Vessel

Vessel representing a male figure seated with open bent legs. He has a headdress made of crossed bands that attach a horn-shaped appendage to the forehead. In the back part of the vessel, the neck is short and truncated. He wears a loincloth and a necklace made out of shells arranged in a petal formation. Figures with a horn on their head appear in different archaeological sites in Mesoamerica, covering a wide chronological and stylistic span; but this element is particularly represented in the ceramics from Colima. Following Furst (Shamanic Symbolism, Transformation and Deities in west Mexican Funerary Art. 1998), the horn constitutes an almost universal symbol associated to supernatural and shamanic power since ancient times. It has been suggested that the Colima pieces with this attribute could represent shamans or guardians of their tombs. These figures are usually part of the grave goods from the so-called “shaft tombs”, which consist of a deeply excavated funerary chamber connected to the surface by a well or vertical shaft. Archaeology interprets these tombs as symptomatic in societies with a certain degree of complexity, with an internally hierarchical social structure whose elites would have participated in well-organised exchange networks at a regional level.