Earspools in Mexico

Earspools (also known as earflares or earplugs) served throughout the pre-Columbian Americas not only as aesthetic devices but also as signifiers of social status. In the Postclassic Era, the act of piercing the earlobes of children was practiced among the Aztec during the quadrennial ceremony of Izcalli as part of a ritual program of events marking maturation (Sahagun, 1951a; Joyce, 2000, p. 479). The actual wearing of earspools, however, only began when an Aztec youth reached the status of adulthood in his or her mid-teens. Earspools in earlier contexts in the Basin of Mexico and in other parts of the pre-Columbian Americas may have served similarly to indicate adulthood or other aspects of social identity. Often finely crafted, earspools could be fashioned from materials ranging from clay, wood, and shell to copper, gold, silver, and such stones as slate, obsidian, serpentine, jade, turquoise, and rock crystal. In Mexico earspools can be divided into four basic types: solid cylinders, rings, flared rings with closed throats, and composite forms. Technologies for producing earspools varied from hand modeling, molding, and assemblage to sawing, chipping, and abrading. Although nearly all figurines excavated at Basin-of-Mexico formative-period sites depict men and women wearing earspools, examples of these ornaments themselves have not been recovered in numbers consistent with the populations of these sites. George C. Vaillant (1930, p. 38) speculated that many formative-period earspools may have been fashioned from organic materials that disintegrated over time. Perishable materials were certainly employed to make earspools more than a thousand years later, as the sixteenth-century missionary Bernardino Sahagun (1951a, p. 151) noted Aztec men wearing wooden earspools painted to simulate turquoise. Vaillant’s report on excavations at Ticoman (1931, pp. 295–296) provides a concise typology and chronology of formative-period terracotta earspools in the Basin of Mexico. Early examples, typically measuring between 2 and 3.5 cm in diameter and 1–1.5 cm in width, were modeled by hand as solid cylinders with flattened faces and slightly concave sides (Fig. 1). Ranging in color from buff to black (the former fired in an oxidation and the latter a reduction atmosphere), they were sometimes slipped and burnished. Occasionally they were incised with simple linear or punctuate patterns, and rare examples were indented on one face. Color was added through pigments coldapplied to surfaces, since glazes were unknown in the pre-Columbian Americas. Ring-shaped terracotta earspools, a second ear-ornament type appearing in formative-period Mexico, were modeled in clay from which all coarse inclusions had been carefully removed. Thin walled, these varied in shape from hollow cylinders with a slight concavity at the midsection to straight-sided cylinders with walls at both ends turned outward to form circular flanges. Such earspools resemble pulley wheels (Fig. 1). Occasionally the flanges were modeled, and in some cases, pigments were applied to the surfaces. A third type of formative-period terracotta earspool found at Basin-of-Mexico sites (Vaillant’s “ornate” type) consists of a hollow cylinder with an outward flare at one end. The throat of the flared end was closed to form a throat disk, a circular wall sometimes pierced with geometric openwork designs or carved with relief imagery. Too fragile for burnishing, such earspools were often coated