The delicate pressure flaking that produced the superbly made lanceolate projectile points and knives of the Late Paleolithic reveals a degree of attention to manufacture that far exceeded purely functional requirements. Archaeologists do not know whether the diversity and refinement of the implement types resulting from this extra effort is accounted for by an aspiration for greater creativity and beauty or by a more utilitarian need, such as a desire by indigenous groups to differentiate themselves through a distinguishing ‘signature’ as they became more territorially bounded. Whatever the case, to the extent it can be called art, the effort was applied to practical implements.
Figure 7 The Tequixquiac carved camelid sacrum.
The earliest known example in Middle America - and indeed one of the oldest in the New World - of what would be a purely aesthetic work, is a carved camelid sacrum, fashioned in the shape of what appears to be the head of a peccary or canid (Figure 7). The object was discovered in 1870 at Tequixquiac, in the Central Mexican state of Hidalgo, deeply buried in a thick layer of Late Pleistocene sediments known as the Upper Becerra formation. For many years the carving’s antiquity was questioned, but subsequent investigation at the Tequixquiac site revealed its association with Late Paleoindian stone and bone tools and the remains of camel, ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon, and other Ice Age animals.
Also found in the Upper Becerra deposits, adjacent to Lake Texcoco at a location less than two kilometers away from the ‘Iztapan mammoth’ finds, was a female skeleton, buried in a face-down, flexed position. Because it was felt that the pit in which the skeleton was placed might be intrusive from a more recent stratigraphic level, the antiquity of the burial, like that of the carved camelid sacrum, was questioned. Subsequent fluorine and nitrogen analyses of bone samples tended to verify the contemporaneity of the Tepexpan skeleton with the nearby mammoths but more recent radiocarbon analysis indicates that the bones may be only 2000 years old. If the earlier date is correct Tepexpan Woman would be the earliest example of an intentional human burial, suggesting that by the Late Paleoindian period belief in an afterlife was part of Middle American ideology.
World History
