some of key reasons for the adoption of the iconic hallmark snake-water symbolism? (Mundkur et al. 1981)

2,000 BCE: Mining and Uto-Aztecan Maya Trade and Contacts Scholars now agree that Aztec prehistory is distantly connected to the American Southwest in its transition and relationships with Mesoamerica. In the historical cluster, after Holocene warming, a parallel culture expression appeared. We identify this as the Maya-Aztec interactive phase of late Neolithic 2000 BCE and after. The first expressions of Proto-Uto-Aztecan rock art in Coso, and to some extent for the ancestral Hopi, and Sonora, Mexico, were direct developments from a hunter-gatherer culture. The petroglyphs of artiodactyls or ungulates (bighorn sheep, deer, antelope, and elk) that are typical to early undistinguished Uto-Aztecan prehistory comprise the primary visual icons of this culture. These animals appear with an anthropomorphic (frequently gendered) master or mistress of animals or with a simple human-shaped (often horned) deity. However, these icons are not so regionally specific as it might seem. How does the Maya element come into play and accentuate the scenario? The Maya themselves were an Archaic culture in the deeper Mesoamerican substratum. The Plains Maya were really a different anthropological group but were definitely not separated by so much ‘distance’ in terms of their iconic expressions, a fact that somewhat enriches and complicates dating matters. Unless the visual iconicity translates between the Maya and Aztec groups, these connections cannot be easily understood. During this long and winding developmental phase of the forager-sedentary spectrum of the Aztecs, these gradual developments necessitated interactions with the Maya in various ways, most notably by means of land and ocean trade. The last five to six thousand years of history in Aztec Mesoamerica is therefore one of exchange and cultural hybridization prompted by economic needs and demands of trade. The volume of trade cannot be overestimated, as

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Figure 6.3. Trade locations of obsidian and precious stones based on the recent literature on the Puebloan Periods (ca. 700 CE and after). Drawing by authors.

is clearly stated by Sidrys (1976). Long-distance trade has been cited as an important factor in both the rise of Maya civilization (Rathje 1972a, 1972b) and in its dramatic demise (Culbert 1973). Obsidian use during the Classic period undoubtedly had some specialized utilitarian functions. Earle and Ericson’s 1977 compilation of research paves the way for a comprehensive understanding of Maya-Aztec trade (Earle and Ericson 1977b). Obsidian, jade, and turquoise, like precious stones in a geography enriched with mining minerals, and volcanic stones created human interest in the Aztec aspect of the culture. “It is expected that the high diversity of the environment, which creates a mosaic of localized raw materials and biological communities, sets the necessary preconditions for the development of exchange. Without centralized organization, these egalitarian systems were integrated by exchange between trade partners and independent sociopolitical units” (Ericsson 1977: 111). The Uto-Aztecan mining sites were visited by the highly developed and much superior Maya economies of the post-Archaic Period—from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE. The Maya benefited from trade in precious stones. The Aztecs, as they transitioned southward and developed intensive farming activity, were also already endowed with mining and trade impetus. What the mining trade routes out of Mojave Desert and into Chaco Canyon in New Mexico suggest is the evolution of a mixed visual iconicity in all

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the Maya-Aztec spectrum of cultures. The Aztecs ultimately would establish themselves as the great imperial centers of power like the Tula, Tenochtitlan, and Xochicalco. Hence, what do the Archaic Maya-Aztec contacts imply? Maya-Aztec trade interactions resulted in an unprecedented cultural interface in the Middle Americas for the last four thousand years of its history. That interface ceased only after the coming of the Spaniards. What this suggests, even more pointedly, is that it is often impossible to extricate the Maya or Aztec elements from their integrated and overlapping visual culture of the Late Archaic and Classic Periods that stretch from about five hundred years before the time of Christ to about CE 1200. This time span represents the period following the fall of Teotihuacan and the formation of the Aztec empire under the predecessors of Moctezuma at Tenochtitlan. The advanced petroglyphs of eastern California, Baja California, the Mojave Desert, Arizona, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, and the iconography of the ‘Chichimeca’ all display asynchronous visualization. No doubt the images we see from the earliest layers of Uto-Aztecan iconography are born from responses to their environment. Take, for example, the snake-water symbol or the symbol of the projectile-point weaponry. These projectiles were large dart point weaponry made of stone and used for hunting bighorn sheep that grazed in the wild or for butchering these animals and a host of other usages. Projectile-point depictions in the rock art are combined with anthropomorphic deity-like formations on rock surfaces. Rock art evidence strongly suggests that these projectile-decorated deities represent divinities of prehistoric Uto-Aztecan groups that venerated and exhibited and venerated such a pantheon of deities in the form of these depictions. These were the same ritualists who exhibited snakes in their hands and were connected to the snake themes that were similarly ubiquitous in Maya culture. Mining resources and technology transform iconography and are themselves transformed by the process of material culture practices. The UtoAztecan Maya mining and exchange systems with precious stones reflect in the advanced stone depictions of the Aztecs. Most striking is the visible material experimentation of iconic forms and the complementary mythical texture achieved in the narratives of divinities, as in the oral ideations of the serpent-priest entity, for example. The Archaic to Classic prehistory had a tremendous impact on the interactive ritual cultures of precious stone relics and monuments that would later define both Aztec and Maya art. The quincunx motif of the Maya bacab theme, for example, appears in Little Petroglyph Canyon, California, and in numerous examples at Little Lake archaeological locations in California. Indeed, Chaco Canyon pueblos of the Southwest developed an expansive economy based on mining and adopted ritual culture mythemes from Maya glyphs and Classic serpent motifs. This is a synthetic phase in visual iconography which acquires complex

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emphases on the snake motifs evinced from a simpler iconography of the early Archaic period. This snake deity, often a snake-human conflated deity as it appears from gender attributes, later morphs into Aztec divinities carved with the precious stones. The rain-bearing snake deities are visually and haptically conditioned by obsidian and jade media. A positively male semiotic for certain snake-holding or snake-master divinities are parallels to the later Quetzalcoatl motif of the Teotihuacan and other related Aztec emperors who considered themselves inheritors of their first divinehuman king, Quetzalcoatl. Using evidence of this last phase, we could say that the snake deity arose out of the hybridized Archaic hunter-gatherer Uto-Aztecans who occupied the same overlapping time frames as other maize-cultivating Aztecans of the Southern-Uto-Aztecans. Maize-cultivating Maya groups also adopted and interchanged the snake divinity symbolism with the Aztecs. Yet both Aztec-Maya interchangeable mining economies generated and sustained an architecture and spiritual iconography of precious stones. Stones were considered to have special properties and were efficacious spirit media.

400 BCE to the Fall of Tenochtitlan The most recent Aztec history is based on a maize-centric urban civilization. But the Northern-Uto-Aztecan transversal has no primal association of maize in the iconic anthropomorphs, the animal masters and flourishing spirits. There is a universally present association of snake, but not maize. The association of the snake as an exclusive element in the Archaic forager culture makes us question whether there ever was any singularly maizeiconic period in Uto-Aztecan culture, and also how the maize may have been actually introduced to these cultures in the Mesoamerican Classic periods. Maize became more important in Uto-Aztecan iconography as time went by. The Aztecs always referred to maize in their advanced Classic iconography (Washburn 2012). The Aztecs and Maya cultures of the last 2,000 years are so profoundly based on nuances of maize that the early forager snake-human iconography was practically transformed, if not fully discarded. The snake consciousness of the earlier Archaic UtoAztecan was ultimately carried over cumulatively in the impressive depictions of the Quetzalcoatl iconography and related imagery. Several aspects of this new maize iconography were conditioned by maize agriculture and thus became dominant in their mythology. In other instances, like the Tarahumara and Huichol, and the northern semiforager descendants of Uto-Aztecans referred to as chichimeca the balance is more tilted toward the snake-Tlaloc or snake-rain-god iconography (northern Mesoamerican

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frontier regions) that is again absent in the primal or Archaic forager layers of the America Southwest (Webster et al. 2006). The Uto-Aztecans split up several times, as is clearly mapped on the basis of linguistic cluster formations of similar dialect chains. While Northern-Uto-Aztecans remained a largely forager economy in the Archaic Period, the southbound migrants constituted settlement-oriented entities. The initial expression starts moving toward Mesoamerica, beyond the volcanic transversal that separates northern Mexican Aridamerica from the southern mountains of the Sierra de Sur, along the state of Guanajuato. This was the transmontane plane beyond the states of Guanajuato, Queretaro, and Hidalgo—where the Aztecs evolved and met the south-easternly embedded Mayans and the Itza. The Aztecs learned many things from the Maya, but they emerged with a snake religion centered on Quetzalcoatl, whose narrative became interwoven with dynastic heritage and imperial struggles. The Aztec emigratory movement, we now know, is symbolically described in the Codex Boturini. The migrations were extensively decoded in the visual-interpretative studies of Patrick Johansson Keraudren and Rajagopalan (Keraudren 2016; Rajagopalan 2018). The Codex also suggests that the Aztecs descended

Figure 6.4. Aztlan, the origin of Uto-Aztecans, as interpreted by Keraudren. The Codex Boturini has been considered a sourcebook for Uto-Aztecan migrations from a phase of Numic migrations in the first millennium before the Common Era. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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from the Uto-Aztecan ethnic groups of the American Southwest, which included the ancestors of the Hopi and O’odham nations of present-day United States. Evidence for the origins of the Aztecs from south and west of the American Southwest is now well documented. But what we would add is that iconographic references are found that support that history. Of course, there is first the efflorescence of a snake-master allegiance, especially a visual equivalent of the rattlesnake and the gopher snakes—indeed a whole mass of snake symbolism appears prominently in Hopi basketry, mats, sand-painting motifs, and petroglyphs (Webster et al. 2006). All of that strata are relevant to understanding Mesoamerican expressions.

Conclusion Did the history of maize-growing affect snake iconography? This is the most valuable question for understanding the evolution of iconography among the Uto-Aztecans. The two major divisions of the Uto-Aztecan ecological niche are forager and agricultural. Many theories of agricultural expansion have been proposed. It does appear to be true, however, that the iconography was affected at a time level of 4000 to 2500 BCE, when maize cultivation was carried from the south of Middle America toward the northern territorial expansions of eastern California, the Mojave Desert, and Arizona. Known in archaeological parlance as the late Archaic to Basketmaker phases in the Greater American Southwest, evidence is borne out in the imagery of the developed pre-Uto-Aztecan civilizations of the Toltecs, Tula, and the Mixtec—with the structure of the Mesoamerican pyramid. The key to dating the emergence of the pyramid formation and the three-dimensional isomorphy in artistic representations is the basic dividing line in this context. Just as there is one phase of Uto-Aztecan development through rock art iconography, the history of ceramics and basketry, and a certain knowledge of patterning techniques, the second phase is marked by the city structure, the growth of independent ProtoUto-Aztecan or Southern-Uto-Aztecan groups in locations of great power and organization. The latter are characterized by maize and snake isomorphy, which brings us close to a timeline beyond the early elemental ceramic designs toward intense sculptural expression and a corresponding surface decorativeness. We believe that this is a point of departure for UtoAztecan cultural transformations. The complexity of art was initiated at a level of agricultural growth and solidification. The culmination was already reached in the civilization of Teotihuacan, which could be considered the climactic phase of the development of sculptural iconography, which was followed by the great development of the art of the snake-deity from

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Teotihuacan and the phase of Mesoamerican history now known as the Mesoamerican Conquest Period (Hirth 2013). Perhaps the best example of post-Teotihuacan iconography are the arts of Xochicalco and Cholula. Hence, though similar elements are retained, we could suggest that the Uto-Aztecan itself is a proto-cultural form that evolved in southern Mesoamerica as a new and independent civilization with only iconic traces not so much of a past but of semiotics, which is what matters most for its cultural identity.

Chapter 7

Hunting Tool Iconography

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Classifications One of the earliest forms of ritual expression in the Uto-Aztecan spectrum were depictions of hunting tools, also known as ‘projectile-point depictions’ (Garfinkel and Pringle 2004). Stone (mostly obsidian) blades used for the atlatl and cutting and shearing activities were considered sacred by Uto-Aztecan cultures. Such tools were visually delineated and interwoven into a narrative of ritual prayers and supplications for continued sustenance. The archaic hunter would fling or ‘project’ the stone blade from the curved fixture of the atlatl to hunt animals. The stones had to be durable and incisive; they were usually made of obsidian or other conchoidally fracturing toolstone. They often derived from stone gathered from the volcanic regions intrinsic to Southern California, Nevada, and northwest Arizona: all of these regions witnessed intense geological activity over millennia. (Basgall 1989; Gilreath and Hildebrandt 1997; Hughes 1989; VanPool 2006; Whittaker 2012). Corner-notched and basal-notched projectile-point accessories are found throughout the indigenous territorial areas of the Great BasinAmerican Southwest Region, which were generally the homelands of a number of Uto-Aztecan groups. These hunting projectiles correspond to the following phases:

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[a] The Great Basin projectiles Elko, Humboldt, and Gypsum dart points range from 2000 BCE or earlier. Heizer and Baumhoff (1961) were the original identifiers of the Elko stone tools, named after the place where they were found—Elko, Nevada. [b] The Coso, Little Lake projectile points from Coso Range of Eastern California, dated from 2000 to 5000 BCE. [c] Finally, there is a group of projectiles from the Rose Springs in California and Nevada, all dating from 1 to 1,300 CE. These are bow and arrow points. Obsidian seems to be the material of choice in the making of these hunting and cutting tools, although cher and basalt are also in use in nonobsidian-intense sites, which is more aligned to human movements between the east of Texas, Midwest through Pecos, and southern Mesoamerica (Moctezuma 1982).

Hunter-Gatherer Tools Depictions Depictions of these points are found in rock art and thus represent drawings of these lithic cutting tools and blades. Such hunting tool petroglyphs, we would argue, symbolize the Uto-Aztecan belief in hunting tool divinities. The petroglyph assumes the shape of an anthropomorph: the projectile blade becomes a divinity, with a visual splay of human features like arms (indicating benediction and supplication) and relational configurations like numinous, floating feet with avian markers, all suggesting spiritual demonstration. Cutting-stone deities relate directly to snakes as they carry snakes and sinusoidal animal shapes in their hands and are interfingered with serpents within their expressions. This means that the deities carried the consciousness of death and life suggested by the snake and thus appropriated the iconographic narrative for deeper awareness of human actions with the continuity of life, success in hunting, and perhaps ideas of heroic achievement in collective values and the celebration of life. Hunting tool petroglyphs thus use a complex of visual imagery that maintains a religious structure for the Uto-Aztecans of later generations. Petroglyphs of the northern branches of Uto-Aztecans who transitioned southward from the Great Basin appear in various locations of the greater region—in California, Nevada, Texas, and Mexico (Figure 7.2). Yet these depictions also constitute an enigma, one that invites certain conjectures. They are concentrated in that specific geothermally evolved volcanic basin territory and are rarely visible outside the range, except for

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Figure 7.1. Projectile points (series). Lake Mojave (a, b), Pinto (c, d, e), Gypsum Cave (f ), Elko (g, h). A cultural resource management plan for the Fossil Falls–Little Lake locality. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

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Figure 7.2. A sample projectile-point petroglyph characteristic of forager ritual motifs. Sheep Canyon, Coso Range, California. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

some strong recurrences across Nuevo Leon, on the western flanks of the Sierra Madre Oriental. These depictions incorporate ritualized modifications or additions to the basic shape of the projectile blade with which animals were hunted (Figure 7.8). The enigma of these localized manifests invites us to believe that the anthropomorphic marker-remnants were made for a forager diaspora that once inhabited the region and believed in the same transcendent divinities and natural blessings as the rest of the vast Uto-Aztecan cultures. These rock art features also point to the presence of specific hunting tools and related forager culture and cosmology. We thus suggest a visual cartography of two layers. It is possible that there are two phases in the evolution of this iconography of projectiles and hunting accessories. First, there is a range of depictions that are simpler and more easily referenced in material culture context. The projectile depictions of this phase are less complicated and nuanced—and have basic or elementary snake-like associations. This body of depictions is concentrated along the eastern flanks of the Sierra

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Figure 7.3. Snake association of projectile icons. Sheep Canyon, Coso Range. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

Nevada. Yet there are depictions that incorporate projectile theogony into a more elaborate mythological visual framework and make them part of a more complex visual narrative. This second phase of sophisticated, narrative matrixes might have evolved much later in time when a more protracted interchange between the American Southwest tribes and the advanced Mesoamerican UtoAztecan cultures occurred. The latter included the Zapotec-Maya interactive populations of later centuries (400 CE). This process continued through the period when obsidian became a recognized source of economic prosperity in local Native history. The evidence for the rich itinerant exchange economies (of mining) between the Maya kingdoms south of Huasteca and the Mexican Caribe, and the Uto-Aztecans of the American Southwest is now well known (Clark et al. 1989; Hester 1978; Kopytoff 1986; Santley 1983; Saunders 2001).

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Figure 7. 4. Anthropomorph adorned with projectiles. Coso Range. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

Cultural Correspondences on Time Layers Realistic renderings of projectile forms are an unusual feature in prehistoric rock art sites in the United States, and have only been thoroughly documented at a handful of archeological sites in North America (Callahan 2003; Heizer and Baumhoff 1961; Keyser and Klassen 2001; Riggs 2001; Sutherland and Steed 1974; Thomas and Thomas 1972). It would be possible with further research to see exactly how actual projectiles are reflected in specific regional expressions of projectile-point petroglyphs.

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There is historical correspondence. We provide examples of such projectile artifacts and the corresponding precision with which the petroglyphs enunciate the structure of the actual objects. In Figure 7.9, we can compare a basal-notched obsidian projectile blade with a petroglyph showing conscious stylistic features. The depiction in Figure 7.7 also reveals the same

Figure 7.5. Elko Eared, Humboldt basal-notched points and Elko corner-notched projectile point with related attribute terminology. Photograph by Alan Garfinkel.

Figure 7.6. Drawings of Nevada Elko Eared and Elko corner-notched style projectile points (Thomas 1981). Drawing by authors.

106 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans Table 7.1. Iconography of the projectile-point depictions, Great Basin (Eastern California and Desert West).

Coso Range Rock Art Chronology Period Name

Approximate Age

Coso Rock Art Element Classification and Temporally Sensitive Projectile Point Associations

Paleo-Indian

11,500 BCE - 10,000 BCE

Great Basin Carved Abstract petroglyphs, (cf. Western Fluted and Concave Base (Concave Base basally-thinned points), bifaces with overshot (outrepassé) flaking, prismatic blades, and polyhedral cores.

Mojave

10,000 BCE - 7,000 BCE

Great Basin Carved Abstract petroglyphs, Western Stemmed points (Lake Mojave, Silver Lake), Wide Stem types and Concave Base basally-Thinned points, bifaces with overshot (outrepassé) flaking; stone tool forms including limaces, crescents, and burins.

Little Lake

5,000 BCE- - 2,000 BCE

Peak period of elaborate pattern-body anthropomorphs with avian feet, early non-Coso style sheep, and atlatls. Pinto (bifurcate stemmed) Series points, limited number of dart point petroglyph images depicted. Avianhuman figures dominated by an abundance of females.

Newberry

2,000 BCE - 1 CE

Early Classic Coso Style Sheep, solid-body anthropomorphs and simple, decorated, animal-human figures (some less stylized with non-avian feet), projectile point petroglyph depictions of Humboldt and Elko Series dart points and atlatls. Continued prominence of female figures.

Haiwee

1 CE - 1,300 CE

Dogs, medicine bags, bow and arrow hunters, Late Classic Coso Style sheep (largest sheep depictions, some life size, and bighorn depicted in concentrated expressions in their greatest numbers), Rose Spring and Eastgate arrow points. Prominence of male figures.

Marana

1,300 CE - Contact

Great Basin (Numic) scratched petroglyphs. Ghost Dance polychrome paintings Late prehistoric and historic pictographs. Cottonwood and Desert Side-Notched arrow points. Owens Valley Brownware ceramics and glass trade beads. Numic immigration into the Coso Range, possible population replacement, Coso Volcanic Field largely abandoned.

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structural notch styles. Hence, we could use this kind of information to create a chronological idea of the cultural manifests—that is to say, the projectile-point depictions that abound in various locations of the Great Basin and American Southwest geography.

Symbolic Dimensions of Projectiles The age for the projectile-point petroglyphs centers on a date of 1700 BCE plus or minus 690 years (Garfinkel et al. 2010). These icons appear to have been part of a distinctive religious expression of totemic increase rites. It is interesting to note that two of the California anthropomorphic figures with correspondences to Nevada style dart points are most likely women. Also, some surprising new observations associate a feminine gender with at least two of the projectile-point glyph images. There are conjectures regarding the paradoxical relationship of male weaponry with the feminine gender (Figure 7.7). The depiction is frequently identified as a birthing scene (cf. Slifer 2000). This anthropomorph’s body form is markedly curvilinear and has rounded shoulders, which may be a symbolic indication of womanhood. Additionally, the element hanging from between its legs could be a representation of a midbirth visual communicating fertility. Another image with a similarly rounded outline is depicted in Figure 7.8. The latter is definitely an explicitly gendered female animal-human figure with avian legs and feet. The figure exhibits female-gendered attributes— the conventionalized elements identified as ‘pendent labia’ (cf. Slifer 2000, Figure 13). Yet the more important iconography is found in one outline transparent image that reflects a dress and skirt (Figure 7.9) symbolism, which is directly linked to the snake skirt motif of Uto-Aztecan iconography. As the figure shows, this is in all probability a female with a pendent skirt. Scholars have suggested that the frilled skirt configuration may also relate to a labia dentata motif which is not uncommon to the iconography of the Greater American Southwest and the Great Basin itself. The teeth pattern transmogrifies into an indented vagina; but since the projectile anthropomorph has a horizontal orientation in its lower part, it is more likely to be a correlate of the Aztec snake skirt that adorns snake-mother affinities like that of the Tonantzin or Coatlique icons of the Aztecs. There also may be a rough analog between the Uto-Aztecan deity variously known as Yahigal or Yahwera (i.e., the Master of the Animals) and the decorated torso, avian-human projectile-point figures of eastern California in the Coso Range (Garfinkel 2009). This Animal Master (or Animal Mistress?) is an ancient religious concept with shamanistic roots. It can be found through-

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Figures 7.7. Anthropomorph with the projectile head decoration. Drawing by authors.

Figure 7.8. Gendered with pendent labia. Drawing by authors.

out the world but is expressed in the immediate area of the Coso Range through the sacred narratives of two indigenous tribes of the area—the Kawaiisu and the Tubatulabal. The Animal Master/Mistress or Mother of the Animals is conceptualized as a deity who ‘owns and controls’ the animals and is responsible for their increase. Hunters were advised to engage in the correct ceremonies, and if these rituals were properly carried out with suitable reverence, they would allow the hunter to slay one of their children (Slifer 2000). Specifically, the images depicted as females with projectile points might be best understood as a Mother of the Animals icon. The projectile points would be metaphors representing hunting success. If this line of thinking is correct, and the class of projectile-point embellished figures does represent the Animal Mistress, this would also be consistent with one perspective of early Uto-Aztecan art in California and the Greater American Southwest. Although the function of much rock art is mysterious and elusive, we can be certain that fertility is one of its central themes. Images indicate a desire for successful human reproduction, and those feelings were frequently extended to request divine reassurance of the continued fertility of the earth. The ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers worldwide documents indigenous group ceremonies

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Figure 7.9. Snake skirt archetype of the Uto-Aztecan mother-earth or snake-mother deity. Drawing by authors.

Figure 7.10. Iny-43/at Parish Gorge. California. A probable Kawaiisu archetype of the mistress keeper of animals. Drawing by authors.

performed to preserve and enhance the fecundity of culturally important game animals. These increase rituals included calling out the game animal’s name, chanting melodies related to the animal, and dramatic presentations of the mythic history of the site and the animal’s association with the area. Acts of magic are also included and aimed at enhancing the prevalence of game animals in general. These visits sometimes facilitate group ceremonies including male initiation and coming-of-age rites. Hildebrandt and McGuire (2002) echo the importance of the symbolic dimension of male hunting technology and its association with the rather spectacular artistic realm of the iconography of California and the American Southwest. Hildebrandt and McGuire aver that the elaborate prestige or ‘show-off ’ behaviors of male hunters—directing their attention at big game animals (specifically large artiodactyls such as bighorn, pronghorn, and deer)—conferred preferential fitness benefits to these male hunters. If such were the case, the depiction of projectile-point images would logically be part of just such a pattern, whereby male hunters accrue power and hunting success through sympathetic magic facilitating the hunting of large game.

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Surface Obsidian, Blades, and Mining Obsidian-cutting tools belong to a semitransparent substratum in UtoAztecan cultures. The most ancient Uto-Aztecans of the Great Basin used obsidian stone tools for weaponry (hunting) and subsistence (cutting) (Hughes 2015; Parry 2014). These tools show us that they were almost co-existent with the earliest known in-migrants from the Great Basin (Moratto et al. 2018). Stone implements that the ancient Uto-Aztecans made are ample proof of the importance of stone and mining material; although organized, formalized mining is evidenced much later. Mining and processing of subterranean material was not yet important in the Paleolithic era (Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002). In any case, the subsequent Paleolithic Great Basin early Archaic Uto-Aztecans developed and utilized stone tools, in many cases employing obsidian. However, surface obsidian deposits to the west of the Great Basin and the northeastern flanks of California, or the California-Nevada border, allowed adoption of obsidian lithic technology. This process was further stressed during the mining epoch in the region, as obsidian produced from volcanic activity began to determine the use and techniques of projectiles and cutting-tool production, knives, and even mirrors; and, indeed, a commerce based on obsidian availability prospered.

The Atlatl Culture and Obsidian Links in the Greater Southwest The atlatl was the chief hunting instrument that involved the development of obsidian technology. But they were also considered objects of veneration in offerings, worship, and prayer, and symbolized individual and collective desires for success in catching and slaying game animals. The atlatl was used as a ‘catapult’ for projectiles, which would be attached to one of its ends (see catapault depiction in the catapault affiliation in Figure 7.9). The atlatl’s functional structure enables the history of the atlatl and obsidian projectile stone to be interrelated. The atlatl may not have necessitated mining and use of obsidian among the earliest itinerant foragers. Obsidian—as the geography of the Greater American Southwest reveals—was available even on the surface of locations that witnessed high volcanic activity. Mining was not necessary for getting access to this kind of surface obsidian. Surface obsidian formations could be found in places that experienced volcanic activity for a long period of time. Obsidian may be considered a semiprecious stone—its use was guided by hunting but was not restricted to that activity alone. Obsidian was thus used by later

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Aztecs to make knives, mirrors, decorative surfaces, and sculptures. Its later use as ornaments and accessories like mirrors, wearables, or even advanced weapons—as in the kind of Aztec and Maya knives and cutting blades—as Bernardo de Sahagún demonstrates in the Codices—emerged in Preclassic urbanized Toltec Aztec communities of Mexico (300 CE). Greater mastery over obsidian crafts is reflected in the Classic period of Mesoamerican archaeology between 200 BCE to 1500 CE (Figures 7.11 and 7.12) (Saunders 2001; Earle and Ericson 1977a). The Northern-UtoAztecan (Numic) sites of obsidian trade are in the eastern Mojave Desert near Halloran Springs in California, and Chaco Canyon in the Hopi nation territory, Arizona (Earle and Ericson 1977a; Findlow and Bolognese 1982). Several scholars have investigated obsidian transmission from the American Southwest to the south. Obsidian excavation is also cited as the reason for Chaco Canyon renaissance among the Preclassic Hopis (1000 BCE to 700 CE) (Duff et al. 2002). The southward migrations of the first Southern-Uto-Aztecans from Paquime and Tula, around roughly 1000 BCE to the phase of high cultural transformation of the Aztecs of Teotihuacan in the third century CE enabled and reinforced the continued use of obsidian. Obsidian material culture resurfaces in all its artistic and technological complexity among the Aztecs who built the pyramid of Teotihuacan, in the latter Preclassic phase of 300–700 CE. If obsidian was discovered in the unknown prehistorical epoch of transforming forager cultures, its full expression is visible among the late renowned obsidian material culture of the Nahua- and Mixtec-speaking Aztecans of the first millennium CE. This culture quarried its obsidian from Tehuapec in the State of Puebla in Mexico and employed obsidian resources from the volcanic Valley of Mexico itself, which was the center of the Aztec renaissance. After the first wave of the growth of surface obsidian technology among the northern hunter-gatherers of 6000 to 1000 BCE, a second wave of complex stone-cutting technologies developed among the Toltecs and Mayas. This period of optimal obsidian use produced an enhanced religious consciousness based on obsidian as a metaphor of sustenance and transcendence. The Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl’s twin half brother of darkness and destruction, carries the famous obsidian mirror. This is the best example of obsidian symbolism among the Aztecan cultures. Tezcatlipoca’s stone mirror and similar obsidian variants like the stone knife or dagger are depicted in the fifteenth and sixteenth century Codices (Figure 7.11). The dark and shining stone became a medium of entry into the consciousness of the darker side of human existence, with its conflicts, battles, sacrifices, and consciousness of the land of the dead (Saunders 2001).

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The memory of archaic Northern-Uto-Aztecan atlatl survives in rock art examples of California, Arizona (Mojave), Nevada, Nuevo Leon (Table of Spoons), and Reynosa (Mina) in Mexico.

Projectile Icons, Snake Images, Gender The representation of Tezcatlipoca, the god who holds an obsidian knife or mirror, reflects an anthropomorphic, obsidian-embracing deity (Heyden 1978; Heyden and Villaseñor 1984; De Sahagún 1981; Moctezuma 1982; Olivier 2010, 2015). The most important deity to the Aztecs, besides the snake-mother deities, was the snake-deity Tezcatlipoca, whose associations with obsidian, blood, death, darkness, and all inimical grandeur have been noted. The evidence comes from a series of Codices. The visual correspondences also associate the deity with spiritual purity and ascendance. The Codices Boturini, Borgia, and Telleriano-Ramensis are the well-known sources of the iconography of the obsidian blade or mirror-affiliated anthropomorph. What the obsidian associations indicate is that the gods or goddesses of the projectile-point glyphs were, in all probability, gods of hunting, bloodshed, and natural cyclical ideas: whether these two perceptions of the mysterious semitransparency of obsidian and the association of death through a weapon or tool for hunting also connects to the ‘inframundo,’ which is a persistent feature of the obsidian symbolism, are implicated here in a network of counter-textual references. The context of obsidian as a stone from volcanic eruptions is duly noted because the projectiles could be enhanced into weapons. The depictions of weaponry and battle are rare but not totally absent in California and the American Southwest iconography. For the later high Aztecs of Tula and Teotihuacan the obsidian knife-holding Tezcatlipoca became the god of war and a symbol of a deity who inflicted death in war.

Conclusion The Aztecs of Toltec and Tenochtitlan themselves were conscious of their hunter-gatherer past. Obsidian was in part a legacy of animal hunting and sacrifice. The entire spectrum of Proto-Uto-Aztecan material culture in the Greater American Southwest (where obsidian mining was plentiful and very characteristic of Archaic to Preclassic era trade), consisted of Aridamerican tribes—including the Pima, Chemuheuvi, Luiseño, Cora, Tubatulabal and the Huichol, the Otomi, and of course the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs of Teotihuacan—who depended for their technological needs on

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Figure 7.11. Tezcatlipoca Azul, the God of the Aztecs with the Obsidian knife. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

obsidian; it was the ideal tool of sustenance and life. The earliest visual evidence for the process is not found in Mesoamerica but in the remnant visual art of the pre-Numic Northern-Uto-Aztecans obsidian-consumers and traders who had also started to move out of the Great Basin.

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Figure 7.12. Obsidian knife, Mixtec (ca. 1200–1500 AD). Exhibit in the De Young Museum, San Francisco, California, USA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 8

The Coso Anthropomorph and Its Untold Secrets and Mysteries

R

The Inyo County Petroglyph Complex Art throughout the native world always relies on metaphor and is a tether for artifacts, ritual regalia, and symbols. The rock art of the Coso Range of Inyo County, eastern California, consists of arresting visual images and patterns that were carved during a time period from about 8000 BCE through 1000/1300 CE. The Coso Range rock art locality is well known, as it contains one of the greatest concentrations of prehistoric rock drawings in the Western hemisphere (Garfinkel et al. 2009, Garfinkel et al. 2010). Recurring geometrical patterns inside identifiable human-like shapes (or pattern-bodied anthropomorphs [PBAs]) reveal an ancient set of motifs that continue to be found in the descendant Numic peoples, like the Shoshone and their later contemporary Hopi and Huichol. The motifs may thus refer to beliefs in bighorn sheep divinity, deer divinity, or ‘spirit’ figures, or a snake-chain pattern suggestive of flowing water or a snake divinity. Finally, at the highest levels, they simulate contextual meaning, embedded in the possible ancient Uto-Aztecan cosmology, ceremony, and ritual that hinge on a deep and abiding understanding of a particular culture’s internal relational framework. The latter type of meaning is difficult to understand, and is conjectural and often understood only from ethnographic, ethnohistoric analogies and cross-cultural studies of comparative religious thought. These iconic motifs in the Coso Range have been present in the same regions for years and years, indeed even hundreds and thousands of years

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(Renfrew 1994). The Coso PBAs really are ritually indexed anthropomorphs as evinced in similar manifests in recent cultures and contexts (see Figure 8.5). Archetypical PBA trademarks for both the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, California, and the United States national rock

Figure 8.1. Coso Rock Art District, Little Petroglyph Canyon. Photo by Craig Baker at Wikimedia Commons.

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art organization, the American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA), demonstrate the long-lasting vitality of these hallmark images. PBAs emerged as principally a formalized perception of a deity or supramundane being: it may also be an adorant shaman or an animal master or mistress, a bearer of the ‘eye of god’ or nierika motif of southern Aridamerica—a theme that also coincides with axis mundi, or portal of the nether world, which is physically located under the earth. The PBA iconic motif that surged in Inyo County appears entangled with other complex figures akin to images from the Huasteca Region of Mexico, in rock art evidences and also in subsequent sculptural and relief motifs of the organized Classic period cultures of 1000 CE. They reflect human propensities of prayer and desirous calling on aspects of nature or livelihood: of rain in particular and in general a wish for a divine cornucopia.

The Animal Master Iconography of the Far West With respect to Inyo County and the Coso PBAs, sufficient documentation and analysis have been completed so that we might attempt to visually deconstruct them. The figures might best be considered semiotic assemblies (Anati 1981; Leroi-Gourhan 1982). The prehistoric Coso were predecessors of contemporary Native American Californians of Timbisha-Shoshone (a.k.a. Panamint, Koso, or Coso), Owens Valley Paiute, and Kawaiisu ethnolinguistic identification and heritage (Garfinkel 2006; Gilreath and Hildebrandt 2008; Zigmond 1977). The petroglyphs (in the Coso Range) form an abundant and distinctive complex of an estimated 100,000 examples of discreet visual diagrams. Of these PBAs, two distinctive classes of elements would have to be taken into account. First, there are abstract geometrical configurations: rectilinear Euclidean patterns and simple curvilinear contours, without specific semantic reference. However, the patterns are often re-assembled to create a recognizably human figure, which is where the geometrical motif blends into a complex gestalt of the human figure. Additional kinesic features like movement, gesticulation, and activities reveal the ‘raised arms’ motif, or ‘flight’ or ‘descent’ and further notable ‘interaction with animals.’ Human ‘representationals’ of the PBAs comprise arrays that resemble human figures and also coincidently display sympathetic action in different modalities of being and functionality. The human-like posture of these rock surface drawings may be extended here to include figurative hybrids that reflect not just human but also additional animal-like elements and organs. PBAs conflate human and animal attributes (like bird talons in place of feet) and exhibit bodily embellishments executed with abstract designs and patterns (like rings or shafts or

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outlines of hunting tools like the atlatl, or a dart-throwing board). We believe and can confidently assert that the Coso Range PBA form might be deciphered in sufficient detail to possibly make out what the artist was most likely intending.

Pre-Numic Traditions of Coso PBAs So, what do Coso PBAs represent exactly? Are they not a paradigm of far deeper and implied, imbricated metaphors, and symbols with embedded compound-meaning for the people who carved and celebrated them? The Coso depended and ritualized sheep as a savior animal (Fowler 1972; Madsen 1975; Quinlan and Woody 2003; Garfinkel et al. 2010). PreNumic groups responsible for the production of Coso rock art are those that ultimately developed in situ or were replaced or emerged as Numicaffiliated populations (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982; Garfinkel 2007; Lamb 1958; Myers 1997). Some of these Numic people include contemporary tribal groups such as the Kawaiisu and Great Basin Paiute or Shoshone. What is it about their sacred narratives, oral traditions, that these groups carried forward from their pre-Numic predecessor? Indeed, there may be no better line of study for the Coso PBA images than the context of findings provided by Campbell Grant and his associates with respect to comparisons of the Coso PBAs with the Yahwera sacred narrative traditions of the Kawaiisu and Tubatulabal of eastern California (Figure 8.2). The animal-human association with a number of homologous attributes is strongly visible among the contemporary native Kawaiisu who inhabit South Central California and reference anthropomorphic entities in their transcendental prayers and visions (McCarthy 1982; Sutton 1982; Zigmond 1977). Kawaiisu animal-human supernaturals function in a similar vein, perhaps implying similar meanings and metaphors of the largely unknown Coso people. The Kawaiisu iconography carries similar motifs: namely, a guardian or sustenance deity, a designated master/mistress of animals who is attended by a host of animal spirits and guardians that are common to the locale. The animals are divine pets, or spiritual-animal escorts of an idyllic garden. The Kawaiisu belief in a caring anthropomorphic deity or keeper of animals is exceptionally strong. Indigenous sacred narratives identify a supramundane being that appears both as a spirit-keeper figure resembling a shaman and wise ritualistic supplicator (of game and food resources) that is also regarded as a spirit that provides such gifts. This dual identity is remarkably similar to that identified for a key divinity, namely, the Huasteca Tatutsi Maxa Kwaxi, which is also recognized in

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many Aztec oral traditions much farther south (Furst 1997; Ramon 1996; Schaefer and Furst 1997; Zigmond 1977). We can identify certain formal attributes of the central Kawaiisu Yahwera figure here. There are intriguing parallels with other distant and distinctive rock art traditions. Diagrammatic PBA archetypes recur in the Dinwoody Wind River petroglyph drawings in Wyoming (Whitley 1996, 1998; Keyser and Klassen 2001; Francis and Loendorf 2002; Garfinkel 2006; Garfinkel et al. 2009; Garfinkel and Waller 2012), the Great Mural Tradition of Central Baja California, and the rock paintings of the Lower Pecos in Texas (Turpin 1990; Furst 1997; Whitley 2005). The common motif here is a full front-facing numinous figure, a therianthrope, with animal-human attributes, sometimes presenting an associated wand or staff exhibiting the heraldry of figures of prestige, prominence, and deific status. These elements and attributes predispose these figures as representations of an archetypical spiritual game-keeper symbolism of the American Southwest and beyond. The other most striking commonality is provided by the serpent-holding entity—a motif that is rudimentary in its visual appeal but whose importance cannot be overstated. The snake-holding motif survived in the Mesoamerican Aztec art of the Codices and may have been intrinsically related to aspirations for rain, reproduction, and increase.

Figure 8.2. The Kawaiisu animal master Yahwera Figure. Drawing by authors.

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Symbolic References in Coso Typologies Thus the symbolic meaning of Coso PBAs has been associated with the desert people’s oral traditions of the animal master or mistress (Hultkrantz 198; Garfinkel et al. 2009; Garfinkel and Waller 2012). The association of a master or guardian figure is reminiscent of Nurit Bird-David’s proposition that spirit-keepers in ancestral religions reproduce the notion of such masters as part of a sociological process of integrating social needs and habit (Bird-David 1999; Porr and Bell 2012). In the case of hunter-gatherers, the animal master or mistress (mother) would have acted as a guardian who provides the wild sheep and other game animals necessary for survival. Scholars have also suggested that the icon may be an early counterpart of a widespread set of figures of the animal master or mistress (Garfinkel 2009). In further support of such a line of study for the Coso PBA images are allusions to the cosmological details of the ethnohistoric Kawaiisu, Chemehuevi, and Tubatulabal (all Uto-Aztecan groups of California and the Great Basin) (Hopkins 1965; Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982; Gilreath and Hildebrandt 2008). Other areas within an even larger sphere provide us with signs that might indicate a series of distant symbolic, analogic links in a chain of potentially related icons for the prehistoric cultures of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and San Luis Potosi in North Central Mexico. We can also identify similar visual motifs among rock art clusters in Santa Catarina in Coahuila, Mexico. Some motifs would seem to anticipate the ‘spirit’ stick figures on the Boca de Potrerillos rock art of Nuevo Leon. The rock art of Mexico and Nuevo Leon has been most recently studied by Turpin, Murray, and others (Turpin 1990; Turpin and Eling 2014; Murray 2007). One can also encounter compelling parallels in the contemporary ritual symbols in Huichol and Nayar iconography (Furst 1997; MacLean 2000, 2012).The northern Mexico rock art assemblage is referenced in reviews of the Lower Pecos Region rock art and in extensive studies crafted by Schaafsma, Turpin, Boyd, and, finally, Murray in Spanish (Figure 8.5 Anthropomorphs at Caborca, Sonora) (Boyd 1996; Murray 2007; Schaafsma 1986; Turpin 1988, 1992). The rock art complexes are concentrated around the Chichimec Sea, the Rio Grande, and in the States of Coahuila and Nayarit in Mexico, as is shown in Figure 8.9. The emergence of a consistent visual typology across distant regions might not have been possible if the image had not been cognitively embedded in the conventionalized yet different mental templates of various cultures. Analysis of the various attributes of PBAs might illustrate precisely which aspects of this archetypal symbolism were transferred or even reinvented by migratory hunter-gatherer groups that transitioned toward the southern latitudes. Visual fonts on the body of

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Figure 8.3. Hohokam Caborca rock art motifs, Sonora-Arizona border, appearing to imply some sort of animal keepers and snake motifs. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

Figure 8.4. Huichol ‘eye of god’ motif. A drawing of a standard motif by authors.

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PBAs might act like morphological codes for a complex visual ethnography that also finds its way into contemporary Indigenous forms. Such connections could be evaluated against the archaeological assumption of the hypothesized autochthonous evolution of visual symbology for the Coso Region and the American Great Basin itself (Fowler 1972; Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002; Quinlan and Woody 2003). Raised Hand Adorant Indeed, the story of Coso PBAs and other animal-human conflations exhibit this paradigmatic morphology of supplication and prayer. According to Maringer, a typology of adoration is constituted by gestures of ‘raised hands’ (Maringer 1979) or “uplifted arms with spread fingers” (Maringer 1979). However, visual anthropomorphs (like Coso PBAs and related animal-human conflations) may not necessarily be supplicants or oblators, per se; their visual appearance does not provide absolute evidence that the PBAs are shamanic ‘adorants,’ as Maringer describes them to be. In the Coso Range, as is likely elsewhere, these engravings, where numerous PBAs appear to have their arms in a raised position with gestures holding an atlatl or other recognizable objects or motifs, PBAs and other such

Figure 8.5. PBA-like formations in Caborca, Sonora. Photo from NavaIsrael courtesy of Wikimedia Commons license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

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iconic forms with this adorant posture appear to us as more likely mythical or supernatural spirit-providers resembling supernatural figures such as those described in the ethnographic literature identified by Schaafsma, and Garfinkel and his colleagues (Schaafsma 1986; Garfinkel et al. 2009). The Coso PBAs wield a realistic rod or dart and similar rigid, shaft-like objects that associate them with symbols of hunting, spirit-gifting, beneficence, and increase rites (fertility), which are likely ritual themes for the Coso artisans (Bard et al. 1979:246; Garfinkel and Austin 2011; Garfinkel et al. 2009; Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002:246; Hultkrantz 1987). Second, everywhere the figurative association of these human, and sometimes gendered, forms appear with associated animal images (birds [e.g., thunderbirds and quail], bighorn sheep, snakes, dogs, deer, and chuckwallas). The PBA figures are sometimes associated with symbols of hunting (dart points, atlatls) and consumption (holding ‘wands’ that have been interpreted as atlatls, spears, digging sticks, rabbit sticks, or even the shaman’s rod of power [the poro]) with their torsos decorated with ambivalent grids, spirals, and zigzag lines appearing reminiscent, as elsewhere, of sanctificatory motifs and further revealing the animal-human figures as players in a system of relationships, not just as ‘adorants’ (Quinlan and Woody 2003; Webster et al. 2006). A third important attribute of the

Figure 8.6. These three PBA examples are typical of Coso relational symbols of animal-human figures with objects like shafts, head ornamentations, and other objects like atlatl, digging stick, and snake (associated with extreme right image), etc. Drawings by authors.

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PBAs is their full-frontal and somewhat static and rigid form that would seem to indicate a very early origin of conceptual, spiritual numinosity for the iconography of the Uto-Aztecan hunter-gathering groups that predated the later complex cultures of the Mesoamerican geography. According to Johannes Maringer, prehistoric religious iconography contains images of ‘adorants,’ indicated by gestures of supplication, prayer, oblation, or sacrifice (Maringer 1979). Maringer’s wide-ranging synthesis, covering both prehistoric and ethnographic religious symbolism from 30,000 BC to the historic era, consistently finds that the act of adoration “is always accompanied by a posture of the body . . . to express or emphasize a desire to enforce a request” (Maringer 1979: 215). The posture is often hands and arms up, frequently with palms exposed. Maringer argues that this expression belongs to many forms of religion and has existed for thousands of years. It is a means of expressing the special, transcendental relationship of people to their deity. It is variously described as homage, prayer, an act of offering, adoration, worship, supplication, reverence, imploring, request, and humble surrender. Concentric Circles Motif The California PBA feature that immediately attracts the viewer’s attention is the concentric circle ‘head’ or face pattern. In Caroline Maddock’s (2015) study, the head and face configuration of the Coso figures she identified with their concentric circle forms were overwhelmingly the most predominant and consistent template. It appears on a minimum of 153 of her sample of 450 PBA figures. Speculation on the meaning and metaphor of the concentric circle head or face results from an engagement with such circular and spiral shapes and is characteristic of many kinds of rock art. They are argued to be universal or entoptic form constants of shamanistic rock art ( Jones 2010; Garfinkel 2007). However, we also believe that there are significant and deeper levels of meaning. The Coso concentric circle face may best be understood in terms of its distinctive structure as having some specific semantic function within the visual (iconographic) scheme of PBAs. Maddock (2015) and Garfinkel and Waller (2012) observe that concentric circles are repeated features in PBAs crossculturally (Garfinkel et al. 2012). Much of the ethnographic and rock art literature indicates that these concentric circles are magical shapes used to visually delineate concurrent access points in an abstract, transcendental corridor (Garfinkel et al. 2009). These shamanistic portal corridors are mutable centers, or forms that imply a nexus connecting mythic time and space—the underworld and celestial spheres with a terrestrial plane of current space and time ( Jones 2010).

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Ethnographic parallels further suggest that this corridor-portal metaphor is precisely the functional attribute implied by the concentric circle face and concentric circle demarcations at the Kawaiisu Yahwera Kahnina (animal master’s home). This is a place described in the sacred narratives of the Kawaiisu as the entry-way, or corridor to the underworld home of the animal master (Figure 8.2). A prominent painting on stone hosts a nearly four-foot-tall figure revealing a central animal-human with avian qualities that adorns the identified entrance to the animal netherworld (Garfinkel et al. 2009; Garfinkel and Waller 2012). The rock art panel is located in Back Canyon near Caliente, in South Central California. This location is recognized in over six versions of the sacred oral narratives of contemporary Kawaiisu and hence may have some significant time depth, as evidenced by the number of versions of the Kawaiisu (Numic) oral traditions. The ‘deity’ references a specific and prominent eponym (place name) in their ethnogeography. Such notable marking for the entrance is akin to suggestions that a center or hole in the middle of concentric iconographic architecture is symbolically associated with a hole or tunnel to the underworld, as is typical of the northern Mexican Tewi art of the sipapu, the Mayan popol vuh narrations on chthonic origins, and the Huichol concentric circle sacred geometry with their ojo de dios iconography of a divine eye.

Figure 8.7. Concentric circle motif with multiple possible associations in the folklore. Photograph by Armando Perez.

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Figure 8.8. Circular knob eyes in the middle of a concentric circle shaped face is exhibited in a large number of Coso PBAs. Drawings by authors.

Notably, it is a calendrical architectural motif in the Aztec pyramid (Garfinkel et al. 2009:181; Grant et al. 1968; Hultkrantz 1961, 1987) and the pyramids of Xochicalco, where holes lead to an underground tunnel and source of water. The central point (a nexus and a type of quincunx-like icon) metaphorically stands for the entry point into a spiritual underworld in all of these instances. This center or inner pointer is therefore a cosmological reference in the cultural complex of Uto-Aztecans. This reference became an important architectural attribute in the high Aztec and Mixteca cultures of Teotihuacan as much as in the cultures that destroyed Teotihuacan and agglomerated as the powerful local cultures of the following archaeological period in the fifth to seventh centuries of the Common Era. Singular Eye Motif The innermost circle within the series of concentric circles that adorn the face or head of the PBA figures constitutes what we would assert is an eye metaphor. Maddock’s (2015) extensive discussion on the Coso PBAs finds that virtually none of these figures has ‘eyes,’ per se. However, there is a unique sensate object-hole in the concentric head structure of many Coso PBAs. It is not a diagram of a real, visual organ as such but an analogical sign or apophasic eye, literally referring to an image suggested by means of denial of an explicit sign as in the primary example of Figure 8.1. The Coso Range PBAs seem to peer at us with their concentric heads and monocular eyes, demanding our immediate attention, both flourishing and iconic. Face-recognition techniques require that both children and adult observers fix their gaze on eyes as a means of detection of the mind or the assumed intention of the person being viewed. Psychological experiments show that techniques of face recognition and animacy can improve with prolonged training and learning (Gosden 2005; Looser and Wheatley 2010:1854). Learning about faces alone does not explain how faces and eyes elicit the attention of almost any viewer: “it is presumably not the face

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itself that interests people but the mind behind it” (Looser and Wheatley 2010: 1854). Scientists generally agree that human beings are highly attuned to specific facial cues, carried largely in the eyes: they are considered the gateway to the categorical perception of life or animacy (Goren et al. 1975; Looser and Wheatley 2010; Tanaka and Farah 1993; Tomalski et al. 1988). Hence, the tipping point of animacy is best identified through the eyes (Looser and Wheatley 2010). Findings in relation to face recognition are indeed startling. If the cognitive capacities for face recognition are acquired from an infantile period, as scientific studies attest (Goren et al. 1975), presumably such a faculty enables humans to associate animacy with eyes. Thus, if the center of the patterned concentric head were a noneye feature of the Coso PBAs, this figure and its ‘face’ would not have been so visually arresting. When any normal subject tries to identify a cluster of features as a face, it takes both global parameters of the form, that is, the whole face, as well as the eyes, which are local parameters, as constitutive features (Langton et al. 2000; Looser and Wheatley 2010: 1854; Looser et al. 2013:804). Concentric shapes have an extraordinary effect on the human cognitive process, and create a shock-effect that is exploited in visual models, especially of ritual objects and in related art such as would be embodied in masks, totemic dolls, effigies, deities, and, ultimately, rock art. All of these visually impactful forms are examples of this communicative effect taken to its extreme, even toward intangible conditions in which the users of such symbols might claim to have been affected or responsive to an effect from the visual object (Sagiv and Bentin 2001: 945; Wilmer et al. 2010:5238). Again, a Coso PBA contains one powerfully suggestive eye rather than two realistic eyes; hence, such rock drawings and concentric circle images might have certain effects akin to hypnosis (Dimberg et al. 2000; Gray et al. 2007:619). Coso PBAs may be assumed to have a central eye-like feature symptomatically represented by an inner circle within a concentric circle structure—hence a means by which attention is riveted and meaning implied.

Transmission of PBAs A transmission theory refers to how the Uto-Aztecans spread out of the Great Basin coordinates to the American Southwest. The groups emerge after a post-Altithermal migration, the most important of them being the predecessors of the Shoshone as well as other candidate groups like the Hopi who merged into different areas farther east. Almost all expressions reflect variations on the quintessential PBA archetype. We may say that

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Figure 8.9. Map showing the distribution of Numic (Kawaiisu, Coso) and Takic groups in California and the Great Basin. Dotted line and arrows represent hypothesized Uto-Aztecan movements through the Sonoran Desert toward northwest Mexico and the Chichimec Sea. Drawing by authors.

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the PBAs have a modular representational structure. For example, the Hopi PBA, though similar in its simulations to all other pre-Shoshone of California, pre-Kawaiisu heritage, also reflect different local variations, for example in the representational feature of the ‘head’ configuration. The drawings of representationals in the Inyo County examples, in Wyoming archetypes, and Sonora archetype of the same idea consist of the one same module of a deity with geometrical body parts and embodiments: the chief being the head feature, and others being arms, legs, torsos with patterns, and genitalia-like protuberances. This head-like feature is repeatedly valenced as a concentric circle akin to the Mojave desert complex iconography of California and Nevada. The same head-like feature of the PBA in Hopi areas is however quadrangular—a square and the eye feature is markedly recognizable as a pair of more realistically positioned features resembling eyes on the human face.

How the Huichol Nierika Links the Greater American Southwest and Mesoamerica Considered in the larger context of the American Southwest and the Great Basin, the presence of some decidedly similar depictions is reported by Furst (1997), Garfinkel (2009), MacLean (2000), and Schaafsma (1986). The Coso legacy, if we could call it so, consists of templates that reappear in varied contexts of visual culture across a very large geographical area, reaffirming their resilience as cultural ideas. Perhaps the concentric eye shape acts like a cosmological trope for Indigenous populations of the region for several centuries at a stretch. Concentric circles are also archetypal markers of seasonal and astronomically significant events in Hopi, O’otam, and Pueblo belief systems of the American Southwest; circles with inset diagonals appear to also be indicators of the horizon, the four directions, four universal and basic elements of the universe, and a central and unitary deity (Lee Tanner 1948; Cole 1994:90; MacLean 2000). The Uto-Aztecan cultures have evidence of such an emic cultural marker. The Huichol most prominently have a concentric patterned PBAlike attribute or visual motif as one of its most important iconographic symbols, namely the nierika, whose Spanish translation is the ojo de dios or the ‘eye of god.’ Both the Huichol and Tepehuano (also called the Tewi) have very similar iconic motifs, none more important in their belief systems than the nierika, or ‘eye of god’. This ‘eye of god’ motif symbolizes in all such contiguous cultures the divine eye of an anthropomorphic deity or ancestral spirit. The nierika symbol of northern Mexican ethnic groups offer a parallel to the similar motif that appears in the early Archaic Uto-

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Aztecan Coso rock art tradition of c. 8000 BCE to CE 1000/1300 (Rogers 2010). In the California and Great Basin archetypes, the divine eye symbolism acts as an image of an eye that also connects the ritual viewer to the spirit world, acting like a hypnotic or trance forming axis mundi (Garfinkel 2006; Garfinkel et al. 2009; Garfinkel and Austin 2011; Garfinkel and Waller 2012). The same idea of an axis mundi is repeated in ] discussions centered on northern Mexican Huichol-Tepehuano ritual symbolism. The studies of Lumholtz (1900), Negrín (1975), Mountjoy (1987), and Negrín and Neurath (1996) attest to the metaphor and functional importance of the nierika motif. Moreover, the connective function of a divine eye is apparently one of the most important symbolic guides to Mesoamerican (predominantly Uto-Aztecan) belief systems. Collaborative research provides evidence for the expressions of an extensive artistic and cultural fluorescence that thrived between the southwestern fringes of the Great Basin and the cultures of Central Latin America, including the Yucatan on the Atlantic coast of Mexico, to Guatemala. Evidence of later manifestations of a divine eye motif is also abundant in Mayan cultures (Furst 2007; Milbrath 2014; Neurath 2002). Furst, following Hrdlicka’s earlier classic studies, points to an origin myth in the Tewi (also called Hewi) mythological narratives: the Tewi being intruders from the north, and of more ancient origin (like the Tepehuano), saying that the world was created out of a spider-mother goddess who came out of a hole or sipapu-like center (a Huichol word that probably refers to a hole or center through which one could pass in a metaphorical sense). This chthonic metaphor provides a striking parallel to the distant Kawaiisu creation narratives and the oral traditions relating to the Yahwera deity, in which these deities have been symbolically rendered in graphic forms with concentric circles with a center or hole in the middle (Garfinkel et al. 2009). This rendition also presupposes an underworld chthonic parallel to the idea of passage or origin, a kind of tunnel into or out of another world (Garfinkel et al. 2009; Garfinkel and Waller 2012; Hultkrantz 1981). This millennia-old symbolism of a central hole within a larger circle found in Tepehuano-Tewi groups reappears in later manifestations of the Huichol nierika (also an iconic passageway for souls to the spirit world, especially for shamanic vision questors). The center of a layer of concentric circles or concentrically patterned squares appears to consistently symbolize some kind of portal and is most specifically identified with the Huichol ‘eye of god’ motif, which is also synonymous with their metaphoric mirror symbol, through which not only do gods look down at mortals but also mortals try to look and pass through to a world of their gods (Furst 2007; Negrín 1975; Negrín and Neurath 1996). Additionally, and of import, is the psychological association of an intricate woven ritual pattern, often

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typical of woven mats, fringed moccasins, and the weaving of basketry from the Great Basin cultures. This last is recognized as an element of the body decoration of the PBA and is sometimes considered a likely object of ritual contemplation (Kitchell 2010). It is similar to the concentric Nahua and Huichol itari, which is none other than a prayer mat used for hunting rituals, and survives to this day in the fabric yarn designs among Huichols of Durango and Jalisco in northern Mexico (Kindl 2000, 2005; Lumholtz 1900; Mountjoy 1982; Neurath 2015; MacLean 2000).

Conclusion Coso Range PBAs thus contain visual-metaphorical templates that may have been acquired and transmitted by migrations or even distant connections of trading and interaction. Perhaps the most distinguished of them is the concentric center or hole pattern, which tends to prefigure an eye motif for a larger and diverse animal-human complex. Our Coso-based research of the PBA template supports the idea that the concentrics are perhaps universal templates in Mesoamerican iconography, and may reappear as the nierika, known as the ‘eye of god.’ These patterns appear to have existed within the system of sacralization and memorabilia and are recirculated through multiple generations of socially connected and ritually organized cultures.

Chapter 9

The Circular Snake of Time

R

The snake symbolizes time. How this symbolism was visually constructed is evident in how the Aztec temples were constructed with orientations of the snake icon, especially in the more advanced urban architectures of the kind that we find in Tula, which was the heart of the Toltec civilization (or the pre-Aztec civilization, to be precise, of Tula or Tollan of 200 CE). The Toltec architectures of Tula were conceived in terms of an art that was embedded in the Uto-Aztecan consciousness for several centuries and, indeed, millennia—one founded in the initial hunter-gatherer placements of rock art panels that were spatiotemporally oriented to face the sun and contain indices toward solar trajectories. The subliminal information of the solar calendar was transposed onto the orientations of the totemic installations of the atlantes, or sun warriors, of the pyramids of Tula. The snake reappears as a death-dealing agency as it is perceived through death and rebirth in the cyclical journey of the soul. Yet the snake symbolizes not one specific idea. The snake’s symbolic presence in the architecture, like its antecedents in rock art reliefs, associates visual depictions with death and transition, and natural and supernatural binaries in the cosmos. The snake was thus juxtaposed to the sun at its zenith, within an architecture of spaces that created a total sense of time that is alive, transitory, and transcendental at the same moment. Uto-Aztecans thus represented a spiritual epistemology of time through the snake’s mortifying presence. On the first level, therefore, the snake becomes a symbol of death. The snake’s overwhelming appearance would then set up the spirit’s alignment to astral configuration, both as it lived its life in the mortal world and to the spirit’s future in the celestial world.

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Uto-Aztecans depicted the journey of the soul in the afterworld and described precisely how the soul transitions through diurnal and nocturnal conditions created by the movement of celestial bodies. The placement of stars and the moon, the northern star or Venus, represent a trajectory for the soul’s temporal experiences and its final, eschatological arrival and experiences at the celestial world. Perhaps the best way to understand Aztec religious consciousness is to empathize with their shamanic intercessors who would intuit through the life of nature, and spirits, and travel through a spiritual medium. Our conversation with shamanic intellectuals demonstrate that the Aztec religion is based on a mystical, pantheistic vision, in which one spiritual continuity connects and actualizes itself through discrete elements in an interconnected universe. The religion could be understood only in terms of an immersive experience of the practicing subject. An ontological pluralism is ingrained into that system: an Aztec shaman would consider all things sacred and would believe in the living and emotive reality of attendant divine beings for those objects. Arnold’s (1999) approach to the Aztec-Maya religious cosmovision points precisely to this esoteric chronology of the soul through its temporal death in the real world. Like other great pluralistic theogonies and ancestral religions of the world, the Aztecs believed in spiritual pluralism and personal faith beings, much like Shintoism or Hinduism (Maffie 2014; Laack 2019a, 2019b). In contrast to focusing only on what Laack calls the ‘material culture expressions’ of the Aztec religion, our analysis enables empathy with past and existing Aztecan (a.k.a. Nahua) religious practices. The Uto-Aztecans were believers in a transcendent state that counterfactually posited its objectivity against a mortal world. Thus, the symbol of Quetzalcoatl is polyvalent in nature, and refers to spiritual moments in a guided perception of events and objects in the world, and beyond. Quetzalcoatl is a cognate for death, not as negation, but as temporal and supra-sensory transcendence (Séjourné 1957, 1959). The Aztec visual appropriation of the iconic snake demonstrates that the snake’s terror and divinity are psychic provocations for entry into spiritualist sciences and knowledge. Quetzalcoatl is a shamanistic icon for a guide to activities that include trade, art, and creativity, and finally an animate tool of divine knowledge in all its visible purity. Correspondingly, the snake reappears as a timeless and flexible visual trope on all levels of power and social existence.

The Astral Snake of Timbisha-Shoshone-Hopi We may thus refer to interesting parallels in the snake symbolism of the earlier strata with the snake symbolism of the Toltec. The snake appears in

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the rock art substratum, which in all probability predates sedentary pro-collective and pro-hierarchical narrative practices. The most remarkable appearance is in the Mojave Desert, on the eastern skirt of Sierra Nevada dry lowlands and desert rock art but also along the Hopi nation cultures. But the snake pattern, and the classic chain-gridlock pattern so common to overlapping Hopi-Timbisha-Shoshone iconography, marks the first signs of the snake’s initial or incipient appearance in an astronomical context. There are either direct or indirect, attached or separated, projections of snakes, with cartographic orientations. This kind of symbolically overlapping iconicity is a very well-established method of rock art makers. Indeed, this method may be characterized as a process of metaphorical synthesis. In the Hopi social world, sun watchers were important, which seems to have been synchronic with the presence of shaman watchers of the sunrise ceremony. Winter solstice was more important because it was a time in which the world had to be re-initiated. One way of appropriating the sun’s life-giving energies for the Hopi sun ritual observers was to produce a light dagger. They had caves or rock shelters where they would open up apertures so that the light came up and bisected a particular image to demonstrate the power of the sun. Examples abound in architectural formations of the California Chumas and the Gabrileaño (the latter alone is identified as Uto-Aztecan speaking). The other way to mark astronomical events would be to depict a phenomenon through a formatted painting. If one stood at the front of the painting, it would reveal a point in the horizon. Such practice is prominent in the arts of the Tubatulabal. The sun stops literally on the peak of a rock that hosts a painted surface. Another way this is done is when cave dwellers would look out of a cave and the vision would intersect with a solstice so that the sun could be seen on a notch. The whole charting was done through the horizon with reference to sun rise and the trajectory of the sun following through the sky during the entire time of the diurnal and nocturnal movements. The rattlesnake would be drawn initiating from the starting steps of the pyramids, and these ideas were aligned with imagined movement of the snakes of the pyramids. In Baja California, the snake shows up in a similar way across the San Francisco rock art templates. A very large figure of the snake in the central Great Mural of non-Uto-Aztecan Cochimi also demonstrates the same correspondence between the iconography and the horizon elements. We would broadly show that this kind of connection is implicit in the earlier models and comes out elaborately in the Codices. This visual tracing of the earth’s cosmic or astronomical coordinates is visible in the Hopi kiva or a Mojave anthropomorph with a concentric head-like appearance, and indicators of directions embedded in four corners of two diametrically distinc-

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Figure 9.1. The bird snake visual metaphor at Tula, an example of astronomical positioning of relief features on architecture. Image courtesy of CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).

tive ends of that circle. The snake in early hunter-gatherer phases may be a symbol of death or divinity: in Tula, it introduces cosmic polarity, the difference and recycling metaphors of night and day, death and life, departure and rebirth, all symbolized respectively by Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl.

Anthropomorphic Circlism So, how were the earliest ancestral Uto-Aztecan looking at this cosmic canvas: the stars, moon, and sun, and the constellations that were all set against the entire breadth of galactic systems? The starting point of the Uto-Aztecan mythology is the perception that the sky is a system of movements, an animated continuum that consumes time and finitude. It is built around the empirical perception of a cyclical continuum of time. The mythology of the Mixtecs and Aztecs refer to what we call ‘cosmological cyclism,’ an idea that derives precisely from the depths of this visual reference to the horizon and the astronomical chart. The cosmological idea of concentrically revolving galactic bodies, planets, and the sun and moon, through multiple longitudinally parallel circles and through different times of the year were represented by the Aztecs in a single metaphor of a cosmic snake circle. The basic Uto-Aztecan visual metaphor of the circle—a

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geometrical form that enables humans to visualize concentrically parallel movements in which the eye is led along the arc toward a zenith, and from there onward toward a horizon and then down to a nadir and then again through a reverse movement up toward and back to the zenith. This circularism explains the congruity that the Aztecs perceived in the image of a circle that joined the four coordinates with repetitive circular-parabolic movement. The Aztecan imagination is uniquely poised to explain this circle-cycle of creation. The one typical aspect of iconography is therefore this circle theme (and also the quincunx)—also a direct response to the canopy of the parallel transitional visible universe and time. Again, the transition from the forager to the sedentary forms of representations marked a practical (though not thematic) distinction in the approach to iconicity. Hence forager and non-maize ethnicities contain very elemental circlism. We can start by identifying a series of circlistic motifs from the anthropomorphism of forager cultures—and even within the Northern-Uto-Aztecan and adjacent, especially Hopi, cultural manifests. Basic circlistic types are all typically prefigured with the ‘head’ or frontal face motif and do not always have ocular projections, or eyes, ears, or any other facial character, although perhaps in most cases these frontal head projections—as they appear on the rock surface—are accompanied by pendants (feathers, stones). Decorations like an ear-ring adornment and feather are two visual motifs in particular that gender the anthropomorphic circle. In other cases, gendering is not so straightforwardly evident on the motif of cardinal directions. Most northern predecessors of the anthropomorphic cyclical representations stand out in a theater of cosmic movements, and are oriented to the movement of the sun—rather than the moon. The movement of sunrise depends on the axial position of the sun in the east-to-west horizon. The horizon astronomy pinpoints toward the PBA motif in Inyo, Mojave Desert, and Nevada petroglyphs with the equinoxial position of the sun. If the metaphor of this placement is extended, the positionality suggests that dualism and synergy are at work in the human respondent’s view of the image. The special care with which much of the horizon’s astronomical anthropomorphs are chosen by the shamanic iconographers reflects a strong mathematical adherence to this belief system. As we move more toward the Aridamerican expressions of anthropomorphs, we begin to realize the primal importance of horizon iconicity. The diamond-shaped cardinal quadrant of the Huichol is another example in the same series. The nierika motif is demonstrably not just a quadrant with four directions but also incorporates a center, like a concentric circle motif—and really carries the same message forward. The Wixarika narra-

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Figure 9.2. The Hopi basketry pattern. Oraibi Mother with baby in cradleboard. The J. Paul Getty Museum (description). Photographer: A. C. Vroman (American, 1856– 1916). Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984.

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Figure 9.3. The Coso PBA body head with calendrical ornamental marks in cardinal directions that anticipate the calendrical marks on the concentric circle motif in the Codex Borgia. Drawing by authors from original photography.

tives of the Huichol, which comes down as an important southern aspect myth of the Uto-Aztecan groups, represent a concentric horizon cosmology indicating cardinal directions on a kind of symbolical geographical map (MacLean 2000; Neurath 1996; Preuss 1996).

Cosmic Time, Circle, and Quadrant Yet, horizon astronomy only alerts us to the cosmic time sense, be it forager horizon astronomy or the more developed material culture expressions of Huichol notion of sacred land and directions in space. Yet the development of this astronomical component is integral to the circlist motif, and the oriented circle or quadrant iconography is far-reaching and evolves into the great, high-complex astronomical projections of the Aztecs of Classical Teotihuacan culture. The Uto-Aztecan iconography is highly dependent on time-consciousness, and intuitive representation of cosmic time as opposed to mere diurnal or quotidian perception of time, which defines its

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cultural belief span. Evidence of this claim is to be found in the Codices of the Mixtecan and Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs. The iconography of the Codices is built on the oriented quadrant theme—the codex iconography especially of the Codex Borgia and Boturini, and also the Codex Fejervary-Mayer are important in this regard (Milbrath 1995, 2007; 2014). This is a key thematic component carried over from forager iconography and the material cultural evidence of Tarahumara and Huichol sacred artifacts to the Postclassic Codices written by Nahuatl and Spanish scribes. What the Codex iconography reveals is not so much a mythological narrative. The Codices are also almanacs (Kendall 1992; Sharpe 2014; Townsend 1979), and each point in the representations are projections (or anticipations) of moments or experiences in astronomical time. Hence, these circular time predictions would act as indices of ritual and prayer. The oriented quadrant theme was perhaps made all the more indispensable by the growing material complexity and advancement of Aztec political organization and the accumulation and management of historical information, lineage politics, and the appropriation and consequences of decisions based on power and commandment. All this advancement in universal time iconicity was therefore associated with the complex, ritualistic, politically expedient strategies of control and acquisitiveness that enabled the perpetuation of power and lines of royalty among a small cluster or elite within the Aztec population.

Figure 9.4. Moctezuma’s stone at Tizoc. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons License 3.0.

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Figure 9.5. The cosmic Disk at Chalcok. Sculpture representing the market glyph or tianquiztli. These objects were fixed on small platforms within the markets in the area devoted to the worship of the god of markets and fairs. Drawing by authors.

The emergence of fiercer natural and power-broker deities is evidence of this mentality. Consider for example Itztli, a deity represented in several Codices, especially Codex Borgia, where she is depicted as the goddess of obsidian, attended by snakes, a motif that transforms out of the obsidian projectile-headed icons of Numic (i.e., Shoshone) expressions we have studied from the Nevada region. The same motif recurs in the visually detailed image of Huitzilopochtli, an icon of primary interest in the iconography of the Codices, often pitted against the supreme snake-deity of the feathered or plumed snake. Huitzilopochtli demands blood sacrifice and cannibalistic appeasement. Both deities, Itztli and Huizilopochtli, are suggestive of cosmic circularity and the theme of return of the same (repetitive) elements in human affairs, most significantly death and birth.

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The Ritual Quadrant in Codex Borgia The whole idea of the Hopi kiva with its concentric architecture, the Huichol nierika depicting the four directions across the Huasteca geography around the Rio Grande de Santiago-Chapala water complex, the grand quadrant iconography of the Codices Borgia and the Codex FejervaryMayer, carries a similar template of Uto-Aztecan cosmic time. A regenerative faith was symbolized. This faith was realized in the belief that the nature of rebirth would also propitiate all rituals and collective desires for food, sustenance, fertility, and power. The same function performed by the nierika is repeated in the Borgia cartography with the cosmic-oriented iconography that represents the cardinal directions. A large concentric circle motif contains this symbolism and metaphor at its heart, like an axis mundi on which the dramatic actions revolve (Figure 9.5). The Codex Borgia appears to have a divinatory manuscript format that would have been used by the Nahuas for prophecy (among other matters). Prediction had an important role to play in the history of the ascendancy and diffusion of political power in the Mesoamerican Classic period religions, as is evident in the circular stone structure at Tizoc, which is commemorative of Moctezuma’s career as a ruler (Milbrath 1995, 2007). What the Tizoc stone reflects are the number of days: it is undoubtedly a calendrical sequence. The meaning attributed to the number of similar objects, the days on a calendar—marked in red and containing microcosmic references aided by smaller concentric inset circles. Scholars such Kendall (1992), Townsend (1979) and later Milbrath (2007) attempted to solve the ‘meaning’ of the Codex Borgia. Their research led to an emphasis on the ‘volatiles’—the floating objects. Hence, the circle encompassing the four directions can only be interpreted in terms of the volatile symbols that float around this main circle. The volatiles are depictions of decapitated heads or features of certain birds, especially the blue and green hummingbirds, the quail, owl, eagle, and turkey (Kendall 1992). As such, they prefigure parts or moments of a chronological scale. Another suggestion is that these volatile time parts, represented by body parts of avian animals, indicate definitive positions of constellations and planetary bodies. The symbolism must have been valorized after centuries of observation, contemplation, and analysis of how the cosmic canvas evolved in time, and how events in the world could be related or predicted by being based on those positions of the volatiles. The Borgia volatile almanac thus symbolizes time and the moments that give meaning to certain human actions so rituals and sacrifices could be performed. At the center of this icon (Figure 9.6) are the symmetrically arranged snakes who are believed to be giving birth to the other reptilian forms within the circle. These are possible sym-

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Figure 9.6. Codex Borgia, page 9. Directional almanacs, each cardinal direction representing four deities (Tlaloc, Xipe Totec, an unidentified Mixtec god, and Mixcoatl). This directional almanac is related to death, associated with four deities in different directions. The scheme functioned as a means of prophecy about death and thus entry through a ludic portal. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

bols of origin or a plenum out of which life is born. The snakes themselves are intertwined in the manner of the Quetzacoatl-Ehecatl motif that reappears in other important Codices. The latter is a center of creativity or creation itself as a cosmic process in which more than several dimensions of vitality are engaged and interactive. The other dimension of this concentric circle image is the presence of four spirit-like deities at the four corners that contain the recurrent subdivisional marks of the circle. Thus, diurnality of the calendar occurs as a phenomenon conditioned by the spirits that come out of the cardinal directions. The details of the meaning inherent in this almanac are quite impossible to discern and can only be conjectured,

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given the historical remoteness of the subjects represented. It is simply not possible to fully decipher the Codices. Yet the basic motifs are there and succeed in communicating the importance of time and spiritual entry (Aveni 1999). Cosmic cycles were essential in the Uto-Aztecan imagination. Ethnographic analysis has revealed this same penchant and method of intuitive circular entry into the world (Castañeda 2019). The ethnographic reports on the NUA subgroups, like the Timbisha-Shoshone and the Yaquis of the Greater American Southwest, show that the Uto-Aztecan imagination was a combined intuitive-mathematical tool. The Uto-Aztecans tended to connect the living beings of the world to their destiny, and the prophetic knowledge of time could help them infer how the future would unfold. Thus, this time sense appears as a micropolitical strategy for Uto-Aztecans.

Figure 9.7. Codex Borgia, page 30 repeats the four cardinal directions and a center labeling the creation of the sun theme. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Indeed, this time sense of the need for ritual at the right astral moment of any sacrifice of appeasement is one of the central precepts, or requirements for peace, prosperity, and increase of life.

The Codex Fejervary-Mayer Quadrant of Tezcatlipoca The most intricate iconographic counterpart of the oriented quadrant motif in the iconography of the Uto-Aztecans can be recognized as a trans-historical journey culminating in the complex heights of referentiality. Reference to detailed information on cosmic and spiritually significant perceptions was incorporated by the Nahuatl scribes. The Maya counterparts are probably most compelling in the quadrant image of the Codex Fejervary-Mayer. This image helps explain why the notion of the four coordinates is important for the myth inscribed in the center—again, that of

Figure 9.8. Codex Fejervary-Mayer, page 1. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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the creation of the sun that symbolized a kind of beginning on differing time scales: diurnal, millennial, and cosmic. The Aztec and Maya calendars have a different calendrical structure but were both very advanced. In all the variations of calendrical counts, there are several layers of Aztecan history memorialized since the Preclassic era. These layers can be seen in the calendars, including those of the Tarascans of the northern frontier of Mesoamerica and Aridamerica. Even the elemental forager versions of the calendar always included consciousness of a cyclical cosmic frame and anticipation of time in which the ritual was addressed or recommended (cf. the encapsulated cross of the Mojave Desert Uto-Aztecan foragers).

Conclusion The ‘fifth sun’ motif (or ‘creation’ of sun motif ) depicts the Uto-Aztecan obsession with the rebirthing order, harmony, and promise or seed of time—which assures the human being of a dream of the cornucopia. The template for this ancient ‘fifth sun’ myth was instilled in the Uto-Aztecan imagination at a time in which the Uto-Aztecans had started to accumulate information about cosmic entities and cosmic cycles of time through the coordinates at the center of the quadrant divisions. The temporal configurations would be repeated and, as such, produce the same effects on human existence and history from time to time. This process could only have been facilitated by a series of reflections and knowledge gathering. The truth of the assertions that informed the early calendar and cosmic templates could have originated in a period that was not as affected by transitions as was the later period of Uto-Aztecan high civilization. Thus, the NUA forager iconography only contains the rudimentary visual template that arrived at such ineffable complexity in the arts of the Codices.

Chapter 10

Outlier Indices in Aztec Icons

R

Introduction to Early Hunter-Gatherer Icons Eastern California, Nevada, and Arizona petroglyph contexts have these rather ancient and remarkable Uto-Aztecan visual mythemes supporting models that favor an active interchange between rock-art culture and Mesoamerican high-cultural expressions (Sugiyama et al. 2000). The effects may have been caused by the travels of itinerant trade groups (pochteca) whose trade consisted of precious stones and later metal, among other objects (Hopkins 1965; Mabry et al. 2008; Saunders 2001, 2001; Sugiyama 2000; Taube 1986; Watson 2010). A snake-woman religious icon in NUA derivative groups has distant ties and appears to prefigure the Mesoamerican lunar-snake complex in which a female mistress deity appears across vast geographical spaces. This connectivity spans the range of territorial extensions of Uto-Aztecan icons. Perhaps we can explore and see why similar motifs across spaces so geographically distant from each other might still demonstrate such a tethered engagement. Bolstering this contention is a specific, yet microcosmic version of a Southern California Coso Range rock-art panel (Figure 1). Hence we call it an outlier panel outside of the Mesoamerican iconographic systems. This panel compels us to believe that there is a visual shorthand, representing an antecedent picture akin to the Mesoamerican oral tradition of the five-pilgrim sky-bearers creating the ‘fifth sun.’

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Figure 10.1a. “Creation of the Sun Panel,” Lunar Goddess with five primordial pilgrims, sky bearers, raising the heavens to create the sun in the cosmos—lifting up the sky with “clouds.” Little Petroglyph Canyon, Coso Range, California. Photo by Alan Garfinkel.

Figure 10.1b. Creating the Sun Panel with the five-pilgrim sky-bearers and the lunar goddess in the Coso Range, southwestern Great Basin, Little Petroglyph Canyon, China Lake, California. Drawing by authors.

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Here, as shown in Figure 10.1b, in its center, the rock-art panel includes the classic motif of a lunar, earth-mother, goddess accompanied by serpents. The distinctive Mesoamerican creation story reflected in this quincunx panel of five deities is historically attested in the southern, more politically organized complex culture mythology of both Huichol and Aztec narrative traditions (cf. Boyd 2016; Furst and Anguiano 1976). A far northern expression supports the centrality of such an earth-mother, avian, serpent-themed figure for a forager culture, just as is recognized for Uto-Aztecan Mesoamericans who were organized agriculturalists. The ethnographic data would hint at a possible interconnecting effect from Mesoamerica into the American Southwest that may have been possible because of trade route connections from Mesoamerica/Huasteca/Huichol territories via the Mojave Desert. One of the most puzzling questions about Coso-Mojave rock art in those similar to the panel shown in Figure 10.1a, which is part of the largest concentration of rock art in the Western Hemisphere, is the difficulty of identifying the ethnolinguistic affiliation of the people who made them. Above all, the quest for the location of a panel such as this (i.e., Figures 10.1a and b) raises more questions than it answers. For example, the panel, with very peripheral appearance and dimensions, ap-

Figure 10.2. Map showing centers of trade in precious stones. Hence, jade may have been mined and carried northward from Chichen-Itza in the peninsular regions of the Gulf of Mexico. Turquoise was mined in Mojave and Chaco Arizona and brought across through the south. Drawing by authors.

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pears close to the great Coso rock-art complex in the western fringes of the Sierra Nevada. Yet, the relationship of this panel to its immediately surrounding rock-art cluster in the Cosos is far less obvious. A Mesoamerican prototype that is commonly visible in the Codices (the Codex Florentine, for example, has several similar snake-held motifs) is located at least 2,000 miles north of ethnic manifests that use this prototype more profusely in their cultures and most significantly in the later Classic and Epiclassic (700 CE) era of very recent pre-Columbian histories of the region (Ringle 1998). This panel, only recently discovered, invites us to consider the question as to who may have made it. What is the reason for its appearance, and what might have been the belief system shared by its makers in carrying a symbol of such significance outward to a culture typically identified as the historic provenance for the visual motif ? What is unbelievable is that historic or contemporary ethnography and ancient iconography separated so greatly, both temporally and spatially, can still intersect. It has been noted that even with respect to thousands of years and thousands of miles there is commonality and an enduring shared symbolic language for the iconicity of the Great Basin, American Southwest, and Mesoamerican cultures (Boyd 2003; Furst and Anguiano 1976; Schaafsma 1999).

Little Petroglyph Canyon Analog What we see in this piece from the Little Petroglyph Canyon is, therefore, a visual analog of the Uto-Aztecan earth-moon goddess etched on a triangular boulder panel. The panel is located in the middle of the canyon on a descending western bench above the central drainage within the canyon. The rock-art panel is, more specifically, 350 yards from where the canyon daylights and ascends to the ground surface of the valley floor. The rock canvas is an extensively desert-varnished basalt boulder 60 cm (centimeters) from base to apex. The boulder sits astride a 45° slope and is below and just east of a horizontally disposed panel of a single bighorn. The panel is not prominent and is difficult (to nearly impossible) to see in bright, unshaded sunlight and can best be viewed with considerable cloud cover or with the aid of a filtered camera lens. The desert varnish reintegration process has faded the original images but they can be clearly recognized in postprocessed photographs and images employing D-stretch photographic aids (Figures 10.1a). The identification of the panel is a discovery in itself, of largely unnoticed evidence of what appears to be a standardized ‘moon’ goddess (earth-mother) Coso mytheme. The panel is oriented just south of a true easterly orientation and its direction is precisely aligned

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with a prominent hillock across the canyon that juts just above the margin of the reciprocal slope. There are, broadly speaking, two aspects of this lunar goddess panel at the Coso. First, the lunar goddess: ethnographically, the moon goddess motif may be surmised with reference to Nahuatl-speaking people’s, and Huichol, iconography, both as it occurs in oral Indigenous culture and in Codices. On the panel itself, the figure to the far right holds snakes in both hands, with the crescent moon and sun elements immediately below. The crescent moon superimposes and overlays a solidly filled round orb that most likely represents the sun. Second, the Five Anthropomorphs: The five figures are the presumed avatars of the primordial pilgrims who have journeyed in ancient times through the wet, cold, and dark predawn world in their quest to create the sun. The largest of the five is perhaps a figure who represents the volunteer who decided to perform a self-sacrifice to create the sun. The sun in turn is created through his efforts but is found to have not anchored itself high enough in the sky. So, the pilgrims volunteer to raise the heavens so that the sun does not burn up or melt the beings on the land. The five figural entities constitute a pentagram akin to the fiveness (quincunx) concept characteristic of ancient Uto-Aztecan cosmology as symbolic of perfection, transcendence, a complete cycle, as represented in Nahua cognates. Four of the elements symbolize points of the cardinal directions with the fifth representing a center-point, an axis mundi, and creator being. This metaphoric symbolism is based on the ancient Uto-Aztecan Huichol and Nahuatl cosmology (Codex Borgia and Codex Fejervary-Mayer). These sacred creation traditions incorporate other key narrative elements of related myth clusters. The central snake-holding goddess figure has avian legs. We note many of the related Coso animalhuman-snake figures also have avian legs and feet. Mesoamerican analogues also are so structured with avian legs and feet representing the mother of the eagle.

Pinyon Peak Analog Further, in the uplands at the highest elevations in the Coso Range, away from Little Petroglyph Canyon, is the Pinyon Peak panel. It is another related outlier motif bearer depicting two figures—both holding s-shaped snakes in both hands and exhibiting finely rendered Elko Series corner-notched dart points that adorn the heads of these snake-carrying figures (Figures 10.3a and b). The depictions of these large corner-notched Elko Series dart points have been dated in the Coso Range in a variety

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Figure 10.3a. Pinyon Creek motif. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr.

Figure 10.3b. Drawing showing details of same panel. Drawing by Bernard M. Jones, Jr.

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of ways (Lytle et al. 1988; Rogers 2010). Experimental x-ray fluorescence dating of comparable Coso projectile-point images provides three measured dates that average calibrated calendar ages of 2,600 years ca. 1750 BCE with a plus or minus sigma of 700 years (Lytle et al. 2008). If in conformity with the dating of PBAs in the Cosos (Dorn and Whitley 1984; Garfinkel 1982, 2007; Grant et al. 1968) we assume the period for the panel to be the same as other solid-bodied Coso indices, we could perhaps indicate that the date for our sky-bearer, handheld-snake divinities are from this same time stratum. The Pinyon Peak panel consists of two solid-bodied avian humans holding snakes with Elko Series dart points atop their heads. Note s-shaped snakes. Pendent labia in the rightmost figure indicate a feminine gender. Note the avian legs and feet. The two figures exhibit the analogous elements for a Coatlique-like avatar, a mother or feminine simulacrum that emerges in a forager hunting tool context with handheld-snake motifs, probably referring back to the idea of the containment of death and divinity as is ubiquitous throughout the Uto-Aztecan spectrum. The question is, how could they have been associated by the rock-art shaman with hunting tools?

Dating the Panels of East California and Nevada We cannot know for certain if a ‘conscious’ Mesoamerican motif like the sky-bearer divinities in this panel could have intruded into a system of representations more typical of Coso petroglyphs. The Little Petroglyph panel and its adjacent bighorn sheep element leads to problems in dating. The references are indeed complex for the panel. There is, in fact, a cryptogrammatical combination of layers of prehistory in the panel. It is rare to recognize such a complex layering of iconographic symbolism in the context of Coso rock art. There are few other references to the sky-bearer motifs, or handheld-snake motif, in the Coso representational rock-art compendium. In this case, however, the Little Petroglyph panel, which is small and goes just up to knee height, consists only of these six figures where all but one are solid-bodied. The solid-bodied element appears to be a prominent archetype characteristic of the Newberry Period visual expressions between 2000 to 1000 BCE (Fowler 1972; Garfinkel et al. 2010; Gilreath and Hildebrandt 2008). This sky-bearer panel has only one figure with a decorated torso and the rest are solid-bodied. Characteristics within the visual motif thus suggest that the panel belongs to the 1500 to 2000 BCE time-frame, if not earlier and is definitively aligned to the solid-bodied representational clusters, rather than to decorated-bodied imagery of an earlier period, namely 6000 BCE and after. The same applies for the

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snake divinity in Figure 10.3a and b. The solid and opaque body format is retained here as well. Both examples connect an archaic shamanic aesthetics with the grand visual displays of the Codices. Further, since the figures on the lowland panel (Figure 10.1 above) include both a single patterned body figure with five solid-bodied forms, we would surmise that the upland Little Petroglyph Canyon panel (Figure 10.3b) dates to the very earliest part of the Newberry Period during the transition from the deco-bodied anthropomorphs characteristic of the Little Lake Period (6000 BCE to 2000 BCE) to the solid-bodied figures of the Newberry (2000 BC–CE 1). We believe this sequence of styles to be temporally sensitive and hence we would hypothesize that the two divinities of Figures 10.3a and b of Little Petroglyph Canyon date this panel to the earliest centuries of the initial Newberry Period ca. 2000 BC to 1500 BC. The Newberry Period is a time associated with the peak period of petroglyph production in the Cosos. This is also known as the Middle Archaic Period—a time that McGuire and Hildebrandt note as appearing during the height of the ‘hunting religion’ expression (Hultkrantz 1981; Potter 2004). It is also the peak period of production of obsidian biface preforms and the extensive export of these objects as part of the Coso obsidian trans-Sierran exchange system (Ericson 1977; Gilreath and Hildebrandt 1997, 2008).

Deconstructing the Symbolic Narrative Now, the sky-bearer panel appears in historic ethnographic contexts to be a depiction of the Primordial Pilgrims traveling in the dark watery world and moving in a hunting quest to slay the first cosmic deer to create peyote. Deer are certainly of significantly less import in the Coso Range. However, the iconic and indexical animal of the Cosos is of course the desert bighorn sheep, and the hunting metaphor is unequivocally the predominant theme for much of the Coso rock-art tradition. We would speculate that the largest pilgrim with a partly decorated body might have been the central sacrificial victim (as in some stories). In others, all the pilgrims are sacrificed and ultimately transformed into stars. The stars are the nighttime dwellers and fade as morning approaches, which would most evidently be an reference to the process of resurrection, reincarnation, and transmogrification as the sun dies and the moon and stars appear. There is also a discussion about the entire ‘nest’ of pilgrims being equivalent or analogized to the morning and evening star (identified as the planet Venus), which of course has a resurrection theme. The entire collection of ‘primordial pilgrims’ are said to form a cloud snake with analogies to fertility, fecundity, renewal, water, rain, and life-enhancing and life-giving properties.

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This ethnogram, while not anomalous, is certainly unusual. There are in fact more ‘story panels’ in the Cosos and Mojave Desert rock-art panels (Rogers 2010), but more often than not we see a concatenation of images of numerous sheep and other shamanistic and hunting symbols arrayed and frequently overlaid (dart foreshafts, spears, vital and bounding sheep, atlatls, shamans/hunting bags, decorated animal-human figures, shields, fringed medicine bags, armed hunters, bows and arrows, deer, dogs, quail, snakes, and mountain lions). Often these individual elements are superimposed in a confusing display that makes it rather difficult to deconstruct (cf. Maddock 2015). This sky-bearer panel is different in having no superimposition, which is somewhat unusual—especially in Little Petroglyph Canyon. Further, we know of only three other images in all of the Cosos of an anthropomorph holding two snakes—one in each hand: two such images in the Pinyon Peak panel and the one in Little Petroglyph Canyon. These are the only such images noted after a systematic and intensive review of several thousand images captured for the Coso corpus assembled in the California Rock Art Foundation Digital Archive (n = 3,165). However, numerous depictions of sun symbols, associated with stars and ladders, are seen throughout Little Petroglyph Canyon. There are also hundreds of solid-bodied and deco-bodied animal-human figures throughout the Cosos. Grant (1968) identified more than 700 of the decorated figures for the Coso Region itself, and the Maddock study (2015) sketched 450 in three major canyons. The fundamental paradox about this riveting petroglyph set from Pinyon Creek and the Little Petroglyph Canyon is that it is only indirectly related to the bighorn sheep iconography common to Coso, yet it is in the same physical location. However, more detailed consideration of the analogues of the Creation of the Sun narrative provide tentative clues to a more inclusive deconstruction of the panel and an underlying theme of predominant animal ceremonialism in the Coso-Mojave art complex.

The Sun and Moon Symbology So we are naturally inclined to ponder: are these figures in the Little Petroglyph panel a northern version of the Mesoamerican Creation narratives? The necessity of the sky bearers (we see five of them in the panel) to hold the sky from falling are all symbolized in Mesoamerican mythology in terms of the mutable symbolism of their energies and the ushering in of dawn. Behind this cosmic setting, the middle part of the panel gets its order with the presence of the universal mother-goddess motif. This gendered icon indeed has various identifiers and names, such as Tonantzin, Coatlique,

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and other identities, by the Aztecs and is considered the primordial keeper and provider. This is a divinity with a handheld-snake symbol of a possible Proto-Uto-Aztecan snake mother-earth goddess. Sun and moon are two classes of spirit-like divinities for the historic Numic (Great Basin Paiute and Shoshone) peoples who lived in the broader Coso Region (Owens Valley Paiute, Timbisha Shoshone, and Kawaiisu) (Vander 1997). Sun and Moon are also spirit beings that help shamans. The creator god in certain Numic myths is Sun and Wolf. In northern Paiute myth, as the earth began, all was water except for one island. Sun, who was a god, promised to come up and help them. Further, Hittman (2013) proposes an equivalency for Sun and God in the Numic languages. Macdonald and colleagues (2012) maintain that the Wind River Shoshone call Sun Tamapah-Sun Father. Father of the day and Father of all. The Wind River Shoshone pray to the sun and sing songs to the sun. All Numic people recognize the sun as a key source of power. Sources of power for the Indian doctor shamans were the sun, moon, thunder, winds, clouds, and stars (Vander 1997). Sun is certainly the most powerful and respected of all deities for the Numa. The Sun is addressed by ordinary people in morning prayers. Native Numic Indigenous peoples would ask Sun to take their troubles away on its trip to the waters in the west. There seems to be an equivalence here between the warmth of the sweat house and the heat of the sun. One talks to Sun in the sweat house. Eagle and other birds that enter the sweat house for the first time are told that Sun is their god. Also the sweat house and Sun are sources of cures for illness as Sun dries out the illness. There is a Numic myth in which Cottontail kills Sun, resurrects Sun, and lectures Sun not to be too hot. The Ghost Dance that incorporates deep time Numic/Uto-Aztecan cosmology relates to the birth and rebirth of the sun. Sun is one of the most common manifestations of Thunderbird and, finally, for the Aztecs, Sun may take the shape of a snake, as much as any other simulation that corresponds to a male-impregnating metaphor. There may thus be, we propose, multiple manifestations and potential equivalencies of this being in the rock art of the Cosos. Sun has to ‘impregnate’ the earth. This ecological necessity is depicted of course in Cosos as the well-considered and common sun motif in Little Petroglyph Canyon (Figures 10.1a and b). There are in fact multiple ladders of the sun, a day and night panel featuring Sun (day), and stars on reciprocal and contiguous rock panels. There is also a crescent moon panel in Little Petroglyph Canyon. These ‘celestial’ panels are given the greatest prominence and most prestigious positioning as these compositions are prominently nested astride the rim rocks of the canyon. Further, Boyd (2016) remarks that the symbolism of the stark white character is emphasized for the lunar deity (Sahagún and Anderson 1950 bk 1:3). The latter deity is of special in-

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terest as its name derives from the Nahuatl word for limestone (tenextetl). More evidence of the sun and moon creator iconography may be found in ‘The Ladder of the Sun’ panel, Uppermost Little Petroglyph Canyon (Snake Path), Coso Range Sun and the Stars Panel (Day and Night), and the Crescent Moon Nested on the Rimrock Panel. A centrally important detail is that of the deity at the center with an s-shaped figure in hand. There is no existing ethnographic narrative for Little Petroglyph Canyon images, or for the Coso-Mojave rock art as a whole, but then what could be the basis for considering the meaning of this symbol? The combination of the basic iconographic features of sun, moon, and so forth, are all present in Little Petroglyph Canyon. These features include a handheld s-shaped snake index, probably the same index as is evident in Uto-Aztecan mythical imagery. Boyd (2016:159–161) that the s-shaped snake symbol is a key attribute of the Mesoamerican moon goddess avatar including that of the Aztec deities Cihuacoatl and Tenexxochitl. This key s-shape form can be readily distinguished on the three moon goddess avatars from the Cosos. The snake figure on the Coso Peaks is explicitly a rattlesnake as its triangular heart-shaped head clearly communicates—incorporating metaphorically death, life, and resurrection themes.

Some Rejections and Remote and Plausible Possibilities Research by O’Connell (1982), Slifer (2008), Simms (2008) and Rogers and Yohe (2020) suggests that some Proto-Uto-Aztecan language speakers migrated northward prior to 5000 years ago from Mexico. This, it is important to remember, is a period long before maize ever entered California and began being used by a very select few of Indigenous peoples— specifically the Yuman ethnolinguistic group living on the margins of the Colorado Rivers. Because there was no maize iconography in the PNUA of the north, Coso must be thought of as a very early pre-maize phase (Garfinkel 2016). A third basis of evidence comes from similarities in iconographic components discovered in Coso and some even far northern Dinwoody styles, the latter being a northern Shoshoni phenomenon (Leondorf et al. 2006). Under the circumstances, it would be safe to assume, just as Rogers and Yohe (2019) have—and our own research on linguistic prehistory provides some further supporting evidence—that Coso would necessarily be part of an ancient, deep time Uto-Aztecan heartland and might then be expected to have some connection to the corollary/descendant Mesoamerican (Huichol and Nahua) spectrum of divinities and creation/origin stories. Coso might have retained vestigial glimpses of the culture that vanished

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in and around Coso, but whose siblings living in the south flourished into a fully developed, complex southern Aztec culture over a period of 3,000 years in their new homelands. This alone explains the presence of snake iconography and its expansions in America, in a way not typically seen elsewhere in North or South America, at least not with such definitive semiotic complexity as is evident in the Uto-Aztecan groups. Perhaps these are old Coso memorials whose creations were induced by a more southern Nahuatl or Proto-Southern-Uto-Aztecan-speaking people (Moratto et al. 2018). The Coso, like the Kawaiisu or Western Shoshone, had a specific store of snake divinities and bore snake divinity similarities to other specific (possibly later) non-forager territories. This transference of symbols would have occurred at an early date when there was no maize agriculture (Zigmond 1972). Perhaps the physical manifestations of these patterns are visible in snake-wielding shamans and supra-mundane beings, animal-human beings decorated with interiors of snakes and having snake patterns over their bodies exhibited regularly in the Coso Range rock-art panels. This is a most interesting discovery and may be further validated on the basis of rock-art anthropomorphism. These anthropomorphic figures may have had an independent and prehistoric development of form and complexity rooted in the southern segments of the PSUA peoples that Mabry and his colleagues identify (Mabry et al. 2008). Hence, the explosive growth of snake divinities in Mesoamerica might have been preceded by the early rudimentary Coso expressions, which could also explain why snake divinities in Coso are akin to a ‘root image’ of a Mesoamerican counterpart.

Explanation of the Mesoamerican Outposts in the American Southwest But what is also more plausible in this case of the sky-bearer panels is to acknowledge the intricacy and thematic continuity of the motif with Mesoamerican Aztec (Nahuatl, Mixtec) and other Maya themes of the skybearer conceptualizations and sacred narratives (Spence 1945; Schaafsma 1986, 1999). This sky-bearer motif panel from the Cosos supports a connection spectrum in iconography from eastern California to the Yucatan Peninsula. The sky-bearer divinity motif is part of a consistent set of semiotics that is also manifest in the concentric circle anthropomorph motif. In Uto-Aztecan mythology, another central motif is the belief in a cycle of sustenance in which all four cardinal directions are held in space with the guardianship of the sun—the ‘fifth’ or final sun, which is the ideal natural visual symbol of a prayer format that exhibits Uto-Aztecan sha-

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manic beliefs on the cosmic inheritance of life-forms. The trajectory of the prayer format is completed in the fulfillment of the sun’s peaceful and strong guardianship, the reverence for the role it plays in holding the directions together in a cycle of harvests, fertility, and the seasons, and of course night and day. The moon and Venus are aspects of this cycle that descend or ascend. Hence, we conclude that in the Uto-Aztecan groups ranging from Coso, Tepiman, Huichol, Nahuatl, to the Mayan Quiché, the skybearer and snake motifs are all central indexical semiotic hallmarks. The snake-motif embodies the iconography of the Aztec and Classic Maya who are connected to the American Southwest via significant regalia of copper bells, macaw feathers, the rubber ball, feathers and pendants, and so on (Austin and Lujan 2005; Earle and Ericson 1977a; Ericson 1977; Hirth 2013, 2016; McGuire 2012; McGuire and Glowacki 2011).

Conclusion Research on the turquoise route and other trade has shown that the Aztec Maya influence of Mesoamerica had a profound impact on the northern basic forager and maize-growing groups of the entire Greater Southwest (Schaafsma 1999; Boyd 2016). The reasons for the unilateral civil and political achievements of Mesoamerican Uto-Aztecan people, in contradistinction to the less politically organized societies of the Southwest, is something to reckon with. The Valley of Mexico cultures, which was a product of the Aridamerican midspectrum high cultures of Paquime, the hypothetical Aztlan and Tula, had consumed the original snake iconography and transformed it into a cultural architectonic. Perhaps the only explanation for this is provided by the discrete and accumulative method of harnessing knowledge and information. The science of astronomy plays a key role in this process (Smith and Berdan 2003). The conjunction of calendrical methods with history and a predictable future, the growth and accumulation in the knowledge of farming and architecture, and the consciousness of techniques and tools as a driving force for complex and organized cultures explain why the Uto-Aztecans flourished in Mesoamerica, farther from their semidesert homeland in the Great Basin peripheries (Hirth 2013; 2016; McGuire 2012). The same potentially symbolic system may in turn have affected peripheral, less organized groups of the Greater American Southwest in ways that create momentary puzzles in the history of iconicity.

Chapter 11

Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío

R

Inchoate Icons of Fertility and Seasons Recently discovered rock arts and inscriptions of the quasi-forager Uto-Aztecans who moved to the ‘sink’ (or the ‘del Bajío’) geography illustrate a consistent pattern in depictive practice. Images comprise responses to rain and increase rituals. Pictograms and a related network of images in this fringe topography illustrate beliefs of a rain-prayer culture that continued to evolve under the influences of interconnected cultures (García 1974; Lozano-Garcia et al. 2013; Nuño 1986; Pasztory 1975; Vasquez-Castro 2019). More advanced agricultural groups that belonged to the same ethnic affiliations stimulated the rain-invoking culture that worshipped the Aztec god of rain, Tlaloc. Similar rain-invoking iconography was also visible in the forager layers of these groups and ethnicities from an earlier time. These expressions pertain to the del Bajío rock-art clusters of the Volcanic Rincon de Parangueo, the Arroyo Seco, and Tzintzuntzan petroglyph complex spread out over a three hundred square kilometer area. We suggest that a Tlaloc prototype engendered in the sink cultures of the del Bajío was a direct response of early Preclassic settlers (300 BCE and after) to changing climatic perspectives of desertification, and a search for water-abundant territories, rain, and fertility. Pictograms from the sink region of Guanajuato, Queretaro, and the adjoining state of Michoacan demonstrate how responses to climate change affect both the content and meaning of rock art in these regions. The period studied

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extends from a hypothetically stated range between 500 BCE and 1300 CE timeframe, when these figures were drawn on accessible land elevations—along sources of water, rivers, or bound-in highland lake vicinities. The American Southwest and its arid cultural counterpart in northern Mexico present a geocultural territory for Uto-Aztecan forager travelers. Kirchhoff (1943, 1954) Swadesh (1956) and Jiménez Moreno (1966) reveal how some of these groups evolved culturally in time (LozanoGarcia et al. 2013; Weigand 1992; Wright Carr 2017). At least one of these groups constituted the Aztecs themselves, who continued to arrive from regions, like Mexcaltitán in the state of Nayarit in Mexico, and settle across Hidalgo (Tula), and then in the Valley of Mexico itself (Tibón 2017). Among the other groups, the chichimecs, as they were erroneously called by Spanish settlers, were the Tarascans. The Tarascan chichimecs settled in waterabundant enclaves to construct some of the most amazing urban civilizations in the prehistory of that region. Perhaps precepts for a cultural semiotic study of these Uto-Aztecan groups are found in the Codices of Bernardino De Sahagún (1975) and others, and the scribes of the Codex Borbonicus. Above all is the Codex Boturini, in which much of the major and complex visual iconography of later periods was preserved. Retrospectively, these Codices help make sense of the outlying and inaccessible pictograms of the lesser-known forager groups that preceded the later high-culture expressions or existed as outliers in a broader geocultural spectrum. Semiotic elements of petroglyphs of the stratum are thus ideationally embedded within the specific expressions of the high urban and politically organized Aztec and Tarascan cultures. The expressions of forager chichimec groups may have been inscribed on rock surfaces on a time scale in which both forager cultures and urban civic cultures co-existed in the sink and altiplano territories of the Aridamerican frontiers. Here, we ask happened to the cultures, not merely demographically, but also as they tended to memorialize their responses toward nature, especially the natural threat to the region posed by the lack of rain and the need for better agriculture, animal increase, and fertility. The pictograms constitute a complex of symbols that is hard to understand, except as a reference to the climatological changes of the region. They constructed a system of beliefs based on the only source of their survival and most potent crisis, rain. Water scarcity threatened local fauna, deer, sheep, and flora, including maize, which was often intensively cultivated in the del Bajío sink (Grueso 2017; Mountjoy 1992). Recognition of related geoclimatic dangers like earthquakes and epidemics are also evident in the worship patterns of these groups. But most important was the concern and anxiety about rain. In fact, the lack of rain has threatened and continues to affect the desert Southwest from California and Arizona, to San Luis Potosi and the Bajío in Mexico. Aridamerica thus became the

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home to a potently rain-seeking culture. The Pacific Coast petroglyphs at Sonora and Nayarit similarly reflect the sensibilities of agricultural societies among distant and similar protolinguistic affiliations (Weigand 1992; Wright Carr 2017). If we consider the Postclassic phase of Aztec history

Figure 11.1. Vessel displaying snake rain icon Tlaloc from Templo Mayor, Mexico City. Dated to Tenochtitlan thirteenth century CE. Photo by Dennis Jervis. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0.

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(400 CE and after), we notice the same thematic concerns. Classic period iconography includes a whole panoply of gods and goddesses, like the snake icon, which is consistently associated astronomically with Venus, and icons of the sun and the moon, symbolizing cycles of destruction and harvest, or loss of harvests and death caused by extreme climatic conditions. Thematically, rain was of essence and of greatest concern for the indigenous peoples who dynamically moved for sustenance in emerging or suitable precipitation systems. This focus is even more acutely perceived for the del Bajío—how, and in what ways, are the patterns of rainfall, as understood from organic fossil histories of the period, also responsible for the origins and continuity of co-existing rain prayer cultures? Collective consciousness of rain is reflected in the depictive practices of cultures of the del Bajío ‘sink’ (García 1974). Pictograms and a related network of images in the archaeological remains of this fringe topography illustrate the wealth of material cultural achievements in Plazuelas and Arroyo Seco. Metacognitive visualization of rain consciousness is most aptly exemplified in the natal transformations of the Tlaloc symbol. Tlaloc was born in response to shifting contours of rain and the gradual desertification of a landscape. Pictograms, contemporary artifacts, and designs on perishable material expose how a rain symbol originates from apprehensions of

Figure 11.2. Map of rock-art occurrences from the del Bajío sink, south of the Aridamerican desiccated system, in the central mainland region of Mexico (based on Anzules and Morales 2008).

Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío • 163

water as a fluid, moving element into a kind of anthropomorphic metaphor of a rain harbinger and deity. The Epiclassic substratum from 900 CE to 1300 CE incorporates a transitional culture in which constituent ethnicities shifted and interacted through time and place. Chichimec foragers would reach out to river-adjoining geographies and install sacred spaces through rain symbolization. The more warrior-like organized groups and formations, like in the Plazuelos site, reveal concrete sculptural motifs of the same pre-Tlaloc entity or prototype composed of visual semiotics of rain and thunder-like impressions. As Plazuelos appeared and dissolved, it retained and memorialized the consciousness of rain and life-enhancing qualities of water. Indeed, these were archetypal zigzagging snake-water themes that also persisted among the Uto-Aztecans from the earliest and mysterious Great Basin prehistory.

Chichimec Pictography: Los Hernandez and Beyond Rock-art specimens from a painted slate-packed elevation in Los Hernandez, at the Municipio of Salamanca, comprise formations that, when deconstructed to its formal patterns, reflect elements similar to other rock-art sites in the del Bajío region, including pictogrammatic sites in the adjoining states of Queretaro, Michoacan, and Jalisco. We are looking at a pictogrammatic culture for which there is very scarce ethnographic correlation,

Figure 11.3. Los Hernandez pictogram site, Municipality of Salamanca, State of Guanajuato, Mexico. Part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, these panels seem to have pre-existed from a post-Cretaceous layer of sedimentary rocks. Photograph by Armando Perez.

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although it might be possible to search for paradigmatic elements. First, the pictograms are structurally defined by type: this is true of the more concentrated rock-art clusters in the sink topography. The style is common to (a) Hoya de Alvarez, Valle de Santiago; (b) Los Hernandez, Salamanca; (c) Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán; (d) Arroyo Seco, in the community of San Luis de la Paz, State of Guanajuato; (e) Plazuelas, Gunajuato; (f ) Cerro de Las Chichimecas, La Piedad, State of Aguascaientes, and finally, (g) Pinal de Zamorano, State of Queretaro (Viramontes et al. 2008). Although stylistically different, and linked to specific times (as is also evident from the very localized expressions), the makers of this iconography used basic representational tools. Pecking or curvilinear groovings are limited to a few places like the Las Chichimecas formations of Aguascalientes and the Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán. On the contrary, red (faded ocher) pigmented lineation interplaying with black-and-white reinforcing patterns are most ubiquitously present. The literature suggests the presence of repetitive cyclical elements in Tzintzuntzan and Las Estacas, Michoacán. Figures 11.4 (a–e) below reveal the presence of at least four elements: (a) geometricals, (b) feminine vulva formations, (c) anthropomorphs, (d) serrated serpent or water or river-like visual dynamic (Gruezo 2017; Viramontes 2008); and (e) evidence of a related fifth element of drawings pertaining to a probable calendric system (Broda 1982, 1991, 2000,2001). Recently Broda’s extensive studies on

Figure 11.4. Anthropomorphic pictograms at Los Hernandeza. (A) Geometrical calendar, (B) vulva-like formations, (C-D) anthropomorph, (E) snake-water mark, and (F) Tlaloc preconfigurations along with calendrical markings. Drawings by authors.

Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío • 165

Mesoamerican astro-calendrical visuals shed more light on how similar formations in pictograms, especially of the kind found in Los Hernandez, Municipality of Salamanca Mexico, exemplify such patterning (cf. Figures 11.4 [a–e] and Figure 11.5). Collateral evidence suggests at least four possible ethnolinguistic groups pertaining to Púrepecha-, Otomi-, and/or Nahuatl-speaking groups in the area. Tarascan/Guachichiles populated the region from an epoch ranging between the Epiclassic (900 CE) to Postclassic (1300 CE) timeframe.

Figure 11.5. Evidence of shapes from Los Hernandez, Salamanca Guanajuato, Mexico: (a) variations on calendrical markings and anthropomorphs and (b) snake-water linear formations. Photographs by Armando Perez.

166 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

They were involved in perpetual battles and conflicts over habitat. Various Aztcan-associated chichimec groups incorporated a calendrical pictorial layout for the del Bajío expressions, with diffuse but dedicated cosmovision, a defined cyclical calendar based on solar trajectories, and related fertility symbolism, expectatively of rain. A divinity associated with climatology in a form ranging from simple concentrics (including Fibonacci simulacrum) to a mature and sophisticated religion of a ‘Tlaloc-like’ rain deity or Tlaloc itself, as is evident in Las Plazuelas or in the Arroyo Seco, Victoria, in the State of Guanajuato were all included in the del Bajío sink geography typology (Figure 11.3).

Geoclimate of the Mesoamerican Frontier The del Bajío rock-art imagery is of interest to us because of the information it contains regarding an incipient Tlaloc form. Generally, climatic factors identified for the region are as follows: (a) Strong yet slow westerly trade winds slowing precipitation patterns ( Jáuregui 1995; Park et al. 2019) (b) Long arid periods producing desert-like conditions (Cook 1947; Jáuregui 1995; O’Hara and Metcalfe 1995; Park et al. 2019) (c) A landscape with some streaming channel rivers that often unexpectedly produced inundations and abrupt transitions (Martínez 1997; Vazquez-Castro et al. 2019). The del Bajío is, however, more peculiar in that it is still part of a highland elevation, creating a basin-like scooped and sunken formation on an elevated plane or ‘mesa’-like plate from volcanic shifts. The Postclassic period of 400–700 CE, after the fall of Teotihuacan and the inland transitions of frontier groups, created a mixed group culture of genetically similar peoples. These groups were thus living in an arid climate and also actively in conflict with the more organized Aztec-Teotihuacan culture of the early second millennium CE (Vasquez-Castro 2019; Park et al. 2019). Further understanding of the basic visual elements of chichimeca iconography may be based on the geographical location of the chichimec iconography. Chichimec shamans who belonged to the centralized and advanced cultures were able to use an entirely different set of techniques to represent the snake-water motif that had its origins in forager obscurity. The del Bajío rock art is confined to the coordinates between 27° N to 21° N. A peculiar aspect of the rock-art designs (Figure 11.4) is the presence of curved

Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío • 167

lines that incorporate information that may be astronomical or of count and calendar. The anthropomorphs and other animal references may be excluded from a consideration of these elements. But geometrical elements do indeed provide blocks of cognitive information and inchoate formats of resemblance with an anthropomorphic Tlaloc-like image (cf. Figures 11.5, 11.7, and 11.8). The Chichimec and Aztec legacy of such markings offers basic indications of the complex, and related and sophisticated iconography is visible in the Codices (Laylander 2010; Mountjoy 1991, 2001). The curved line has been traditionally associated with either the water or river symbol but is semiotically aligned to the snake symbol as well. The lineations add up to a tentative humanoid form, a kind of rudimentary ritual-mat anthropomorph. The same format gets a clearer anthropomorphic theogony in the Plazuelas sculptures and relief as evinced in the drawings in Figure 11.6. In general, it is assumed that agriculture developed after a period of transitions, and it should have been necessary for southbound cultures since the second century BCE to seek semiotic equivalents for rain. In view of the wealth of information on climatic fluctuations in the Bajío, it appears that the neo-volcanic axis of the region was relatively wet at the time of the foundation of Teotihuacan in ca. 200 BCE, although both precipitation and lake levels probably started to decline sometime after 300 CE (Sanders et al. 1979; Jáuregui 1995; Lachniet 2012). García (1974) reconstructs the climate coincident with the rise and fall of Teotihuacan, and the adjacent Bajío basin land. She concludes that the decline of Teotihuacan could be related, in part, to a period of intense drought starting between 700 and 750 CE (Gruezo 2017; García 1974; Jauregui Ostos 1995). Reference to this part of the geography is again necessary in order to appreciate that the zigzagging water index constitutes the generic format for a recoiling visual narrative that culminates in the human form of a thunder anthropomorph, a snake-child like anthropomorph as in the Plazuelas hints of Figure 11.6, or into a syncretic snake-human Tlaloc as in the Templo Mayor example. Water symbolism is potent among the visual triad of (a) anthropomorphs, (b) rectangular-to-geometric patterns including circles, and finally, (c) curved, bending snake-like recoiling lines of the Plazuelas sculptures. An entire list of ethnographic material points to this pattern (Mountjoy 2001; Mendiola 2005; Martínez 2010). Further, there is the presence of a geometrical ritual-mat-like pattern, including astronomical references and calendars. This pattern provides a very useful reference for the del Bajío iconography. Visual resemblances also indicate the presence of a vulva-like formation representative of the human female reproductive organ, which are simultaneously a geometrical feature

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of the kind not uncommon to the American Southwest and other parts of South-Central Mexico (Figures 11.5 and 11.6). The vulva shape is more specific and perhaps ubiquitous to the region. It is a birth or fertility symbol, and may be associated with agrarian beliefs (Figure 11.4 [a]). There are remarkable similarities in depictive elements in the rock arts of these regions, extending from the western coast petroglyphic styles of the grand Nayar, down to the Tzintzuntzan, whose late pictograms sharply resemble those of the del Bajío. All along this trajectory, a probable rain-invoking culture developed among the southbound Uto-Aztecans who confronted desiccation on a large migratory scale (200 BCE to 1400 CE).

Dating del Bajío Pictograms What, therefore, is the dateline suggested for these drawings? What possible pre-Hispanic groups are we considering for these pictograms? Location and geographical description for the Rio Laja pictograms between latitudes 20′79′′ N and 71′13′′ S indicates dating. Who drew these pictograms will remain an open-ended question, but we can try to collate the geological history of the Postclassic periods in Aridamerica, which is indicative of the large timeframe around which this art is most likely to have been made. There is no certitude about the dating of rock art in Aridamerica. But evidence shows an Epiclassic migratory period starting from ±700 CE is most likely the time frame for all similar kinds of Epiclassic to Postclassic artifacts. Long and recurrent droughts starting in 700 CE resulted in a lateral east-to-west transition of the Uto-Aztecan groups. This period was likely to experience rapid and decisive migrations of a cyclical nature and facilitated the transitions of the Tarascans and the rise of the Purépechas in this region. These were precisely the people who carried with them the memory of the snake-water anthropomorph. One of the most complicated characteristics of the proto-Aztec chichimeca migrations is the constant flux of groups and contacts, and the complex borrowings and lendings of objects and artifacts. Demographic changes in the Bajío represent a case study in the movement of ethnological groups (of the chichimeca denomination) whose rock art shows a depictive practice that grew in response to changes in human habitat and movements. While a part of that process of depictive practices depended on changes in habitus, human aggression, war, and inter-tribal rivalry played a part. The experience of movement and conflict continued until very recent Postclassic times to the late contact period for the chichimecas. Hence, the iconography of Aridamerica is a corpus of artistic practices conditioned by the

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coexistence of indigenous societies which achieved different levels of cultural sophistication in their sociopolitical organization, ways of life and ritual (García 1999; Grueso 2017). Between 350 CE and 900 CE, the populations achieved political organization, maintained a certain level of autonomy, and were linked through a network of kinship relations sharing similar cultural practices, transforming their natural environment, appropriating similar designs, and creating extensive exchange networks that allowed them to build an urban nuclei and modes of planning (Grueso 2017).

Tlaloc Index of Las Plazuelas Following Paul Kirchhoff (1943), Jiménez Moreno (1956), Weigand (1992), and Wright Carr (2017), we know of the territory for ethnic references at Las Plazuelas–adjacent archetypes of the pre-Hispanic Period (Table 11.1 and Figure 11.1). Postclassic historical maps suggest that the Plazuelas ruins point to a Tlaloc-based group of worshippers. In the Plazuelas history, Tlaloc symbolism is very potent, and even if other rock-art clusters from Table 11.1 are included in our study, there is no doubt that a Tlaloc-like formation remained a common motif for the priest-shamans who designed them. The map of chichimec migrations, initially drawn by Jiménez Moreno (1966), and developed with a detailed history by García (1999), also suggests that the del Bajío visual configurations should have developed in a consistent manner since the sixth century. The phase of interaction between migrating southbound Uto-Aztecan groups may have resulted in the architectural achievements of both groups—the complex Plazuelas (near the town of Penjamo, State of Guanajuato) and the less sophisticated but thematically similar petroglyphs of Los Hernandez (Salamanca, State of Guanajuato), including either Aztec or Oto-Palme petroglyphs of the Pinales de Zamorano hills (Queretaro). These locations all lie within a stretch of no more than 200 kilometers. They share major iconic tendencies of the period. No hypothesis regarding dates have been forwarded by Carlos Viramontes (1999), who constructed an inventory of the del Bajío rock-art complexes, which is detailed for the Arroyo Seco segment but not for the under-done, ritualistic pictogram concentrations of Los Hernandez or for those of Pinales de Zamorano. This material has allowed us to suggest that some type of contacts existed between both settlements, even if we do not know anything about political hierarchies or kinship lineages and conflicts in the del Bajío in any historical detail (Wright Carr 1999, 2017).

170 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans Table 11.1. A chart of Bajío rock-art sites related to possible groups that gave birth to the inchoate iconography of the whole region.

Rock art sites

Geographical location /states

SUA affiliated Linguistic Groups

Tierra Blanca (San Luis de la Paz)

Del Bajio / Guanajuato

Otomi, Oto-Pame Guachichiles

Los Hernandez

Del Bajio / Guanajuato

Guachichiles, Tarascan

Hoya de Alvarez

Del Bajio / Guanajuato

Guachichiles, Tarascan

Arroyo Seco

Del Bajio / Guanajuato

Otomi, Oto-Pame Guachichiles

Cerro Sombrero

Del Bajio / Guanajuato

Otomi, Oto-Pame Guachichiles

Pinales de Zamorano, Queretaro

Del Bajio / Queretaro

Ota-Pame

Tzintzuntzan, Michoacan

Mesoamerica / Michoacan

Púrepecha

Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío • 171

Figure 11.6. The Plazuelas ruins at Guanajuato, Mexico (inhabited between Classic 600 CE and 900 CE). Photograph by Armando Perez.

The ‘Chichimec’ Substratum The del Bajío, or sink, was already inhabited by contiguous groups from a much earlier period (400 BCE), especially by the Oto-Palme (Wright Carr 2017). Otopamean and Nahua-speaking cultures may have occupied the region in overlapping time frames, possibly evolving from intergroup conflict and settlement patterns. Thus, what is most evident is that the Bajío linguistic groups were both denominationally identified as living between the Otomi and the Nahua—but research reveals a Northwest (Nahua) domination. There is concrete visual evidence emanating from sites of Jalisco-Nayarit and Las Plazuelas around Penjamo, with an older settled regional presence of Otomi-speaking groups near the west of this sink— the present-day Mexico City valley. One particular element is the presence of zigzagging lines and shapes, river, or snake formations. For example, here is a representation of Tlaloc (Figures 11.7 [a and b]): The curvilineated forms symbolize an assembly of signs, a body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), and yet a conjunction of coils and recoiling features reminiscent of snakes. This snake referent, in the rock arts of Los Hernandez, Pinales Zamorano, and Tierra Blanca, indicates rudimentary syllables of an incipient or inchoate

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Figure 11.7. The Tlaloc symbol: (a) a rudimentary but powerfully suggestive anthropomorphic (curved arm feature) symbol of an ethnographic rain deity; (b) Tlaloc symbolism from Las Plazuelas, in the State of Guanajuato, Mexico. Drawings by authors.

Tlaloc-like invocation. The simultaneous and disjointed snake-water combinations show that the makers of these icons had similar orientations toward questions of food and hydration. The Plazuelas concentric shape as in Figure 11.7 (a) is Tlaloc’s wound-up arm, a divine posture associated with Tlaloc in the Codices as well. Tlaloc would symbolize the most universal deep-time symbol of divinity in Aridamerica, including in the sink and beyond. The major petitionary idea of the zigzagging snake-water line as well as calendar counts and registers are seen in the flowing metaphor of the Plazuelas sculpture in Figure 11.7 (b). Symbols of reproduction (vulva) or increase, agricultural products, and animals are the predominant and most frequent elements represented in the Bajío sink. The dispersed symbology

Iconicity of Tlaloc in the Rain Praying Cultures of del Bajío • 173

Figure 11.8. Convoluted, curvilinear formations do not add up to any specific image and are probably solar calendars with some metaphoric deific pareidolia. Photograph by Armando Perez.

is suggestive of a direct link with the Tlaloc motif, who is represented in the Codices as also holding a snake-water index in his hand (De Sahagún and Anderson 1975). Indeed, the Plazuelas icon of a near concentric quadratic shape (see Figure 11.5 [b]) points toward the presence of either lightning, or an irregular water line, also perhaps a snake. The calendars in Figure 11.8 could be markers of time for seasons or harvests. These convoluted, curvilinear formations do not add up to any specific image. It is perhaps an index of continuity, a seasonal clock for rain.

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Figure 11.9. High Aztec rain (snake-patterned) prayer artifact in polychrome shell. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License of property of the Walters Art Museum, Maryland.

Conclusion We shall conclude with a reference to Classic ceramics of 700 CE and after, as well as any references to images that help in identifying a culture centered around the Tlaloc prototype—in other words, of a rain-bearing expressive ethos (Broda 2000). The undulating, curvy lines comprise a visual type that recurs almost universally in the preliterate iconography of the region. The curved, zigzagging line is a recurring motif in the entire Preclassic to Epiclassic art of the del Bajío region. As stated above, the Bajío iconography, which would have been the home mostly of Guachichiles and chichimec Otomies, reflects an obsession with the undulating line. The motif reveals how the undulating, curved line, associated with a serpent divinity, as well as with water, as Tlaloc itself was, is a defining Uto-Aztecan iconic type in the frontiers of the desert lands of Mesoamerica.

Chapter 12

The Binding Liberating Chain of Chupícuaro Pottery

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Cultural manifestations of a large intra-linguistically connected group of peoples such as the Uto-Aztecans are a result of dispersions in different directions and along different vectors of time. Anthropologists studying the evolution of material culture in the region suggest that the notion of ‘influence’ of one culture over another cannot be pressed too far. Tendencies of influence or precepts cannot be easily discerned. Our recent studies support the early hypotheses of Jesse Walter Fewkes (1893), Konrad Preuss (1998), and Eduard Seler (1998), who recognized a kindred relationship among peoples seemingly unrelated in time and space: the ancient Mexica, the modern Cora, Huichol, and Mexicanero of the Sierra Madre Occidental, and the Pueblo Indians of the Southwestern United States (Carot and Hers 2008). In this chapter, we wish to review a recurring, symptomatic visual pattern associated with the ritual and decorative objects used by the Chupícuaro of the South Central Mexican highlands in the Sierra del Sur. This mountain range, the Sierra del Sur, marks off Aridamerica from the lush tropical environs of Mesoamerica. Dispersal of cultural elements occurred from these northern frontiers of Mesoamerica (inhabited by the Chupícuaro culture of Guanajuato) toward the American Southwest inhabited by Chalchihuites, Hohokam (ancestors of the Tohono O’odham Nation), and Hopi ethnicities ( Jiménez Betts and Darling 2000; Michelet et al. 2005). The north-to-south movement of Uto-Aztecans must be disregarded at this stage of history (Mann 2010). After the Uto-Aztecan expansions

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toward the American Southwest, the Southern-Uto-Aztecans are known to have flourished in different zones of the vast southern borderlands, including what we call Aridamerica and South Central Mexico. Initial waves of dispersal along the Tepiman corridor led to the formation of the Huichol and Huastecan cultural extensions of Northern Mexico. The picture that emerges is one of a northern NUA to southern SUA dispersal that continued until the Classical period, one synchronous with the time phases of the Common Era. This was an active period of intermigrations among similar ethnic and linguistic dialect groups that effected change in microhabitat rather than large transitions. This reverse phase of migrations, both in terms of population demography and resettlements, was caused by requirements of trade and mining. These phases consist of movements of exchanges between high Aztec cultures of Mexico and the more dispersed, somewhat less politically complex ethnic cultures of the American Southwest and the eastern Mojave Desert of the Great Basin. We could thus think of a simultaneous migratorial process of a strong NUA expansion phase that moves across SUA territory and a reflexive evolution of imperial SUA cultures. The SUA traveled to create a countercultural movement across the earlier NUA territories. The strong SUA cultures like the Chupicuaro, Toltec, and the Mixtec-Zapotec of Monte Alban resensitized cultures of the north that were bound to the desert and materially declining, as were the Hopis and the Timbisha-Shoshone of the extended Southwest and Great Basin regions. The pre-Numic (Uto-Aztecan Shoshone of 1500 BCE and after) who presumably moved southward also came to settle across water-enriched territories for at least several centuries in that Archaic 1000 BCE to Common Era phase, also known as the Preclassical phase. These southbound Uto-Aztecans who moved to the Mexican central regions were aggressive warrior cultural groups. Settlement along water-abundant geography, and a constant urge to fortify and organize material productions enabled the Preclassic to Classic groups of 2,000 years to achieve great heights of military organization, ritual and administrative hierarchies, knowledge of the cosmos and material objects, and advanced technology. These SUA expressions may be arranged on a rough chronological scale as follows. Material organization and consolidation of power came to manifest in the following sequence of expressions: the Chupícuaro (300 BCE), Toltec (300 CE), Teotihuacan (700 CE), Xochimilco (900 CE), and, finally, Tenochtitlan (1200 CE and after). Henceforth, these cultures developed very strong archetypal Proto-Uto-Aztecan symbolism. The same motif of the snake, the shamanic intercessor, and the mother earth entity were crafted with extraordinary levels of sophistication. In Mesoamerica this same timeframe is

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Figure 12.1. Map showing location of the highly sophisticated Chupícuaro pottery culture. Drawing by authors.

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attested by an interaction between Mayas of the farther east coast and Aztec denominations across the Huasteca, the territory of the south belonging to Tarascan and the Chalchihuites who fell along a mining trade route into the north of Mexico. The history of Proto-Uto-Aztecan motifs was reconstructed by anthropologists who concentrated either on Mesoamerican frontier cultures in and around 400 BCE, namely the Chupícuaro. Charles Kelly (1966) began an early inquiry into the Mesoamerican frontier cultures that lived between Guanajuato and Michoacán. Keraudren’s exegesis on the Codex Boturini explains clearly how early Numic cosmovision—of the Shoshoni or the first Hopis, for example—were retained in the collective memory of Teotihuacan (Keraudren 2016; Rajagopalan 2018). Symbols from the unknown past of Proto-Uto-Aztecan ceremonial life became visible in the NUA groups that inhabited Western Nevada and the Mojave Desert.

Wave versus Diffusion Although a wave of movements from one geo-ecological substratum to another is proposed in relation to Uto-Aztecan migrations, another hypothesis must be tested. Migration of symbols may not depend on conscious transfer of knowledge or physical population movements. Anthropologists studying movements and migrations do not usually address the question of spontaneous transfer of imagery. Spontaneous surge rather than cultural influence is responsible in part for the evolution of semiotic elements, symbols, and iconography. Cultural evolution and cosmological differences are products of behavioral expression. But if we are looking at larger time periods of ethnic movement, we often fail to account for the rapid pace with which the composition of symbols change. This process is even more evident in how media affects a visual archetype in the complex history of Classic Uto-Aztecan culture and later. Semiotic changes in visual symbolism are frequently confined to short time intervals of no more than a few centuries. Hence, symbolic elements like that of the snake, though embedded in Uto-Aztecan memory for several millennia, were actually given cultural rendering and conditioned by more local and spontaneous necessities. Actual demographic changes are more rapid, abrupt, and contingent than the theory of transcontinental migrations supports. Hence, in this case, the notion in environmental and earth sciences that movements are relational to climatic or geological transformations cannot function as a determinant of cultural dispersion. Iconographic practices of Amerindian groups, especially Uto-Aztecans, show that symbolic

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transfers occur when cultures are more deeply seated or rooted (Dunbar 2006; Mann et al. 2001). The Uto-Aztecan symbols perhaps are more easily transferred than others, especially in relation to the depictive designs we are considering here. Snake-water symbolism was ubiquitous in the NUA cultural territories of Alta and Baja California, Arizona, and Nevada. There is a common thematic unity in the variations of the snake-water symbols, which is true of the variations of the same symbol in another related culture far removed in time and space. Whereas the Numic expressions of snake-water icons were executed by means of rock surface petroglyphy, the same snake-water motif appeared and functioned in the later Mesoamerican Chupícuaro pottery design in the same vein. Chupícuaro iconographic pottery shares semiotic characteristics that bind the culture to the snake-water symbolism of hunter-gatherer symbolism. Chupícuaro iconography demonstrates a spontaneous expression that lasts nearly 4,000 years affecting Classic history (200 BCE to 700 CE). But the Chupícuaro renaissance foreshadows the articulation of sacred snake-water iconography in the Chalchihuites of Northern Mexico and even farther northern Hohokam of the American Southwest, who received this material influence. Further stimulus recognized from the Hohokam enabled a resurgence of the same motif within different geoclimatic affordances of the north, like the Mogollon. Chupícuaro design anticipates the supreme examples of this process of iconicity.

Snake Symbol of the Chupícuaro The Chupícuaro cultural nascence dates from 400 BCE and continues to expand and touch the adjoining cultures of Central Mexico. This south central ‘sink’ or bajio is located about 400 kilometers to the northwest of the valley of Mexico. This pottery and polychrome ceramics indeed is the locus classicus of Uto-Aztecan symbolism. The discovery that Chupícuaro cultural prominence caused a centrifugal dispersal of visual motifs is now acknowledged as one of the greatest findings in studies on symbolic dispersals in Mesoamerica. Its importance cannot be overemphasized—such a discovery is based on the patient research of Porter (1956), Kelly (1966), Carot and Hers (2008), and Martínez (2010), among others. Chupícuaro and Tarandacuaro in the State of Guanajuato bear evidence of an impressive polychrome pottery aesthetics that the influenced pottery optics of northern groups like the Chalchihuites culture of Zacatecas, Hohokam, and the Mogollon and Hopi of New Mexico. The Chupícuaro presumably comprised southbound Uto-Aztecans who settled and flourished in the

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high mountainous lake system of Cuitzeo and Zacapu in Michoacan and Guanajuato. Their high art reached out to affect the iconic design practices of the Hopi and Hohokam cultures of the Greater Southwest. The symbolic depictions of Chupícuaro pottery incorporate motifs from atavistic foragers and early settlers around river geographies along the Rio Grande and Pecos and the Rio Casas Grandes along the Arizona-Mexico border. The Chupícuaro glazed pottery design, which has been considered a unique cultural achievement originated in the Mesoamerican frontier. It contains the same snake-water zigzagging line, which is its leitmotif. The Tarascans (or the Purepecha) and the Chupícuaro are the group from the eponymous region (both dating forward of 400 BCE). Chupícuaro may have been a settler group that matured long after traveling from northern Aridamerican latitudes. They are known to have lived around the fertile and dense vegetated lake systems of Michoacan, Guanajuato, and southeast Jalisco (Michelet 2005). All historical evidence suggests that they were ancestrally much anterior to the Toltecs of the early Common Era, and the Aztecs of Teotihuacan. They brought and memorialized the snake as a founding symbol (Englehardt 2018; Carot and Hers 2008; Darras 2006). The Chupícuaro material culture included Preclassical pottery or sculptured figurines and related material: some of the evidence here is collated from the Chupícuaro area that was historically accented on the bajio within and adjacent to the central Mexican valley (Figure 12.2). The time curve of Preclassic to Classic, established for the earliest polychrome pottery in the region, attests to the necessary presence of a connection between the earlier Preclassic strata and the Classic evidence from 200 CE. Most of it is located within an ambit of a few three hundred square kilometers around the lakes of Cuitzeo and Zacapu. We shall look closely at some of the more intact specimens preserved at the Alhondiga Museums of Guanajuato City, the Irapuato City Museum, and the Waldemar Julsrud Museum of Acambaro. Specimens are preserved in the Acambaro, Tarandacuaro, museum complex. These small towns are considered the center of the great Chupícuaro representational or decorative culture. Specimens are also preserved in the Museum Alhondiga in the capital, Guanajuato. More importantly, we look at the pottery from the Preclassic evidence from the Huanímaro, Cuerámaro, and Acambaro-Tarandacuao frontier of Mesoamerica. In every case, we come across the snake-water undulating line. How this snake-water formation, also commonly called the zigzag line, originated may never be exactly known. Pottery, vessels made of clay and stone, most all bearing the same decorative zigzag motif, indicate an overall process of the socio-optical adoption of this form. A psychological or collective consciousness seems to be at work in a powerful and determining way.

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Figure 12.2. An interlocked zigzagging line grid on Chalchihuites pottery. Photo by Thelma datter. Creative Commons-Share Alike 4.0.

Research on motifs indicate the great similarity between Mesoamerican zigzagging lines in pots, vessels, and earthenware, which may or may not have been used as ritual objects in the Chupícuaro culture. The interrelationship of cultures of the north and south have been studied very comprehensively by Carot and Hers (2008), Díaz (2019), and Kelly (1966). Besides the prominent zigzagging line, the other important visual feature is the chain-like extension. If the zigzagging line is featured as a recurrent motif, it is also bound all around a vessel like a chain, which encircles the artifact. The chain winds around in a concentric manner (Figure 12.3). But the chain or concatenatedly curved line is the guiding artistic motif and is visible in at least three variants. These are [a] the Fibonacci squarish unwinding line movement (Figure 12.4) [b] the curved conch-shaped line (Figure 12.5), also unwinding and connecting to the next unit as if in a series, and [c] the quadrangular Fibonacci illustrated in Figures 12.6 and 12.7. One such example of the last is the Container or Cajete, from Huanimaro in the State of Guanajuato which offers an example of clay modeling. The design is observed in the piece in coffee color, in an incised and polished combination format. Geometric decoration along the horizontal plane is exhibited, along with parallel lines and points on the outer body. This is a typical Western Mexico Bajío, or Huanímaro Classic snake motif (Figure 12.6).

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Figure 12.3. Incised snake line decor. Geometric. West of Mexico in the Bajío, Cuerámaro, Turbio River. Classic (400 CE). Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum.

Figure 12.4. Classic (400 CE) period container. Mud modeling demonstrating the unwinding Fibonacci-type line from Bajío Mexico. Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum.

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Figure 12.5. Conch-shape decorative motif with inclined parallel lines throughout the body. Abasolo, Mexico. Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum.

Figure 12.6. Quadrangular Fibonacci snake line grids on container. Mud modeling. Incised and polished. Décor West of Mexico-Bajío, Guanajuato. Huanímaro. Classic. Photo Courtesy of Irapuato City Museum.

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Figure 12.7. Hohokam pottery in Arizona, Mexico border. Wikimedia Commons.

The example in Figure 12.7 offers a direct parallel to motifs in the northern Aridamerican petroglyphic design elements or motif of the Arroyo Tigra in the State of Zacatecas in Mexico (Braniff 1995; Carot 2005; Carot and Hers 2008). This last motif is found in the first millennium trade exchange line of Mesoamerican pottery. It may be farfetched to assume that these motifs mean anything. But from the point of view of visual culture studies, it is more than a coincidence that these motifs are ubiquitous not just in Mesoamerica but also in the desert climate pottery cultures ( Jiménez Betts and Darling 2000). The chronology is unclear. The water accent is not necessarily bound to water-abundant cultures like Chupícuaro or water-impoverished cultures like the Chalchihuites of Aridamerica. The same motif is as strong and vibrant in climate-independent scenarios, hence demonstrating a resilience of semiotics. We may always divide the context of Mesoamerican symbology in binaries of either forager or sedentary maize-bound ecologies. The Hohokam example is a sample of the earlier northern (NUA) form of sustenance ecology and displays the preponderance of the undulating snake-water symbol.

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Rattlesnake Antecedents The dualistic snake-water line symbolism appears wherever there is recognition of the importance of water. An interesting parallel in the snakewater dualistic imagery is that it morphs into the diamond shape. If we look at the Chupicuaro pattern, we are also struck by the visual quadrant formation—the rattlesnake diamond chain (Figure 12.8). Why this happens again is not known but rattlesnake shapes do point to an interactive cultural phase through the US-Mexico Tepiman corridor. The rattlesnake physiology of the diamondback snake skin reappears in Chupícuaro pottery. Chupícuaro possibly predates or overlaps with the Huichol-Zapotec split and the independent Huichol emergence in Northern Mexico around 1000 BCE or later. The Mesoamerican diamond-shaped coordinates, engirding the eye-like center may have come to the Tarascans of Chupícuaro from a Huichol source. It may also have some unknown (untraceable) Olmec lineage. Chupícuaro does relate to Olmec anthropometric similarities (Martínez 2010). But in either case the snake-water associations with an anthropomorphic figure—as in Chupícuaro renderings of the snake-water chain—on clay sculptures celebrate the same fecundity motif of a snakemother entity as well as a snake-water, life-endowing spirit. The exact geo-ethnographic locations and origins of that motif remain shrouded in

Figure 12.8. Diamond rattlesnake shape deep in Western Mexico, from the Classic period of 700 CE and after. Photo courtesy of Irapuato City Museum.

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the mysteries of the past. This particular vessel (Figure 12.8) or container contains a shadow of the Huichol diamond formation. If Huichol art is a later expression in the time scale, there is no doubt that adjoining Alta Vista petroglyphs in Nayarit, which is technically speaking part of the Huichol territory, manifest the concentric squares, much like the Huichol ‘eye of god’ motif. Whether the antiquity of forager iconography over maize were accepted or not, there is no doubt that the diamond backed rattlesnake’s diamond chain iconography and the ‘eye of god’ or nierika of the Huichol are transcendent corridors for a passage through space among the cardinal points of any quadrant.

Chapter 13

Mother-Earth Snakes

R

The earth-mother iconography of early forager culture already suggests that from a very ancient early Archaic or pre-Archaic age Uto-Aztecan groups engaged in gender-sensitive, female symbolization. Scholars have speculated on the mother-earth symbol, or its variation, akin to a cosmic mother goddess. But we also must consider the mother-earth deity with reference not just to iconography and iconic practice, but also in terms of how the visual indices based on this conceptualization were generated and sustained through material cultural transformations. Further, such a discussion illuminates how prehistoric peoples might have been channeling gender sensitiveness in their spiritual view of the ecology within their cosmological observations. Sam D. Gill’s ethnographic study Mother Earth: An American Story (1991) points to the continuous presence of a mother-earth deity among Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. Gill’s ethnographic information derives from his broad but perceptive conversations with shamans and religiously intuitive people among several contemporary Indigenous groups. As in Gill’s study the natural bounty and prosperity perceived as a correlate of the regional environmental canopy and its resources also provides a conceptual framework for understanding the mother-nature or mother-earth symbology of prehistoric, Indigenous, nonliterate cultures. Edward Tylor (1889) already first pointed to the importance of a belief in the earth mother as one of the foundations for the religions of Indigenous peoples of Middle Americas, especially the Uto-Aztecan branch, al-

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though the anthropological denomination of Uto-Aztecan was not clearly defined in Tylor’s time. Tylor speaks of “mother earth among the races of North America . . . the earth mother is one of the greatest personages of mythology” (Tylor 1889: 359). But it was Carl Lumholtz (1904) who started to identify specific items in the visual iconography of the ancient Uto-Aztecan groups, especially through rock-art inscriptions. Lumholtz’s (1904) evidences relate directly to the beliefs reconstructed and recognized from the ethnographic record of the Uto-Aztecan languages. Much later, Hultkrantz refers to this body of anthropomorphic representations as ‘mother-earth goddesses found everywhere in North America’ (Hultkrantz 1954). We find reference to a ‘mother’ goddess, definitely a female icon, in stories of healing and ritual worship among the Hopi or Zuni narratives and visually expressed in altarpiece iconography of Hopi Mauwyinga, or the female spirits of sand-paintings of Pueblo Indians. A comparative study of the American Southwest Indigenous religious visuals to late Classic (400 CE) iconography helps us understand Lumholtz in greater detail. Lumholtz identified the female anthropomorph, with its distinctive ‘labyrinth pattern,’ and snake and avian configurations. Campbell Grant and his associates (1968) called the feminine anthropomorphs of the Coso Range PBAs, ‘the patterned body anthropomorphs’ (1968), as markers of a shamanic motif. The mother concept in the Mesoamericas is not merely a large pantheistic and overarching vision of the earth as a mother and provider. It builds on what Lumholtz (1904) identified as a set of common denominators: ‘concentric circles, the conventionally shaped spiral and the labyrinth pattern.’ Forager Coso PBAs, or the Trincheras anthropomorphs of Sonora and the Great Mural Rock Art Tradition in Baja California, do not repeat precisely the same characters although they all reflect concrete female affordances (Gill 1991; HaysGilpin 2004; Insoll 2004). If it is true that all evolving Uto-Aztecan groups share a mother-goddess theme in their beliefs, then the mother goddess is also simultaneously a manifestly local-culture perception and is unique to its ethnicities. Thus, common, overarching iconicity features within a largely identifiable Uto-Aztecan religious system, including a definitive astronomical connection for the female-mother figure. Gendering associations are created by assembling features like ornaments, genitalia, and numinous animal modifications to a prototypical shape. In Mesoamerica, of course, gendering is also achieved with references from myth. Several characteristics like the presence of handheld shapes or lunar associations in different variations demonstrate the feminizing character of the art layers, tendencies that flowed into Preclassic influences of sophisticated Aztec-Mayan trade and mining cultures.

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Several factors are responsible for the change in iconographic practice. Knowledge of the calendar, natural processes, and technological advancement affected the visual representation of the female deity. The snake image here leads, absorbs, and transforms the narrative. Mother-earth iconography is no longer related to game animal provisions that were standard practice in the Desert West. A female-mother modularity emerged in sculptures and reliefs in the architectural remains. The mythological content of the Codices refers to an elaborately referenced astronomical semantics of the mother-snake icon, which suggests that the sculptural mother earth iconography of Teotihuacan Chiapas, Palenque, ChichenItza, and Uxmall were all deeply embedded in Mesoamerica from the past. The solid sculpted mother-earth icons were nuanced for advanced mythological narrative, time, and prophecy. The range of variation effected in the iconicity of the female-mother figure can be somewhat deconstructed (Table 13.1). Enlisting characteristics and relating them to ethnographic evidences show that the mother-goddess prototype evolved from region to region and on the time scale. The female-mother could have different functions depending on the natural roots that this kind of symbol implies. The northern prototype is only an essentialist or miniaturized version of deities of the Spanish Codices. However, certain very old evolutionary notions of a mother image are clearly evident for the American Southwest and Mesoamerican tribes and these themes could be reiterated. Jacques Lafaye’s extensive study comparing interlinguistic sources and Codices iconography from Colombian Mexico demonstrates that the connections are so deep-rooted that they construct the modern nationalist consciousness of Mexican culture. Lafaye (1987) shows that the diversity engendered by the Spanish and Indigenous mixture was fortified by, or in turn

Figure 13.1. Tapuat earth-mother symbolism of Hopi petroglyph evidences. Drawing by authors.

190 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans Table 13.1. A list of mythological or sacred narrative legends originating as earth-mother names and their possible reappearances through visual metaphors in recent epochs.

UtoAztecan groups

Name of Deity

Characteristics

Myth

Research

Coso

Unknown

Possible patternedbody anthropomorphic petroglyphs

Animal master or mistress of animals bighorn sheep, deer, antelope, elk.

Grant et al. 1968,

Kawaiisu

Yahwera

Deity in center identified as akin to a small hawk, associated with quail and guarded by gopher snake and rattlesnake. Both male and female. Underworld Master/ Mistress of the Animals

Yahwera Kahnina, Back Canyon, Caliente, Tehachapi Mountains, California

Mukhopadhyay and Garfinkel 2019 Garfinkel and Williams 2011 Zigmond 1977

Shoshone

Mother Earth

Patterned-body anthropomorphs attached to female features and dart or projectile points

Sun Dance, Death Myth

Hultkrantz 1973, 2010; Spier 1921

Paiute

Ahlaane. Dine bijek

Unknown

Sand paintings

Griffin-Pierce

Paiute Numa

Stone Mother (Pesha u),

Rock formation, morphoglyph on Lake Mead

Lake Mono petromorphic mother image, a myth of origin and nostalgia

Foley 2008

Unknown, ritual dance formats

Creation story of Sun and Mother Earth

Hudson and

Kuyuidokado

Luiseño

Tamáyawùt [Earth Mother].

Merge 2014

Blackburn 1978

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Luiseño

Ikaiut

Tongva

Tamayawit (Earth Mother)

(Kroeber 1925; Boscana 1933; Harrington 1934)

Weywit ,daughter of Quoar

Hopi

Tapuat Concentric circle

Unknown, ritual dance formats

Mother earthnature and Creation mother, couples with darkness

Hudson and

Katsina dolls, anthropomorphoic representations

Creation of race

Waters 1963

Blackburn 1978

Or Kokyangwuti (mother earth) Tubatulabal

Father Tukmit Mother Tomaiyowit

Unknown

Oodham

Coyote

Coyote animal configuration (nonexistent except in narrative)

Birth-giver

Bar et al 2001

Huichol

Tateitema,

Circle and frontal head with gender

Mother Earth

Kindl 1993, Furst 2007

Tatei Kiemwuka, Tatei Yurienaka

Voegelin 1938

Creation

Schaeffer and and Furst 1996

Werika Wimari (goddess and mother eagle and wife of Teyaupa, father sun god) Nahuatl

Coatlique, Quetzalcoatl Tonantzin Tlalteuctli

Snake mother with frontal head projection and snake skirt, Plumed twining snake etc

Cosmological Cycles Creation Daybreak

Bernardo de Sahagun. Codex Florentino (main source)

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Figure 13.2. Kukulkan Maya Itzaean snake-deity evolved from the Aztec Maya interactive phase of the first millennium in the Common Era. Wikimedia Commons.

fortified, the Catholic mother: a phenomenon symbolically narrated in the Nahuatl narrative of the Nicah Mopohu,which continues to explain why even modern versions of the earth mother in Christianity continue to hold fascination in terms of regional color (Kroger 2012; Leon-Portilla 2014).

The Forager Mother How far back in time could we go to learn about a ‘feminine provider’ that is projected everywhere on Uto-Aztecan cultures? Here, the forager snake motif quintessentially morphs into mythological portraits. The Aztec examples, as briefly mentioned in the Table 13.1, are Tonantzin, Cihuacóatl (also called Quilaztli, Yaocíhuatl, warrior woman and lover of war), but they are also strikingly enough called upon as reflections of Tonantzin [‘our mother’]. Cihuacóatl was also called Huitzilnicuatec (head of the hummingbird) Coatlxopuehe or Coatlicue, references to which are bound to the internally varying Aztec or Nahuatl mythology—or iconography—of the Codices (Vaticanus, Borgia, and Florentine) and Bernardino de Sahagun’s General History of the Things of New Spain (De Sahagun and Anderson 1975 edition pp. 175 ff.), which constitute basic sourcebooks and references for the earth mother, or more specifically the snake mother or snake woman motif in the Classic to Hispanic-era Nahuatl historiography ( Jeffrey 1955). But we follow this cue out of the forager visual culture remnants, because archaeologically, the earth mother had a forager animal mother role, and may have originated in the pre-Numic ancestors of the

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Shoshone, Pima O’Odham, and Hopi). Of this phase, from 1200 BCE to 800 CE, the Classic Aztec and the Maya had a focal or evolutionary memory, whereas the deity itself, as visible in the Codices, was created out of Spanish visual registers. The actual optical content of Codex iconography retains little optical similarity to forager earth mothers. Codex iconography does not apparently or explicitly carry a visual cognitive array that animated the glorious petroglyphs. In mature high-cultural visualization of southern Chupicuaro (Mesoamerica), Tula (semi-Aridamerica), and Teotihuacan (deep tropical lake abundant Mesoamerica), forager petroglyph culture was displaced by sculptural iconography. It is a dimensional shift in visual art and its recognition or appropriation as a sacred object is symbolic of a very distinctive transformation of Aztec media technologies. Codex deities were conceived as two-dimensional equivalents of the sculptural, relief models. The continuity of an anthropomorphic motif is held up by the metaphor of an elemental snake, cosmic portal, and axis mundi, and culled in with obsidian tools and mirrors and the standing lateral anthropomorph itself, gendered, and decorated with avian features.

An Iconicity of Gender The present discussion brings to the forefront an important attribute of California and American Southwest iconic figures. Coso, Inyo County rock art and Nevada projectile-point petroglyphs exhibit a far greater representation of explicitly gendered figures than has been previously reported (Hays-Gilpin 2004; Maddock 2015; Molinar 2021). Recent, detailed studies of Coso anthropomorphs led scholars to question male exclusivity in Great Basin and American Southwest iconography. An exhaustive review of the total inventory of 450 individual Coso figures depicted in Maddock’s compilation provides a comprehensive and robust database for classifying their gender (Maddock 2015). Based on a systematic review of Maddock’s decorated and solid-bodied figures culled from a broad sampling of the Coso Region and through rigorous cross-checking of the drawings with the photographic archive of the California Rock Art Foundation, Coso figures were classified, when possible, as to gender. A few preliminary statements on gendered figures in rock art should be made. Prehistoric artisans represent males and females in a great variety of ways (Slifer 2000). Depictions are sometimes conflated with animals and may be identified as therianthropes (intermixed animal-humans). Further, it is not unusual to find ambiguous or androgynous images that cannot be differentiated as to their specific gender as they combine both male and female sexual identities. In rock art of most areas, males and females

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are not equally represented: images of males (as phallic anthropomorphs) are much more abundant than images of females. Unlike men, women are seldom portrayed in mundane activities. Elaborate depictions of genitals suggest that many female images are intended as symbols of fertility and procreation—supporting the notion that most art was created by men, who picture females in terms of life-generating power. In most areas, images of men are unambiguous and more obvious than those of females (Slifer 2000). Females are identified by genitals and sometimes by overall body form. In some instances, clothing or hairstyles are useful indicators. These include early predictives of the Hopi squash blossom, butterfly hairstyle. Vulva symbols with a U or V-shaped mark are widely employed over the area of a woman’s genitals to represent sex or gender. A darkened and emphasized genital area with rounded hole/s also exemplify feminine gender. Pregnancy and birth are detailed with small anthropomorphs noted below a mainframe figure, or between a woman’s legs, or within the body. Actual acts of giving birth are sometimes shown and conflated with the depiction of snakes emanating out of her body in simulacra of the umbilical cord. In some rock-art images, there are representations of menstrual bleeding. Additionally, visual shorthand for the female form are two dots separated by the torso or single dots on both sides of a vertical line—representing female breasts and the duality of labia (Garfinkel and Austin 2011; Potter 2004; Slifer 2000). We explored tentative classifications of 450 Maddock figures that show a subsample of 146 gendered figures. A closer review of the gendered inventory shows 96 of 146 recognizable females. Characteristic counts of this sample found (a) 16 pendent labia, (b) 17 solid oval or hole, (c) 7 reference markers to child or birthing, (d) 5 markers of menstruation, three with hair whorls, (e) 28 ‘Vee’ and/or ‘U’ at genitals, and (f ) 32 hair whorls (exclusive of other gender attributes). The number of specific male attributes were lower in count (n = 25), with (a) 25 phallic markers, and (b) 25 ambiguous (exhibiting both male and female attributes simultaneously) markers. In all, the sample showed a preponderance of female iconography in the ratio of 96 females to 25 males and 25 ambiguous configurations. To summarize, 32 percent (146/450) of Maddock’s 450 figures exhibit gender (male, female, or ambiguous). Nearly four times the number of females (96) are exhibited as that of decidedly male figures (25). Ambiguous figures (25) are equivalent in number to the male complement. Hence, eastern California expressions of prehistoric UtoAztecan anthropomorphs, in the majority, are feminine beings. Further, this entire assemblage is predominantly feminine with masculine figures in a significant, but substantial, minority. This sample study may well in-

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Figure 13.3. Distinctive labia and hole motifs from the American Southwest. Drawing by authors.

dicate local preference for a mother earth or feminine caregiver sustainer deity in these forager NUA groups. This suggests a remarkable similarity of gender mainstreaming in the legends and mythological tales of more contemporary, existing Uto-Aztecan groups.

The Mother-Earth Polity Tracing the evolution of the mother-earth mythical figure issues from a contextualized scholarship, supported by the Codex literature and the early Spanish accounts of some of the original Aztec/Nahuatl accounts of the pre-Aztec mythology, which is itself vast and complicated by its appearance in their several extant versions. The same myth is narrated in several different ways, but again with a common core content, both in terms of visual imagery and metaphorical implications. The most important of all deities—that relate directly to the prefigurations in forager canon (as we have shown in Chapter 11) is the feminine snake-deity Coatlique. Snake and femininity are different issues—but not so much as when they continually tend to merge in the snake anthropomorph icon in the total time frame of Uto-Aztecan movements. Much of the research on Uto-Aztecan forager layers point to the importance of the pre-Numic to Mesoamerican movement timeline, of 3500 BCE to the Classic (400 CE); the latter manifests of forager elements are entirely part of a continuing forager convention that was not entirely discarded until very recent history of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Chichimec historical parallels. Snake elements have been recently very clearly highlighted by the digital pointillism of our colleague Bernard Jones. Even where visibility is obfuscated by varnishing and transformation of rock layers, the ancient petroglyphic arts of the Aztecan (pre-Numic and SUA) cultures carry a range of recognizable and nuanced snake symbolism. Yet what makes gender characteriza-

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tion possible is the snake’s affinity to human action. Snakes begins to share human attributes. From the snake as an adornment, a handheld subordinate creature turns into a human itself and combines in the metaphoric imagination. This imaginative fusion of animal forms is basic to world’s iconographic cultures: including the theogonic narrative cultures of Greeks and Romans. The snake deities inside a forager ecology demonstrate that the snake is a symbol of sustenance life style. The complex and intricate snake symbol in the Codices leads us to believe that it was the direct counterpart of a knowledge system that was capable of extremely organized structures of thinking. The Aztecs of the first millennium CE evolved gestalt out of integrated thought processes: education, priestly wisdom literature, astronomy and calendar, and a functional legal system. All of these organs of the body politic were present in the Aztec high cultures of Mesoamerica and as such account for the formation of the snake deities of immense complexity and fusion of experiences. Quetzalcoatl and Coatlique symbolize this heightened, complex integrated art. Even the earliest representations of snake-like zigzagging images in Preclassic contexts, such as the ceramic designs of the Chupicuaro, Tarascan pottery and effigy, patterns reflect a ubiquitous continuity between all Aztec cultures. Transformation and ornate complexity, as in sculptures of the snake anthropomorph, derive from pure building blocks of the mind (Martinez Gonzalez 2010). All increasingly evolved, complex cultures of the world gradually lose memory of pure form, or retain it in new media of expression.

The Accessorial Snake-Skirt Motif Of all systems, the most potent accessorial symbol of the Mesoamerican deity of Coatlique is that of the snake skirt (Figure 13.1). Coatlique wears a skirt of snakes, as depicted in the sculptured divinity now preserved in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City (Baldwin 2012; Klein 2008; see Figure 13.6). As the Mesoamerican Coatlique emerged as the Archaic snake divinity and as a symbol of mother earth, it was foundationally connected to death and regeneration (Klein 2008). The snake-skirt is one of the most prominent details common to California, Arizona, and Nevada petroglyphs, as much as the skirt-wearing divinities of Mesoamerica where she was of course, a grand snake-mother god. This proto-symbol of a snake-frilled skirt appears to be mirrored in an almost ubiquitous manner in at least some of the Great Basin iconography (Baldwin 2012). Uto-Aztecan expressions in California and Nevada figures in a number of instances can be recognized as wearing the Hopi

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style of women’s hair whorls. This is a traditional expression of tying up the hair in side-whorls, a symbol of coming-of-age. The hair style is called squash blossom or butterfly and signals the first menses and benchmark of marriageable age for young women (Maddock 2015). It is interesting also to note that the skirt-wearing divinity distinguishes California rock art from adjacent cultures in the Anasazi and other far Southwestern cultural groups, notably Hopi and Navajo, and even the Ute or Paiute denominations in north Utah-Colorado extensions of the Uto-Aztecans. The Proto-Uto-Aztecan reference of the skirt is based on these images of the mother divinity. The rattlesnake or togowu and the gopher snake kogo, as they are called in Kawaiísu, are the most important snakes. The rattlesnake guardian of Yahwera’s home, for example, is known as tugu-baziitu-ba in the local narratives. If we adopt the idea that the skirt-wearing goddess is an early UtoAztecan Coatlique analog, we see the equivalence in the distribution of snake motifs. There is also evidence of accompanying snakes for such divinities in Little Petroglyph Canyon, Coso Range (California), as elsewhere. This snake symbol, associated with a snake-skirt symbolic compendium, provides a parallel to the flying snake Huitzilopochtli, the male snake divinity also associated with the descending Venus: the god also responsible for sacrificing the other snake-sister divinity of Coyolxauqui, who is slain in order to create the moon. This latter isolated hanging, or handheld snake divinity of Coyolxauqui, is illustrated in the Codices Florentine (Sahagun et al. 1950), the Telleriano-Remensis (Keber 1995), and Borbonicus (Keber 2001). The head of Coyolxauqui is isolatedly symbolized as the moon itself—in another manifest as a feminine divinity. Again, the earth-mother Coatlique holds Huitzilopochtli in one hand and an atlatl in the other. The atlatl is replaced, it would seem, in all post-Hispanic Mesoamerican depictions of the goddess with spears or swords as an armed-divinity trope. Hence, discussion of the skirt-wearing mother goddess presents several elements for our consideration. The feminine, feathered-head, skirtwearing, mother-goddess theme also suggests impregnation—namely, a pregnant goddess. In the Codices and oral traditions on which they are based, the mother goddess is impregnated by the feathered snake Quetzalcoatl, whose feathers the mother goddess actually adorns. The last, but not the least striking Proto-Uto-Aztecan feature of the Coso Mojave Desert rock-art iconography is the handheld snake, another direct parallel to the snake-adorned Huitzilpochtli, who sacrificed a sister to create the moon (Figure 13.4). In fact, Huitzilpochtli may be another kind of sun-god, snake-inspired motif, not absent in Coso, at least visually (Figure 13.5).

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Figure 13.4. Drawing of Coatlique representing fertility. The sculpture was discovered at the Antigua plaza mayor, Historical Center of Mexico City, and is preserved at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia. 350 × 130 × 45 cm; 24 tons. Drawing by authors.

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Figure 13.5a. Photograph depicts a woman wearing squash blossom whorls in her hair, a common Hopi hairstyle. Photo courtesy of Museum of Art, BC, Canada.

Figure 13.5b. Hopi hair whorl recreated in early portrait of the goddess Xochiquetzal depicting a whorl tradition in the Aztec tradition. Rufinio Tamayo Museum. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Attribution 4.0.

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Figure 13.6. Quetzalcoatl. God of life, light, wisdom, fertility, and knowledge, patron of the day and of the winds, and ruler of the West. Codex Borbonicus, pp. 21–22. Bibliotheque del Paris Bourbon 39 × 39.5 cm; 24 tons. Drawing by authors.

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Figure 13.7. Artist’s rendering in outline of relief of Coyolxauhqui dismembered by her brother, Museo del Templo Mayor (diameter 320 cm). Drawing by authors.

Figure 13.8. Drawing reproduction of original from Little Petroglyph Canyon, California reveals snake divinity with handheld snakes and associated feminine snake-deity. Both divinities are seen wearing snake-skirt vests. Drawing by authors.

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Gender Indispensable Iconicity What this discussion brings to the forefront is another very important correlation between the gender of northern and southern indexes among the Uto-Aztecan groups. It is now increasingly clear that the rock art of eastern California, Coso Range, and Arizona as well as in the larger southern Great Basin is overtly gendered—the number of female anthropomorphs appearing in these regions is definitely larger than has been previously expected or reported. In South America, principally in Central and South America, a survey of archetypal symbolism recognizes a lunar divinity as ‘Woman of the Moon and the Sea’ (Neumann 2015: 183). Here, it was the night sky where the lunar goddess was found. This goddess represented a unification of the underworld and an integration of all living things. This ancient night-sky goddess was a renewer of vegetation. She was also the goddess of death, the underworld, and the West (Nuemann 2015; Spence 1945). For the Aztecs and culturally related peoples of the Americas, the West is a place of women, the primeval home, the place where humankind once came from and was created and ‘birthed’ from below, from a primordial hole in the earth, and a place of descent (Sahagun et al. 1950). Hence, the realm of the dead was again emphatically in the West, a theme made clear in the creation story in which the evil moon-sister is killed by Huitzilopochtli, a scene re-enacted in the Aztec spring festival celebrating the snake underworld goddess, Mictecacihuatl. Through Aztec sacrifice, Native rituals were focused on reviving the feminine earth—a concept constantly reinforced by the flow of life and death in nature. In contextualizing this linkage, Nuemann (2015) argues that this is the paramount reason why the Aztec mother goddess and many of the great primary earth-mother goddesses worldwide are frequently associated with the hunt and war. Further, in America, the Aztec mother goddess is naturally also the goddess of obsidian. Obsidian as spear point, hunting knife, and sacrificial blade was, for the Aztec, the principal instrument of death. In fact, it was posited that the original faith of the ancient Aztecs forbearers was an obsidian religion (Neumann 1955: Spence 1945).

Feminine in Inframundo The Aztecs of the last 2,000 years worshipped a skirt-wearing snakemother entity that represents for them the mother who also strides across the nether world. She is not just the goddess of earth. She is not merely a nature deity. The skirt-wearing mother earth represents is therefore not

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any simplistic naturalist pantheism. The snake mother is a spiritual mother earth who lives and functions in the nether world, where the mythical material of religious art is dotted by snake-spirit entities. Aztecs believed—as per Codex Borgia and the Vaticanus, among others—that she is a bone crusher who strides the nether world and gives birth to Quetzalcoatl, the free-rising snake-spirit of morning and sun. The metaphor of spiritual genesis speaks for itself. The same version of the quincunx, with one central and four other deities that represent the four cardinal directions holding up the sky, are called the bacab by the Maya—the four snake-hybrid icons of the Aztecs are called Tezacatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl and Xipe Tepec. Some of the variations that the snake-mother deity assumes are Toci (Temazcalteci), goddess of health, and lady of motherhood and of medicinal herbs. Cihuacóatl, goddess of birth and death, mistress of doctors, bleeding men, midwives, surgeons, and those who gave remedies for abortions; she is the gatherer of souls (tonalli). Chicomecóatl, goddess of agriculture, lady of crops and fertility. Citlalicue, goddess of the Milky Way, lady of the stars. Coatlicue and her sisters Xochitlicue and Chimalma, goddesses of fertility, ladies of life and death, guides of rebirth. Tonacacíhuatl, primordial goddess of sustenance, lady of furtiveness. Omecíhuatl, primordial goddess of substance, lady and goddess of the creation of the entire universe according to history. The gendered snake-adorning (snake-skirt) deities from the entire Greater Southwest already contain the seed of this more elaborate pantheon. The core idea—like the La Llorona motif, which remains the most impactful—of a snake-mother deity who comes out of the darkness of the universe along with a primordial Freudian ‘id,’ a subconscious to manifest and express itself in abundance, cornucopia, and everything that is creative and energized in the world. But she wears a snake skirt with dismembered shreds of a snake garment, as the feminine energy who gives birth and maintains mastery over the dead.

Conclusion Divinity appears out of the darkness of night and the afterworld, which is like a refuge of the souls. Quetzalcoatl’s reappearance every dawn is understood as a diurnal solar cycle. In the myth itself, Quetzalcoatl laments coming back into the comforting bosom of the snake earth mother, Tonantzin. This nostalgia is a reference to coming back to earth, a plane of origins of life, water, and all creative art. It also represents the strong desire of the male energy to reunite with the female moon and mother earth who wears a skirt of snakes and is a transforming snake herself.

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Figure 13.9. Codex Borgia, page 56. Bone crusher mother goddess of the Aztecs. Wikimedia Commons.

Conclusion

R

Uto-Aztecan iconic practices are primarily conditioned by the consciousness of the snake as a death-dealing power—and, as such, an animal that evinces the deepest fears and anxieties of the individual. Yet this consciousness can only be framed by the cognitive apparatus by identifying and valorizing certain accepted visual elements of the iconography. Death consciousness drives iconicity as an optical process. The snake consciousness is a handle for the ability to recognize and express the notion of death, extinction, and the paradox of annihilation, rejuvenation, and sustenance that nature offers to the human being. This thematic discovery shows how the snake pattern was instilled in the different cultural expressions, ranging from rock-art templates in the Great Basin and the American Southwest to other cultural artifacts like basketry, pottery, temple architecture, and sculptural motifs. As we have now studied the snake iconography in various media and objects, it justifies the independent focus of the individual chapters. The snake image runs and reappears as a template for our consideration throughout these chapters—like a kind of subconscious reflex or template. What this means is that the great visual-artistic achievements of Uto-Aztecan theology and ethnological layers are based principally on the snake. We may speak only briefly here on what this all means. Because we hypothesize that ‘a snake consciousness’ enlightens the visual artifact there is no doubt that the patterns that we see either in rock art or in polychromatic and dimensional forms of art are not just superficial accidents or mere coincidences. Every image in the spectrum of Uto-Aztecan art

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has a profound cognitive meaning. These metaphors and deep signifiers are examples of symbolic memory. Above all, they are signs of a central and abiding resilient iconicity—one acquired and extrapolated through many generations of Uto-Aztecan-affiliated people who endured through time and inhabited a vast variety of geologically defined locations. Richard Dawkins would call them memes, derived from Dawkins’s notion of these basic genetic units or ideas already present in nature, which implies that the snake-water meme may be a living example of how such memes may function within collective memory. Of course, through the individual chapters, we have tried to identify a broad core culture as it relates to the iconography of the Aztecs, but also—especially—to the central and prominent snake icon. The three material culture aspects that we have studied are (a) rock art, (b) basketry and pottery, and (c) ritually embedded sculpture. In the expression of this same snake-water iconic association, we find a reified, ritualized meme evolving on various levels of cognitive expressiveness and creativity, even cutting across dimensions and configuration with respect to media pliability. We might capture the visual expositions of the snake-water motif in a tabular form, to show how the meme advanced in time and layout. But even if we were to accept the meme’s reality as a chromosome of the imagination, there is something so intrinsic to the image that the concept of the meme is not entirely capable of communicating. The zigzagging snake-water visual metaphor is not just a fortuitous configuration, or a mere optical fantasy: the constitutive meme must include the emotive effect of this line, one that, as an array, suggests movement, embodied cognition, snake phobia, and a death portal—meanings that should all be inherent in a set of associations. Our discourse on the snake-rain dualism of the snake-like line issues from hunter-gatherer rock-art styles. The snake motif was unique in its earliest expression as represented in the forager cultures. The snake-like line was again never distant from the ideas of a mother-snake deity. Interweaving these associations, Uto-Aztecans went on to explore the idea in greater depth and with more potent animistic belief. The same snake-line—as the tabular list shows—is visible in the form of the water-retaining pot of the Chalchihuites and the Chupicuaro designs that at once connected a home art environment with moral visions of death and regeneration and with a symbol of life we seek in the celestial waters. The intricacy of details in the most advanced phases of that culture—as it appeared in Tenochtitlan, for example—in the handheld snake pattern of Tlaloc is born from ubiquitous naturalism. But what the memelike structural idea does not capture in its entirety is the emotive capacity or efficacy of the meme. If we were to break up such a reference temporally, we could say that the notion of an emotive signal, an emotive meme or

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chromosome, one that floats in memory and is reified voluntarily through generations, demonstrates that emotional perception is more primitive and appears before, or as a causal property of, spatial perceptions. The zigzagging meme in its evolution reveals an emotive meme that speaks to a belief in the journey of the soul. We recognize that this is how such a “chromosomal” notion progresses— through the memory of feelings, a phase state of human self-awareness that has not yet been fully understood in the literature. It is on the emotive foundation of the snake-water symbol that the artistic tendency was ultimately based. The art, at least the optical features of such symbols, was determined by its emotional and moral valence. Its relevance for the imagination refuses to be tied to space and positivist certitudes of finitude. As the tabular list of curved-line features show, there must have been this evolution. Like all other dedicated activities, wrought through generations of a singular population, there is always modification and development of modes and potencies of representation. The Aztecs did not have a written script but the absence of script, and writing was to a greater degree substituted in Uto-Aztecan prehistorical practices as an achievement of unprecedented progress with iconic transformations, knowledge of medium, and mathematical precision in architecture. The same knowledge was symbolized through three-dimensional isomorphism. Uto-Aztecan iconicity is cognitively isomorphous. The snakewater image evolves in time and medium with a magnificent promise. The sculpture of the snake at Tula—mentioned in Chapter 12—demonstrates the unflinching adventurism of the Uto-Aztecan artist. Future research may be able to do justice to the psychology of iconicity that has enabled social collectives to retain the memory of form and to recreate it in different dimensions for self-preservation and memorialization of ancestries. The leap through dimensionality is not too radical, but it does provoke us to think when we consider the scale of time involved in the transformation of these symbols and the abilities of the retentive human mind. Once we realize this, we understand that it would never be possible to look at Aztec art in the same ways. The isomorphic and extended iconicity demonstrates the death resilience of the Uto-Aztecan imagination. It gives us an opportunity to look at and appreciate the art even more ardently than ever. If we apply the techniques of visual analysis offered to us by Franz Boas in his meticulous count of lines and patterns in the paradigmatic symbolism of Kwakiutl and Alaskan artifacts, we can always extend that to Uto-Aztecan snake-water isomorphy in the pictogrammatical and sculptural representations of their material culture—all based in an expression of the supplication for water, animals in the hunt, increase, and transcendence through death. Indeed, a comparison of our visual epistemological

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technique with that of Boas, especially as the discussion is conducted in Boas’s great book A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native American Art is in order. The deconstruction of optical detail is infrequent in most treatises on native art. Any visual analysis will seem wanting in the face of the massive detail compiled by Boas in his description of the Kwakiutl blanket designs, for instance. But if Boas introduces a method of counting visual features on textiles, we could probably extend a similar technique to suggest how the visual memes are accounted for and modified by the UtoAztecan representers. Yet, Boas’s methods are confined to more recognizable forms of art. Boas extracts anatomical features in his analysis of blanket designs and reconstructs them to show how these designs are interwoven. How, then, does the snake ultimately appear in such creative vision? Just as Boas had shown for the Kwakiutl blanket design, the UtoAztecan elemental zigzagging snake-line is a paradigm instance, but the zigzagging line throws open possibilities of alterations. First, there is a simple zigzag pattern. What then are the basic modificatory types in the snake pattern. From the environmental time frames for these representations, we may recommend that the basic sinusoid was the archetype for all later transformations. The sinusoid was probably easier to etch on the rock surface—more elementary technology would have supported the sinusoid (Figure 14.2a). Also, there is a variation in examples from Figure 14.1 between the elementary snake-like wave pattern or sinusoid (as we are calling it here) and the New Mexico ( Jornada) zigzagging line. The wave-like snake has a larger wavelength and is also very similar to the sinusoidal trajectory of the movement of a real snake. The zigzagging Jornada style of the snake is more iconographically constrained by the art. The sinusoid is replaced by a suggestive geometrically angular wave structure (Figure 14.2b). The angles in Figure 14.2b stand to almost 90 degrees in the New Mexico ( Jornada) example. The Jornada New Mexico style frequency may be detected in the Chalchihuites pottery of Figure 14.1. If we extract the Chalchihuites styles as Figure 14.2c, then Figure 14.2b and Figure 14.2c are definitive later styles and found in variations in baskets and pottery across the Southwest. Again, with later Aztecs, we see a minor improvisation of the right angular Jornada or Yokuts style, which is evident in the Chupicuaro pottery exhibit of Figure 14.1 and the Sonoran Caborca pictogram style in Figure 14.2d. The fourth (Figure 14.2d) introduces two features: a reduction in the angle of the fall and an accentuation of the hypotenuse and an acute drop. Figure 14.2d is an advanced form that recurs in several ways: most notably Figure 14.2d also develops a short plateau as in the Chupicuaro and the very late Classic Mixtec architectural snake pattern of the examples of Figure 14.1.

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Yaqui Ancestral

Coso

Caborca Preclassic 400 CE Jornada, New Mexico

Mogollon Caborca

Mixtec 1100 CE Chupicuaro

Toltec Tlaloc Codex Laud

Mixtec 1100 CE

Figure 14.1. The snake-water mimetic or archetypal prayer pattern on different cultural manifests of the Uto-Aztecan civilization: Coso (California), Yaquí (Sonora), Jornada (New Mexico), Caborca (Sonora), Caborca-type pottery (Zacatecas), Mixtec relief in architectural styles and the definitive snake arms or adornments of the Codices, like the Codex Laud (as shown here). Drawing by authors.

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Figure 14.2a. The elemental line. Drawing by authors.

Figure 14.2b. The perpendicular indented snake-water line modification. Drawing by authors.

Figure 14.2c. The sharp angular snake-water transformation in pottery and related artifacts. Drawing by authors.

Figure 14.2d. The grid-like snake-water relief patterns common to architecture. Drawing by authors.

Figure 14.2a–d. The evolving Uto-Aztecan snake-water line. Drawings by authors.

The snake pattern is an universal template with very predictable variations in the Uto-Aztecan spectrum. We have demonstrated the motif ’s range in various art forms. This snake isomorphism in the culture should thus change the way we look at and interpret the art of the Uto-Aztecans. Our conclusion urges us to take a more serious view of the forager arts— and the unsuspecting depths that lurk in the apparently simple codes of Uto-Aztecan iconography. Each chapter in this book illuminates a pattern with respect to the medium. Perhaps one of the most important examples presents in Chupicuaro pottery. The coordinates of this culture, dating from the Preclassical period of about 400 BCE, demonstrates a subtle and improvisatory development of snake décor, mostly in some of its sculpture and examples of the pottery, vases, bowls, and pitchers discussed in Chapter 12. But, above all else, it is important to realize that what this implies on the cognitive level is that emotions are of far-reaching significance in the discussion of iconography; emotions are also more intrinsic to the question of rituals and art, and perception, than the formal elements of art are concerned. Leaping through

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introductory reports on the matter, we might therefore directly ask: What do the Uto-Aztecan symbolizers have to teach us about art, and why is what they teach us more significant than psychobiological notions that have been tentatively promoted in recent years? (Silvia 2005, 2007) Indeed, the notion of iconicity explains why aesthetic figures or diagrams are not merely produced because of ‘complexity fascination’ with visual prototypes; the resources of fascination are yet to be identified in various impulses— either including or excluding reasons of ‘arousal’. What this means is that the representation does not lead to mere visual arousal, but an arousal conditioned by collective memory—memory that is not located simply in a shamanic individual who made the drawings or the artists who sculpted the snake-like forms. The memory of the artist was part of a historical memory of that culture and the ‘values’ that were historically attributed to those visual icons. Furthermore, and most importantly, the Uto-Aztecan snake-line demonstrates that the whole process of affective iconicity involves not just collective semiotic memory, but also ‘affective’ memory, a long-term individual memory and evocations of working memory provoked by patterns of emotionally understood triggers of visual arousal and appraisal. Hence, visual representations are guided in this case by emotive effects: the zigzagging line can turn into a semblance of a fearsome snake, or a lightning shape or water. The iconographer’s memory of both natural forms and history are instrumental in this process.

The Neuroethology of Cultural Symbols Thus, sections of this book are dedicated to the theoretical underpinnings that explain why a certain visual metaphor has this kind of emotive-communicative efficacy that makes them powerful cultural and religious symbols. The cognitive anthropology of symbolism recommends that symbols draw their collective efficacy from resources deep within the human neurological system and are sustained and orchestrated by a complex set of psychosocial behaviors (Anati 1981; Mukhopadhyay et al. 2017). We strongly suggest that reactions to visual stimuli are both ethological and predictive. Hence, visual templates remain permanent references and objects of analysis, even after hundreds of centuries, even multiple millennia. These predictive stimuli are central to nearly all Uto-Aztecan cultural emergencies and correspond to the natural functions and ideas attributed to related symbolism in the later and more easily accessible ethnology of Uto-Aztecan oral traditions, mythology, folklore, and popular imagination. Just as religious iconography reflects social consensus and conditioning, it would be fitting to assume that symbols were intrinsically efficacious in their ability to af-

212 • Iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans

fect humans in the first place. Hence depictions, like those emblematized by the terrifying snakes in forager practices, suggest recognizable reflexes for humans. We demonstrate the ethological parameters to show why such symbols emerge and affect cultures throughout time. Though we have not referred explicitly to James Feibleman’s fundamental notions on the psychology of art appreciation (1946), we have dealt in detail with the same Feiblemanian theory of behavioral tendencies implicit in the formation of artistic reflexes. Artistic behaviors require the artist’s embeddedness and memory of what Feibleman called ‘values’ of the art. Are these ‘values’ not merely emotional valence states? These values would be implicit in the elemental snake-line and its modifications according to the change in chronology and geocultural environment of the artists. Indeed, as the concluding remarks on the snake-line pattern shows, Uto-Aztecan iconicity had this resilience of memory. The iconicity of the Uto-Aztecans creates an example of emotional resilience of ritual and aesthetic symbolism. There is no doubt that, of all human achievements, the symbolic representations, mythic or visual, whatever the case may be, is of supreme human value because it sets a context of behaviors against the memorial past and emotions of the human animal. The resilience of emotive symbols has the ability to consolidate a social collective but it also has the ability to transform and express itself through variations and mutations of culture and transference to other cultures of other epochs and locations. Uto-Aztecan iconography demonstrates this symbolic memorial order of the emotional valences—and the negotiations with death and a belief in rebirth, just as the skin-shedding snake reptile manifests in its life cycle.

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Index adorant, definition, 124; image, 117, 123; Maringer, J., 122, 224; posture, 76, 122–24 almanac, in the Codices, 139, 141; directional, 142 altithermal, geological time, 9, 34, 40, 88–89; post- 127. See also Holocene American Southwest, culture of the, xviii– xx; 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 27–28, 31, 38, 40, 61–62, 87–88, 94, 96–97, 99, 103, 107–12, 119, 127, 129, 143, 148–49, 157–58, 168, 175–76, 179, 187–89, 193, 205, 208; and Greater Southwest, xxi, 7, 9 , 41, 107, 110, 180, 203; ecology, 27–28, 38, 40, 92, 160; migration, 22; petroglyphs of the, 11, 38, 79, 81–82, 99, 195 Amerindian, 14, 178, 232; the Great Basin- 86–88; Paleo- 90 animacy, definitions of, 72, 126–27, 223, 229; tipping-point of, 72, 223 animal-human, symbols, 9, 13, 45, 47, 49, 50, 63, 65, 67, 74, 80, 106, 107, 118, 122–23, 125, 131, 150, 154, 157, 193, 218; and therianthrope, 119, 193 Animal-Master, 12–13, 58, 65, 69, 81, 95, 107, 108, 117, 120, 125, 218 Animal-Mistress, 107–8, 117, 120; Coso, 150 animism, 6, 76, 214, 219, 227, 232; BirdDavid, Nurit, 66, 73, 82, 120, 214 anthropomorphism, Campbell Grant, 76, 118, 188; images signifying, 12–13, 19, 28, 34, 38, 45, 52, 61, 65, 70–71, 74, 76, 78, 81–85, 92, 95, 100, 102, 104, 106–8, 112, 115, 118, 120, 122, 129, 134–35, 136, 150, 153–54, 157, 163–65, 167–68,

185, 188, 190–91, 193–96, 202, 217, 224, 229; Maddock, Caroline, 47, 124, 126, 154, 193–94, 196; numinous, 78, 82, 100, 119, 188 archetype, xxi, 31, 42, 54, 109, 119, 127, 129–30, 152, 169, 178, 208, 226 Aridamerica, xx, 10, 16, 41, 61, 96, 112, 136, 145, 158, 160, 168, 172, 175–76, 180, 184, 193 Archaic, culture, 3, 23, 25, 28, 31, 41, 55–56, 77, 99, 112, 129, 153; period, 3, 20, 59, 84, 88, 92–97, 110, 153, 176, 187, 196, 214, 218, 220, 222, 231 array, examples, 17, 51, 64–65, 78, 117, 193, 206; Gibsonian, 64 artiodactyl, 92, 109 atlantes, 132; at the pyramids of Tula, 132 atlatl, in petroglyphs, 17–18, 25, 44, 67, 89, 106, 112, 118, 123, 154, 197; use of, 25, 89, 99, 110 axis mundi, 117, 130, 150, 193; and concentric circle, 141, 150 Aztec, in the Codices, 11, 59, 84–85; culture, xix, 3, 4, 6, 13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 28, 49, 51, 54–55, 77, 92, 93, 95, 111, 113, 119, 126, 132, 133, 135, 138–39, 155–61, 166–67, 169, 174, 176, 180, 192, 195–96, 199; gods of, 5, 12, 13, 59, 69, 85, 107, 111–12, 156, 192; iconography, 13–14, 22, 69, 107, 133, 136, 148, 155, 159, 206–8; and maize, 95; and Maya, 14, 16, 31, 76, 92– 95, 111, 133, 145, 158, 188, 192–93; mother goddesses of, 202–4; origin, xx, xxi, 3, 16, 96–97 Aztec-Tanoan, 21, 87–88 Aztlan, 158, 222, 229

Index • 235

bacab, myth, 203; in petroglyphs, 94, 203 Basal-notched, definition, 99; depiction of, 99; diagram of, 105; projectile point types, 99, 105 Bighorn sheep, 9, 25, 44, 92, 94, 106, 109, 115, 123, 149, 152–54, 190, 217–18, 232–33; rock art, 44, 123 Boas, Franz, 207–8, 214 Borgia, Codex, 53, 62, 85, 112, 140–43, 150, 213, 225 Boyd, Caroline, 13, 14, 41, 55, 120, 148–49, 155–56, 158, 214 Boturini, Codex, 3, 85, 96, 112, 139, 160, 178, 222, 228 Buschmann, Johann Karl, 11, 17, 21; definition of Uto-Aztecan family of languages, 11, 14, 21 Caborca, rock art of, 65, 67, 121–22, 208–9 Carot, Patricia, 175, 179–80, 184, 215 catapault, 110 Chaco Canyon, 94, 148; renaissance, 111; trade, 93–94, 111 Chalchihuites, 175, 178–79, 181, 184, 206, 208, 216; people, 175, 178–79, 181, 184; pottery, 181, 206, 208 Chemeheuvi, 50, 112, 120 Chibchan, language, 14 Chicomecóatl, 203 Chichimeca, definition of, 94; people, 94–95 Chichen Itza, 16, 148, 189 Chimalma, 203 China Lake, rock art of, 34, 147 Chupicuaro culture, 175, 178, 185; location, 175, 179; people, 179–81, 183–85; period, 176, 179; pottery, 177, 179–80, 185 Cihuacoatl, 35–36, 156, 192, 203 circlism, motif, 135–36 Citlalicue, 203 Classic, cultural expressions from, 13, 59, 63, 85, 94, 134, 138, 148, 178, 181, 193, 208; period references, xxi, 13, 16, 43, 51, 56, 59–60, 93–95, 106, 111, 117, 138, 149, 158, 162, 171, 176, 179–80, 182–83, 185, 188, 192–93, 214–16, 228–31 Clovis, 87–88 Coatlique, 14, 107, 152, 154, 191, 195–98

Codex, 195, 209, 213 Codices, xx, 2–3, 11, 18–19, 51, 53, 55–56, 61–63, 69, 78, 84–85, 111–12, 119, 134, 139–40, 142–43, 145, 149–50, 153, 160, 167, 172–73, 189, 193, 196–97, 209; Borbonicus, 160, 200; Borgia, 53, 85, 112, 138–43, 150, 192, 203–4, 213; Boturini, 3, 85, 96, 112, 139, 160, 178; Fervery-Mayer xiv, 139, 141, 144, 150; Florentine, 53, 55–56, 59, 85, 149, 191–92; Huichapan, 85; Laud, xvii, 209; Talleriano-Ramensis, 112; Vaticanus, 192, 203 Comanche, 77 Composites, visual, 41 core index, presence, 56, 61, 195, 206; in Uto-Aztecan rock art, 17–18 Coso, rock art site, 10, 13, 18–19, 42–44, 46, 49–50, 55–56, 61, 66, 76, 79–80, 82, 92, 100, 102–4, 106–8, 115–18, 122, 128, 131, 146–48, 150, 153–57, 193, 197, 202, 209, 217–18; anthropomorph, 117–18, 120, 122–23, 126–27, 131, 138, 193, 224, 226; projectile-point depictions, 152, 218; rock art, 118, 120, 123–24, 129–30, 149, 152–53, 156–57, 217–19, 223, 225, 228; trade routes, 153; the unknown people of, 157–58, 190; visual indices, 152, 154, 156, 193, 217–18 concentric, circle motif, 10, 17, 39, 44–46, 49, 62, 65, 124–26, 128–29, 136, 138, 141, 157, 166, 188, 191, 226; head motif, 82, 84, 126–27, 134; itari mat, 131; shapes in rock art, 131, 136, 138, 141, 172–73; visual index of, 131, 172–73, 181, 186 Cora, or Corachol language, 16, 22, 112, 175, 226, 227 corner-notched, depictions of, 99, 105, 150 counterintuitiveness, 70–71, 228 Coyolxauhqui, 197, 201 Cro-Magnon, 71 Cuitzeo, lake, 180 dart point, depiction of, 18, 43, 106–7, 118, 123, 150, 152, 154; weapon, 94, 100 Dawkins, R. 70, 216; concept of memes, 206

236 • Index death, consciousness, 3–4, 205, 207; death after death, 85; and rebirth, 1, 4, 28, 41, 44, 85, 91, 100, 132–33, 135, 140, 156, 196, 202–3, 205–7, 212; theme in UtoAztecans, 1, 3–5, 27–28, 38, 41, 44, 67, 70, 89, 112, 132–33, 142, 152, 162, 202, 205–6 deco-bodied, 45, 47, 80, 152–53 deity, 65, 107, 112, 124–25, 129–30, 156, 190, 193, 213, 235; female, 146, 189, 195, 202; horned, 92; human shaped, 28, 34, 92, 94, 117, 129; hunting, 107–8, 118, lunar, 155; mother-earth, 187; obsidian, 112, 140; plumed snake, 14, 49; of rain, 41, 59, 163, 172; snake deity, 55–56, 59, 95, 97, 112, 140, 192, 195–96, 201; snake mother, 55, 109, 112, 203, 206 del Bajío, the region of, 53, 54, 55, 61, 169, 170, 180 De Sahagun, Bernard, 28, 31, 55–56, 59, 111, 112, 155, 160, 173, 192, 197, 202 desert, 38, 40, 49, 120, 166, 174; the Aridamerican, 175, 184; Arizona, 111; Mojave, xx, 3, 19, 23, 33, 41, 50, 61, 67, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 92, 93, 94, 129 134, 137, 145, 148, 149, 154, 176, 178; Sonora, 3, 22, 33 94, 128; Southern California, 20, 22, 49, 111 Desert West, 11, 19, 22, 33, 34, 61, 62, 89, 90, 92, 106, 160, 176, 178, 189, 197 Dinwoody Wind River Range, territory, 119; petroglyphs, 119 divinity, animal, 115; anthropomorphic, 13, 51–52, 100, 153, 157; bighorn sheep, 115; deer, 115; feminine, 152–53, 197; Huasteca, 118; lunar, 202; mother earth, 196–97; rain, 166, 172, 174; sky-bearer, 157; snake, 13, 95, 115, 133, 135, 155, 196–97, 201–3; symbols of, 22, 69 eco-symbol, 5 Elko Series petroglyph, 43, 100–1, 105–6, 150, 152 Embodied Cognition, 65–66, 69, 74, 206 Emotively Disposed Icons, (EDI), 65 emotive, symbols, 1, 65, 67, 69, 71–72, 74, 77, 206–7, 211–12

Epiclassic, 53, 56–57, 149, 159, 163, 165, 168, 174, 209 ethnogenesis, of the Aztecs, 9 ethnolinguistic, 26–27, 117, 148, 156, 165 ethology, definition of, 212; cultural, 69 eye-of-god, symbol, 81, 84; in Huichol ethnography, 83–84, 117, 121, 129–30, 186; ojo de dios (Spanish of ), 84, 129, 131 face, iconic feature, 45–46, 69, 71–73, 78, 124–27, 129, 136, 208; recognition, 71–73, 126–29 Feibleman, James, 212 Fejervary Mayer, Codex, 141, 144, 150 Fewkes, Jesse Walters, 2, 12, 31, 175; on Hopi pottery, 12, 31; on snake dance, 2, 31 Fifth-sun, 145–46, 150, 157 Five Pilgrim, 146–47, 150, 153–54 forager, culture, 11, 13–14, 23, 25, 27–28, 34, 41, 95–97, 102, 138–39, 145, 148, 158, 160, 163, 195–96; hunting animals of, 26; hunting practices of, 12, 26, 33, 82, 92, 96–97, 110–11, 145, 212; icon, 14, 17–18, 20, 27, 34, 41, 54, 56, 61, 65–67, 82, 84–85, 95, 102, 136, 145, 152, 166, 186–88, 210, 212; mother goddess, 192–93, 195–96; petroglyph, 9, 22 Fowler, Catherine, 7, 20, 21, 23, 25, 51, 118, 122, 152 gaze, 72–73, 85, 126 gendering, identities in rock art, 78, 136, 188; tokens, 78 gesticulations, 65, 69, 117 Gila River Basin, 20–21, 24 glyphs, symbolic, 41, 94, 112 goggle eyes, iconic motif, 66, 69 gopher snake, 35–36, 38, 58, 97, 190, 197 Great Basin, cultural ecology, 1, 11–12, 27, 33–36, 38, 58, 88, 92; human movements, 7, 9, 14, 22–23, 41, 50, 86–90, 99, 127; iconography/archetypes xx, xxi, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 28, 31, 58, 61, 106–7, 122, 128–31, 147, 149, 155, 163, 193, 196, 202, 205; linguistic groups in, 118, 120; material culture expressions. 100, 110, 113, 158, 176, territory, 17–18

Index • 237

Greater American Southwest, xxi, 9, 14, 27, 62, 81, 97, 107–8, 110, 112, 129, 143, 158, 180 Guachichiles, 165, 170, 174 habitus, 3, 7, 16, 168 haplogroup, matching DNA, 9, 14; UtoAztecan, 9 Hill, Jane, 20–23, 25–26 Hohokam, 14, 62, 121, 175, 179, 180, 184 Holocene, Holocene Climatic Optimum, 8, 20, 34, 73, 76, 86, 88, 89–92 homeland, 3, 10, 14, 20, 99, 157–58; Huichol-Zapotec Split, 185; NUA, 23; PUA, 20–21, 23 homologous culture, 29, 118 Hopi, ethnology, 14, 16, 23, 31, 37, 56, 78, 88, 92, 97, 111, 127, 129, 134, 136, 175–76, 178–80, 188, 191, 193; cultural expressions, 18–20, 32, 41, 45–46, 52, 59, 61–62, 79, 83, 88, 92, 97, 115, 127, 129, 133–34, 136–37, 180, 188–89, 191, 194, 196, 199; kachina, 13; kiva, 134, 141; snake dance ceremony, 2, 31 horizon astronomy, 129, 134–36, 138 Huasteca, 16, 103, 117–18, 140, 148, 176, 178 Huichol, eye-of-god motif, 84, 125, 129–31, 186; people, xx, 12, 14, 31, 95, 112, 115, 158, 185; iconography, 37, 62, 82–84, 120–21, 136, 138–39, 141, 148, 150, 156, 175–76, 186, 191 Huitzilopochtli, 85, 140, 197, 202–3 Hultkräntz, A., 33–34, 81, 89–90, 120, 123, 126, 130, 153, 188, 190 hunting tools, 9–11, 27, 99–100, 102, 118, 152 iconicity, cultural, 2–3, 11–12, 27, 92–93, 188; definition of, 2–3; ethological, 69, 211–12; of a female-mother, 189, 193, 202ff.; of image, xx, 4, 28, 61, 90, 136, 207; and memory, xx, 4, 56, 179, 206–7, 211; psychology of, xx; of rain, 58, 159; of snake, 13, 58, 90, 205; as symbolic transmission, 64–65, 69, 134, 136, 139, 149, 158–59, 205

iconography, definitions, xx, 2, 11, 16; of maize, 13, snake, 3, 9, 12–13 indexical, definitions, 28, 30, 156; signs, 22–23, 26–29, 38, 45, 65, 68, 76, 153; visual, 3, 20 inframundo, 112, 202 intentionality, psychology of, 70 Itza, 17, 96, 148, 18; Itzean cultural memorials, 16, 53, 56, 192 Itztli, 140 jade, 3, 86, 93, 95, 148 Jiménez Moreno, W., 160, 169–70 Jornada, style expressions, 54, 208–9 Kawaiisu, cultural expressions of, 48, 58, 109, 117–20, 125, 128–29, 157, 190, 197; people, 8, 37, 41, 77, 108, 120, 128, 155; Yahwera, 119, 125, 130, 190. See also Yahwera Kanina Keraudren, J., 16, 96, 178 kinesic, 65, 76–77, 117 kiva, ceremonial structure, 62, 134, 141 Kwakiutl, 207–8 La Llorona, mythical motif of, 203 La Pintada, rock arts of, 10, 41, 65 Lamb, Sidney, 23, 118 Levine, Marc, and Carballo on obsidian, 12 Little Lake Period, petroglyph prehistory of, 55, 90, 94, 100, 106, 153 Little Petroglyph Canyon, petroglyphs, 34, 38, 56, 79, 94, 116, 147, 149–50, 152–56, 197, 201 living gestures, theory of, 73 Luiseño, 2, 41, 112, 190–91 Lumholtz, Carl, 17, 130–31, 188 Macro Mayan, language, 14; cultural spectrum, 16 maize, cultivation, 10–11, 19, 21–23, 25, 65, 78, 95, 156–57, 160; deity, 28, 97; geographical emergence, 25, 184; iconography, 13, 17, 27, 80, 95, 97; vocabulary, 21, 25–26 mat pattern, icons, 79–80 Mesoamerica, culture, xxi, 7, 10–12, 16, 21–23, 27, 31; geography, xviii, xxi, 1, 3,

238 • Index 14, 17, 20, 23, 27, 31; iconic motifs, 12, 21–22 metate, the hunting tool, 25 Merrill, William L. 23, 26, 88 Mictla, sculptural motifs of, 2, 19, 56, 61 Mictecacihuatl, 202 Mictlantecuhtli, 5 mining, activity, 86, 94–95; in jade, 93; in obsidian, 93, 110, 112; and trade, 86, 92–93, 103, 176, 178, 188; in turquoise, 93 Mixe-Zoque, language, 14, 21 Mixtec, cultural expression, 2, 14, 41, 54, 56, 85, 97, 111, 114, 135, 139, 142, 208, 209; Mixtec-Zapotec of Monte Alban, 176 Moctezuma, 94, 141; Stone at Tizoc of, 139 Mogollon, cultural expression, 62, 179, 209 Mojave Desert trail, 3 moon goddess, 149–50, 155, 156, 202 Mother goddess iconography, 12, 13, 63, 130, 154–55, 187, 188, 189, 197, 200–4; of Aztec, 12, 154–55, 200–4; Coatlique as mother goddess, 14, 154, 197; cosmic symbol, 187–88; Coyolxauqui, 197; Tonantzin, 14, 56, 154; Klauber’s observations on, 41; mother of animals, 108–9, 120, 130; snake mother association, 12–13, 41, 55, 63, 77–78, 107, 109, 148, 155, 189, 206 mytheme, in Uto-Aztecan culture, 94, 146, 149; Coso motifs, 149 Nahuatl, language, 2, 28, 31, 41, 49, 53, 54, 112, 144, 149, 150, 156; oral traditions of, 150, 157, 191–92, 195 Neolithic, cultural referent, 92 Neurath, Johannes, on Huichol iconography, 14, 130–31, 138 The Newberry Period, of iconography, 106, 152–53 Nicah Mopohu, 192 nierika, symbol, 82–84, 117, 129–31, 136, 141, 186 nimbus, effect, 66 Northern Origin Hypothesis (NOH), 21, 23

Northern Paiute, 41, 155 Northern-Uto-Aztecan (NUA), 16, 21, 23, 25, 41, 55–56, 58, 76–78, 95–96, 113, 136, 176, 184 Numic Spread, cultural, 82, 111, 125, 179; affiliated groups, 22, 27, 89, 106, 118, 128, 155; possible mythical antecedents, 155, 178 obsidian, crafts, 111, 112, 113, 114; hunting tools made of, 99–100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 140, 193, 202; Itztli, 140; precious stone, 3, 9, 12, 16, 18, 93, 95, 103, 110, 111; religion, 202, symbolism, 12; trade trajectories, 153 ojo de dios, symbol in Huichol, 62, 129 O’odham, 88, 97, 175, 191, 193 Olmecs, 9, 16, 91, 185 Omecíhuatl, 203 Orans, posture, 77 Oto-Mangue, 14, 21 Otomi, 7, 112, 165, 170, 171, 174 Otopame, language group, 117 Paiute, xx, 41, 50, 77, 88, 117–18, 155, 190, 197 Paquime, 11, 158 Panamint, 117 Patterned Body Anthropomorph (PBA), 74, 76–79, 115 –20, 122–24, 126– 27, 129, 131, 136, 138, 152, 188 Petroglyph, of animals, 92; anthropomorph, 12, 31, 45–46, 100, 119, 136 (see also PBA); Coso Range regional, 10, 44, 55, 115, 117, 152–54, 190; del Bajío regional, 169, 184; emotive effects of, 77–79; forager referents in, 66–67, 193; Hopi ancestral, 189; Pacific coast (Sonora and Nayarit) forms, 161, 168, 186; of the extended Southwest, 42, 92, 97, 146; Great Basin types, 41, 100; projectile point symbolism, 9, 100, 102, 104–7, 193; symbols, 3, 13, 64, 74, 94, 97, 195–96; Tzintzuntzan, 159–60 personhood, in icons, 70, 82 phallus, symbol of, 71 pictograms, xxi, 51, 62, 77, 160, 162–65, 168–69, 207–8

Index • 239

Pima, 2, 16, 24, 88, 192; Pima-Bajo Pinedale Glacial Maximum, 7 Pinyon Creek, petroglyph formation, 151, 154 Pinyon Peak, petroglyphic symbol, 150, 152, 154 Plazuelas, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 171–73 Pleistocene, 7, 9, 90 Plumed snake deity, 2, 4, 14, 34, 45, 140, 190 Pochteca, 146 pottery, xxi, 13, 51, 59, 60, 62, 64, 175, 177, 179–81, 184, 196, 205–6, 208–10 Preclassic, visual expressions, 176, 180, 188, 196, 210 Preuss, Konrad, 12, 14, 17, 83, 138, 175 Projectile, 9, 18, 43, 66, 94, 99, 100–7, 109–10, 112, 140, 152, 190, 193 projectile point, depictions of, 9, 18, 43, 66, 94, 99, 100, 102–10, 112, 140–41, 152, 190, 193; Elko series depictions, 100; Coso projectile depictions, 100; Rose Springs, 100, 106 Proto-Northern-Uto Aztecan (PNUA), 16, 80 Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA), 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 21, 23, 25–26, 31–32, 38, 87, 88–89, 92, 112, 155–56, 176, 178, 197 Provider, 58, 123, 155, 188, 192 Quetzalcoatl, god, 14, 95–96, 111, 133, 135, 191, 196, 200, 203; divine human ancestor, 95–96; plumed snake deity, 14; snake human composite, 96; symbolism, 14, 133, 191, 196, 200, 203; and Tezcatlipoca, 111, 135; Venus association, 203 Quiché, 87; Mayan branch, 158 quincunx, fiveness symbol, 150, 203; icon, 126, 136, 148 rain, deity forms, 34, 41, 53, 54, 66, 95, 166, 172; ecological motif of, 28, 40, 50, 117; icon, 46, 58, 161, 174, natural phenomenon, 28, 40, 50, 117, 119, 153, 159–60, 162, 168; rain curtain, 58; snake-rain composite, 2, 41, 58, 68, 95, 206; various symbols of, 28, 40, 45, 46,

50, 58, 77, 78, 81, 159, 162, 163, 166–67, 173–74; Tlaloc, 53, 54, 59, 68, 95, 166; virga rain (rain curtain symbol), 58 rattlesnake, as deity, 58, 190, 197; diamond shape formations, 185; iconography of, 40, 46, 58, 156, 186; Klauber’s early research, 40–41; natural presence, 35, 36, 37, 38; patterns, 45, 46–48, 56, 97, 134, 156, 185, 197 rectilinear, forms of deities, 83; petroglyph formations, 117; ritual patterns, 117 representationals, 17; as anthropomorphs, 117, 129, 152; as deities, 23, 73, 152; functional process of, 69, 73, 164, 180 Rose Springs, projectile-point petroglyphs at, 100, 106 Savanna, 7, 40 shaman, definition of, 4; iconic drawings of, 10, 13, 58, 61, 84, 107, 117–18, 122–24, 130, 133, 153–55, 157, 176, 188; contemporary practicing, 5–6, 31, 50, 134, 136, 152, 166, 169, 187, 211; beliefs of, 4, 6 Shoshone, xx, 16, 21, 35–36, 41, 77, 88, 129, 133, 140; Timbisha-, 117, 133, 143; Wind River, 155 show-off behavior, of shaman heroes, 109 spirit, of animals, 58, 118; anthropomorphic, 28, 73, 78, 81, 95, 120, 129; of bighorn, 44, 115; caretaker, 28; deity forms, 28, 45, 67, 71, 75, 118, 142, 155, 185, 188; of the departed, 6; gamekeepers, 119–20; gender indicators on, 28, 45, 203; guardian, 6, 48, 58, 118, 123; media of shamans, 95, 133; snake associations, 203; and spiritual agency, 65, 132; warrior, 2; world of, 48, 126, 130 sipapu, 130 sky-bearer, myth, 146–47, 152–54, 157–58 Southern-Uto-Aztecan (SUA) 95, 176 snake, as an animal, 3, 33–35, 38, 41, 58, 63, 89–90, 92, 123, 154, 212; an animal index, 26–27, 29; anthropomorph, 9–10, 13, 19, 28, 34, 39, 44, 52, 56, 65, 95, 123, 188, 193, 196; association with hunting tool, 10, 17, 100, 103; astral, 133–35; avian human features in depictions

240 • Index of, 42, 45, 55, 150, 188; and birthing symbols, 45–46, 141, 194; the bull snake, 35; child association, 167; dance, 2, 31; and death motif, 3–5, 132, 205; deity of Uto-Aztecans, 55, 58–59, 65, 85, 91, 95, 115, 140, 142, 153, 162, 190, 192, 196, 201; the diamond backed, 35, 38; with diamond chain patterns, 185; with fang, 77; female or woman, 189, 192, 202; and the Fibonacci, 182–83; the gopher, 35, 97, 197; Kukulkan, 192; isomorphism, 210; lunar, 146; and maize, 27, 97; metaphor of, 1–4, 6, 13–14, 19, 31, 38, 40–41, 46–47, 56–58, 97, 102, 132–33, 153, 155, 192, 196, 211; path, 156; of oral tradition, 2; plumed, 2, 14, 49, 85, 140; presence of, 1, 3; and rain, 2, 41, 46, 95, 161, 196; the rattle-snake, 36–38, 41, 47, 97, 197; river similitude, 171; s-shaped, 31, 152, 156; snake-withoutmaize, 27; snake holding entity, 43–44, 85, 95, 119, 123, 149–50, 152, 154–55, 196–97, 206, 209; snake-index, 32, 42, 44, 54, 56, 61–62, 67, 157–58, 212; snake-mother, 12–14, 41, 55, 77–78, 107, 112, 115, 140, 146, 155, 189, 192, 196, 203; and skirt, 45, 56, 107, 109, 197, 201, 203; shamanic intercessor to, 30–31, 157, 176; and spiritual circuit, 31; and sun, 155, 197; and time, 132; as Tlaloc, 95; Uto-Aztecan words for, 25; and water, 5, 17, 22, 24, 38, 40, 51, 53–54, 60, 90–92, 94, 163–67, 173, 179–80 184–85, 206–7, 209–10; zigzagging (Preclassic) 196, 208 squash blossom hair whorl, 194, 197, 199 Southern-Uto-Aztecan (SUA) 21, 23, 26, 95, 97, 111, 157, 176 Takic, 8, 22, 47, 128 Tamapah, 155 Tanoan, 21, 42, 87–88 Tarascan, calendar, 145; people, 21, 54, 160–61, 165, 170, 178; sculpture, 53; water-snake anthropomorphs of the, 168, 180, 185, 196 Tatutsi Maxa Kwaxi, 118 Tapuat, 189, 191

Telleriano-Ramensis, Codex, 62, 112, 198 Templo Mayor, of Tenochtitlan, 4, 5, 68, 161, 167, 201 Tenexxochitl, 156 Tenochtitlan, 4, 12, 15, 85, 86, 94–95, 112, 161, 176, 206 Tepehuano, culture, 37, 129–30 Tezcatlipoca, 111–13, 135, 144 Tewi, 125, 129–13 Theology, Christian, 6; Indigenous, 6, 205; Mesoamerican, 5, 49 Thunder, symbols of, 40, 54, 59, 62, 80, 155, 163, 167 Tianquiztli, 140 Timbisha, 41, 88, 117, 133–34, 143, 155, 176 Tlaloc, 53–55, 59, 61, 67–68, 95, 159, 161–64, 166–67, 169, 171–73, 206, 210 Toci, 206 Temazcalteci, 206 Tohono-O’dham, 175 Toltec, 2, 13, 16, 97, 111–12, 132–33, 175–76, 180, 209 tonally, 203 Tonantzin, 14, 56, 107, 154, 191–93, 203 totem, belief, 29; practice, 3, 29, 74, 107, 127, 132; references, 62, 66 Totonacan, 14 Tubatulabal, 22, 41, 108, 112, 118, 120, 134, 191 Tula, 2–3, 19, 94, 97, 111–12, 132, 135, 158, 160, 193, 207 typology, 16, 34, 62, 80, 106, 120, 122 Tzintzuntzan, 159, 164, 168, 170 Upper Paleolithic, 71 Uxmal, 16, 189 Vagina dentada, iconic motif, 107 vigraha, 73 visual metaphor, 40, 131, 135, 190, 206, 211 volatiles, 63, 141 water, 13, agriculture, 28, 41, 59; and desiccation, 40; iconography, 17, 22, 24, 28, 34, 40, 58, 61; and snake synthesis, 5, 22, 24, 38, 41, 51, 53–54, 59–60

Index • 241

Western Pluvial Lakes Tradition, 88, 90 wixarika, the iconic map of, 136 Xochicalco, 2, 55–56, 94, 98, 126 Xochitlicue, 203 Yahwera, the Kawaiisu god, 58, 77, 108, 118–19, 130, 190, Yahwera kahnina, 125, 190, 197

Yaqui, 16, 143, 208, 2010 Zapotec-Maya, 103 zigzag line, anon petroglyph, 13, 19, 47–48, 123; in pottery, 181, 196; as thunder, 62; d snake, 10, 13, 34, 47–48, 51, 207–8, 211; as snake-water symbol, 163, 171–72, 180–81, 206; as a water symbol, 53, 61, 90, 167, 174