Spring 2006

Karen E. Stothert :: Feeding the Living and the Dead: Food Symbolism in the Art of Ancient Ecuador

Several categories of Pre-Columbian ceramic objects used in the prehistoric period in coastal Ecuador express food themes. These vessels and figurines become more intelligible as one explores the symbolic significance of food and drink in Amerindian culture. The objects illustrated here have been selected from a large number of artifacts that express food themes and which are found in the collection of the Museum of the Central Bank of Ecuador (Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo, Guayaquil), and in private collections in Ecuador. Many other objects found in collections of Pre-Columbian art from Ecuador show no explicit links to food and drink, but because most of the museum objects recovered from ancient graves are functional containers, their association with eating and drinking is implicit.

Ceremonial meals were central in performing social relations among many of the ancient peoples of America, including those of Ecuador. Throughout history communities linked together by kinship celebrated their unity by feasting together, and through the sacrifice of food people expressed their relationships with ancestral spirits. Later in the prehistoric period the concept of ceremonial meals and sacrifice to supernatural spirits was appropriated by religious and political elites in order to achieve their special social and political goals.

 

The Feast of the Dead

The contemporary celebration of the Day of the Dead by indigenous people in coastal Ecuador is described here because it helps us to envision aspects of the thought and practice of Native Americans in the present and in the past.

For the people of Santa Elena, the best day of the year is
Figure 1 the Day of the Dead, which corresponds to All Souls and All Saints in the Catholic calendar. On these two days people visit and renew the tombs of their departed relatives, but the most important part of the celebration takes place at home where special bread and other celebrational foods are prepared. On the first day people remember deceased children, and on the second and more important day, they serve decedent adults. Each day, in the wee hours of the morning, the lady of the house rises and sets out a table of food in a quiet room, with a sheet hanging around the table. She puts out the best food she can afford, emphasizing the favorite foods of her recently dead relatives as well as old time menu items. Tables are adorned with ripe red plums and ritual bread.

The housewife makes her table attractive, sometimes
Figure 2 with traditional hand woven table cloths, and each lady invites her beloved dead by name to come and serve themselves. People believe that the dead come to eat and enjoy the food, even though it is not apparently consumed. People say that they can hear the footfalls of the dead around the table in the upstairs room.

After noon, relatives and friends gather to enjoy the leftovers together, and gifts of food are sent to others, reinforcing social bonds. Neighborhood children go from door to door, impersonating angels from heaven, and begging for gifts of bread.

It is believed that if the dead are not fed they will become angry, and as a consequence there will be no rain, and people will suffer bad luck. This thinking reflects the widespread indigenous belief in the crucial role of ancestors and spirits in reproductive processes, and the ubiquitous concern with fertility and abundance among Amerindians. In the evening, the people of Santa Elena say farewell to the dead with a good-bye party featuring drinking and dancing. They hope to send the dead away content. Even teetotalers must have a drink on this occasion.

During this celebration, people use food and drink as symbols and devices to express their ethnic identity, to remember the past, to affirm their relationships with the dead, to buttress their kin and community relationships, and with the hope of future abundance. People say this is the best day of the year. It is certainly the best food day of the year! On the table you see every kind of dish: lobster ceviche, purple sweet potatoes with savory peanut sauce, sweet rice pudding, and strong drink.

 

Ancient Ritual Meals and Sacrifices

This modern feast of the Day of the Dead is part of Catholic practice which probably has roots in ancient thought and practice. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that through time and across space indigenous American peoples have enjoyed ceremonial meals and sacrificed food to spirits inhabiting the parallel world. Food sacrifices are often left in tombs.
Figure 3

Feasting among Amerindians in the past and in the present is frequently linked to sacrifices. A sacrifice involves the ritual transformation of food, drink, tobacco, coca, blood, animals, plants, human beings, figurines, or other goods into sacred offerings dedicated to the spirits and removed from this-world contexts by burial, burning, casting into water, or perhaps by being presented on tables hidden behind hanging sheets. Historical accounts make clear that aboriginal Americans were very dedicated to making sacrifices.

Chronicles written by Europeans in the early Colonial Period indicate very clearly that indigenous people regularly participated in
Figure 4 feasts that involved eating, drinking and drunkenness, as well as dancing and evoking animal spirits.

From the early descriptions of the religious calendars of both Mesoamerican and Andean peoples we learn that each indigenous month was defined by its distinctive feasts and sacrifices (Durán 1971; Poma de Ayala 1980). Because people were concerned for the productivity of their subsistence systems, they assiduously primed the cosmic pump by feeding the spirits who send rainfall to irrigate the natural and human world. Such festivities were practiced at the domestic and community levels, and on a grand scale by the Aztec and Inca states. Politics and religion were inextricably blended in Amerindian societies. Even today, drinking and feasting are part of the process of "making kin" in the Andes (Weismantel 1995).

Within the territory of modern Ecuador, by 2300 BC
Figure 5 during the Valdivia Period, some of the earliest ceramic pottery in the New World included decorated jars and bowls employed for serving food and drinking fermented beer—probably during ceremonial meals. The Valdivia people also made sacrifices to spirits and interred the remains of special meals.

By 500 BC a tremendous escalation had occurred in the manufacture of ceremonial paraphernalia as elites invested considerable effort and expense in producing still more elaborate feasts whose accoutrements included extravagant serving vessels and spectacular bottles
Figure 6 as well as ceramic figurines and musical instruments. The social and symbolic significance of Amerindian drinking vessels, beginning with gourd cups which evolved into elaborately decorated bowls (Bruhns and Stothert 1999:167-169; Helms 1996), can not be emphasized enough. Later in history, as meals continued to be prepared in order to unite and define social groups, serving dishes were elaborated as signs for "commensality" and as markers for factions and indicators of "naturalized" gender roles (e.g. Joyce 2000:25-28, 68-72, 78, 185).

Theses vessels and figurines reflect the widespread Amerindian belief that human well being and reproduction depend upon plant and animal reproduction, all of which are linked directly to the positive disposition of ancestors and other spirits, especially those that control natural phenomena. Today in the Andes and in the Amazon many people believe that those spirits require feeding. Individuals, communities, priests and shamans invested and still invest time and energy in contacting spirit beings in the parallel world. This may be done in order to gain knowledge and power, but also in order to propitiate those beings by sacrificing food, tobacco, coca and the other kinds of offerings mentioned above. Just as the food sharing among living people symbolizes their relationship to one another, the feeding of ancestors and other divines symbolizes the ongoing relationship of dependence upon supernaturals.

Among the Desana, a 20th century ethnic group of eastern Colombia whose communities are not very hierarchical, there exist priests called kumú who serve their villages as ritual practitioners, "moral teachers," and respected authorities. Their "main public function consists of pronouncing the…'songs of god,' that are sometimes sung on the occasion of large gatherings when gifts of food are distributed between phratries. During these ceremonies, which may last for two or three days, people bring quantities of smoked fish or wild fruits that the kumú receives and keeps in his house" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:135-137.). This priest invokes the Sun god, offers him food, and then distributes food to the celebrants. Reichel-Dolmatoff writes that

[t]his ceremonial distribution is called abé kóa/sun-gourd bowl, and the food is interpreted as consecrated, coming directly from the divinity . . . Because at this time of the year the fish begin to run, and it is also the time in which the new planting is begun in the fields, the main objective of this ceremony is to ask the Sun for abundance and the fostering of growth (1971:137).

This author also describes how the kumú employs a woven box called "god's chest" to keep ritual objects such as "several anthropomorphic figurines of wood some twenty centimeters in height that represent the Sun, the Daughter of the Sun, and another spiritual being" which are made by the priest himself and a ritual helper. In order to evoke the Sun, "the kumú places his little figurines on the box and then dances in a circle around them. During this dance he marks the beat with a stomping tube decorated with two black stripes and a series of triangles, representing the designs of the Snake-Canoe" (1971:137).

Because ritual performances like this one are so variable across time and space, modern researchers can only review the little evidence available and exercise our ability to imagine the thought and practices created by particular ancient Ecuadorian peoples throughout the long prehistoric period.

The proliferation of ritual paraphernalia in archaeological contexts between 700 BC and AD 500 is evidence that more priestly roles were being created as more shrines and ceremonial centers competed for clients and pilgrims. By 500 BC some feasts had became very political as the patrons endeavored to naturalize their roles as leaders. Sumptuous quantities of food and fermented drink may have been produced in order to demonstrate the power and elevated status of some individuals and factions (Brumfiel and Fox 1994; Clark and Blake 1994; Clark and Gosser 1995). Their wealth would have been understood as evidence of their connectedness to fertile and productive ancestors and other divines (Helms 1993).

During ceremonial events, elite patrons not only fed their kinsmen, allies and clients, but they also made offerings to ancestors and spirits, while at the same time they expressed their superior status by (a) manipulating exotic and symbolically potent plants, animals and raw materials like gold and jade, and (b) by associating themselves with fine textiles, astonishing personal ornaments, and awesome ceramics. Manipulating and possessing extraordinarily crafted and symbolically powerful objects contributes to the construction of elite identity (Helms 1993). The spectacular archaeology of America is due to the achievements of elite architects and craftspeople in making ceremonial centers and outfitting tombs.

Not only would elites have sponsored ceremonial gatherings, but they certainly would have built shrines and centers for worship and healing that became pilgrimage destinations and regional ritual centers where spiritual and political leaders competed for prestige. Such assembly places would have functioned as political and economic nodes, as well as social and religious focal points in the ancient world.

The following ceramic artifacts, belonging to several styles, were made at a few high status ceremonial centers in coastal Ecuador between 700 BC and AD 1532. The objects in this sample have been classified by style as Chorrera (dated to the middle of the first millennium BC); Jama-Coaque, Bahía and La Tolita (styles derived from the Chorrera tradition and dated 300 BC to AD 500); and Milagro-Quevedo and Manteño (dated AD 500 [or 1000] to 1532). The ceramic containers illustrated were used to serve ceremonial and ritual meals, to pour libations for guests and for ancestors and divines, and to contain cal (also called lime, a calcium compound that facilitates the release of alkaloids of the coca leaf) which is important in the coca chewing ritual. The figurines, may have functioned as votive objects or icons. All of these objects were accoutrements in celebrations that were probably sponsored by elites: these events would have included funerals, coming of age ceremonies, agricultural feasts, and celebrations of ancestors. These objects were ultimately interred in tombs, and in recent times they have been looted and sold to collectors.

Twentieth century viewers may not be impressed by these ceramic artifacts, but in the more organic Pre-Columbian world, where most individuals were in daily contact only with plant matter, animal bodies, earth and minerals, most people would have experienced polychrome vessels, artistic effigies and ceramic musical instruments as transcendental, awesome. Dazzling, symbolic and otherworldly objects were designed to impress the guests and please the ancestors.

 

Women and Couples

Figure 7 Among the works that seem to suggest food themes there are many representations of women holding pots or other containers. The women are dressed elaborately, which is taken as evidence that they are prepared for participation in ritual events. Their ornaments may signal their social standing, but such ornamentation also has religious significance, as it does
Figure 8 today in the Amazon where jewelry, body paint, decorated clothing and hair, as well as headdresses, are symbolically complex and serve to protect wearers and to help them make contact with spirits.

The creators of the objects may have intended to represent real women or married couples making their indispensable and highly admired contributions of ritual food and drink; or they may have portrayed real women and men reenacting the contributions of mythic heroines, creator deities, or ancestral mothers who long ago brought gifts of food, honey (Gutiérrez 2002:264-265), and fermented drink to human beings.
Figure 9

Even if the ceramic images represent supernaturals themselves, as do the wooden icons of the Desana, the elite patrons of the ancient feasts (who certainly dressed in a similar fashion) would have benefited from association with these artistic images. Many of these objects are actual vessels that could have been used to
Figure 10 serve guests, or to contain votive food or drink. Sometimes the entire female body takes the form of a bottle: liquid libations must have emitted from the narrow neck attached to the figure's back.
Figure 11

An elaborate Jama-Coaque vessel, with its aperture at the back of the figure's head,
Figure 12 shows a female individual bearing a baby on her back. She holds a covered container and is seated in a ritual precinct flanked by birds which are understood as spiritual messengers. There are plant motifs on her head, suggestive of abundance and fertility,
Figure 13 but these may also evoke the idea of sacred, psychotropic plants. She may be a participant in the celebration of some agricultural feast, and she might be making an offering of honey or some other food, or a ritual drink, like chocolate, an alcoholic brew, or a hallucinogenic concoction of plant origin.

Other ceramic figurines represent well-dressed women in the act of offering dishes filled with small objects.
Figure 14 The simply modeled items in the dish could be maize tamales, little cakes of raw chocolate, fruits, resinous incense, or other votive objects.

The female figure illustrated in Figure 15
Figure 15 bears a bird on her right shoulder suggesting that her activity is spiritual. Many similar figurines depict women as they offer packets of objects that might be food. Today food as well as other things are wrapped in leaves and tied with plant fiber string in rural Ecuador.

The figurine shown in Figure 16
Figure 16 is representative of a series of images in which the individual, usually female, grasps an agricultural tool in one hand, and may be offering food with the other hand. Alternatively, she might be dispersing seeds. Another series of figurines
Figure 17 represents individual women, each displaying a baby (or a tiny figure depicting a dependent human being), and each holding a dish, which, although empty, seems to evoke the idea of female nurturing and productivity.

The tiny lime pot (designed to hold calcium carbonate for the coca ritual) illustrated in Figure 18
Figure 18 depicts a human being with a burden basket supported by a tump line. This imagery suggests harvest and abundance. In the Andean region, coca is thought of as food for supernatural spirits. The pot may also represent a "gourd-woman" who in some South American traditions acts as shamanic mediator and psychopomp (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1984; Weinsteiin 2001:41).

Many figures represent people carrying plants such as maize
Figure 19 Many figures represent people carrying plants such as maize ears--or perhaps pineapples. Festooned with cobs or fruits, these figures, which represent both male and female individuals, might be portraits of a maize god (of either gender), or represent a human impersonator during a ritual directed toward a Mistress of Plants. It seems likely that these objects were fabricated for use on particular holidays, and that people would have recognized their meaning and associations.

Figure 20 The effigy shown in Figure 20 portrays a handsome young person seated upon a bunch of manioc roots. Today this sacred plant (known also as cassava or yuca) supplies more calories to more people than any other plant on Earth; it is daily fare in coastal Ecuador and a staple in the Amazon forest where its starch is fundamental to abundance and used to produce the indispensable ingredient in tropical forest
Figure 21 celebrations--beer. The symbolic connection between the productive tuber and the beautiful anthropomorphic being is touching.

Since both indigenous men and women work together to make gardens, and because fertile ancestors are both male and female, we find couples associated with ritual enclosures and with sacred vessels decorated with plant festoonery. What is in the giant jar?
Figure 22 The container might evoke the idea of hallucinogenic brew employed in making spiritual contact, or it could represent one of enormous vessels employed for making and serving festive alcoholic drink. In many of these ceramic models such vessels are associated with female nurturing and with foliage .

 

Seeds and Silos

The painted dot designs found on the interior of the pedestal plate shown in Figure 23 may represent seeds which
Figure 23 symbolize regenerative potential. The beans which are modeled around the edge of the plate would have reminded people of the new life held inside--vitality which is manifested as beans sprout. Sprouting seeds are important in ancient American iconography (Hocquenghem 1989; Peters 1991). As if the bean and seed imagery were inadequate to convey the message of this serving plate, the artist added a modeled frog--harbinger of rain, and associated everywhere with fertility.

This effigy jar in Figure 24 depicts a traditional silo for
Figure 24 storing corn, of a kind still found in rural coastal Ecuador. This icon reflects people's anxiety about having enough food, and the desire of the patrons of feasts to identify themselves with abundance--with surplus to feed the living and the dead. Clever effigies are good theater, and must have provoked comment during feasts or burial rituals.

 

Fruits, Tubers and Flowers

Ancient artists depicted a wide variety of edible and symbolically significant fruits and vegetables. Although not
Figure 25 all are identifiable to species, they probably evoked the plants that figured in myths and stories: surely each species would have had special ritual associations--as do red plums with the Day of the Dead. These food plants also may have served as sacrifices offered on occasions to supernatural beings. Elites drew special attention to themselves by offering up not only the customary fruits, but by adding spectacular effigies of the usual sacrificial gifts.
Figure 26 In ancient Mexico plants and especially flowers, which may be represented on some Ecuadorian vessels, were used commonly as food, decoration for temples, gifts for the dead, personal ornaments, tribute payments, and symbols of rank (Castelló 1987).

Chorrera tombs contain a wide variety of exquisitely made fruit effigy bottles which would have heightened the experience of an
Figure 27 ordinary liquid offering. While some fruits are difficult to identify, others, including papayas (Carica papaya), and guanabanas and anonas (Annona spp.), relatives of the better-known chirimoya (Annona cherimolia), are easily recognized.

Ancient artists frequently created effigy bottles
Figure 28 and jars depicting squashes and gourds, both very old domesticated plants whose seeds are consumed, whose flesh is delicious, and whose bodies are made into containers, including ritual paraphernalia such as rattles that evoke female
Figure 29 spirits, and whose symbolic associations are many (Weinstein 2001). Squashes are widely associated with the female principle, with human fertility, and with the cosmic womb. Sometimes squashes have both uterine form and phallic spouts or crooked necks associated with the male sexual organ
Figure 30 (Weinstein 2001:42-44).

Squashes and gourds remind people of the equivalence between cooking food and the gestation of new life in the womb (see Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:62 ff; Roe 1982; Weinstein 2001), and their presence in tombs evokes myths of death and rebirth into the parallel world of plenty--of cosmic creation and renewal. In the minds of guests, beautiful squashes surely represented the prosperity of the hosts of great feasts.

The beautiful bunch of manioc tubers illustrated in Figure 31
Figure 31 has a leafy stock with a tree snail that suggests moisture, fertility, and plenty. The stock seems to have functioned as a cup for drinking, or perhaps for pouring out liquid offerings.

The tall polypod plate in Figure 32
Figure 32 is supported by effigy manioc tubers or perhaps sweet potatoes. This is a spectacular example of how food was served to guests, and perhaps also to spirits during ceremonial meals, on dishes that would have reminded everyone of the plenitude of the hosts' gardens and evoked the idea of the plant gifts received by humans from their ancestors long ago.

 

Animal Effigies

"Metaphorically potent" animals are also represented among the sacred effigy vessels in our sample. In fact, Amerindian peoples manipulate animals literally, as sources of food, pelts, shell, feathers, hair, wax, calcium carbonate, pearls, bones, antlers, teeth, claws, spines, sinew, excrement, dyes, poisons (Benson 1997: 131; Gutiérrez 1998:277-289), and they also make animals major players in their cosmologies, philosophies and ethics (Benson 1997; Gutiérrez 1998; Urton 1985). In diverse social contexts, animals were given as gifts and offerings at the individual level and by the rulers of indigenous states (Benson 1997:7-12; Gutiérrez 1998:246-248). Animals are commonly understood by Amerindians as old beings, as ancestors to human beings, and as mythical and supernatural. Animal spirits are evoked with gratitude because long ago they taught people to be civilized, bringing them tools, fire, agriculture, crafts and the plants they depend upon, as well as art and music. Indigenous people have long depended upon animals as psychopomps (Hocquenghem 1989; Benson 1997), and animals are recurrently related to shamanic practice--to the business of making contact with the parallel world of powerful spirits. Animal metaphors were employed by elites to construct their political, military and religious roles in society (see for example Peters 1991). Elites, of course, identify with animals high on the marine and terrestrial food chains (Peters 1991).

Among the Desana of eastern Colombia, the payé (another kind of priest or shaman different from the kumús mentioned above) conducts collective religious rituals designed to influence the animal "masters" that control certain game species in order to assure the success of hunters in their economic pursuits (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971:15-16, 125-135). The Desana also hold (or held in the recent past) periodic feasts which, according to Reichel-Dolmatoff, were characterized by "their emphasis upon sib [kin group] cohesion" and which "constitute the strongest and most structured collective expression of the culture" (1971:16). These feasts involved the gathering of guests from many villages who brought gifts of "various fruits, fish, and smoked meat" to the host kin group. The celebration involved reciting "the Creation Myth and the myths referring to the origin of the phratry [kin lineage]", as well as costumes with large feather crowns, "dancing to the sound of various musical instruments," and sometimes the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs. The myths involved active animal characters, and the food and paraphernalia were laden with symbolic meaning. Similar kinds of gathering might have been the contexts for the display of ceramic effigies in coastal Ecuador many centuries ago.

Animal metaphors were characteristic of ancient thought and persist in Amerindian ideology until the present. More thorough explorations of animal representations in ancient art can be found in innumerable publications (e.g., Benson 1997; Furst 1968; Gutiérrez 1998; Legast 1987, 1998; Peters 1991; Saunders 1998; Urton 1985). Because of this kind of thinking it is not surprising that animal sacrifices were widespread and frequent in the ancient world, and that animal effigy bottles and serving vessels were important accoutrements to ancient ritual meals and socio-political feasts. Gutiérrez believes that many of the metaphorically significant animals were easily tamed and actually kept by human beings (1998:298). They must have been closely observed, and therefore adopted as natural symbols: familiar animals become "mythic heroes," "ancestors" and "gods" (1998:302). The frequently represented species include monkeys, felines (especially the small, inoffensive tropical ones), kinkajous, coatis, parrots, doves and falcons, which were not very important as food, judging from the infrequency of their bones in archaeological refuse, but which became ideologically significant. Animal spirits are widely understood as the sources of food, and, in many myths, they are the original suppliers of domesticated plants.

In the following discussion the readers' attention is drawn to the wide range of animal effigies produced by Chorrera, Jama-Coaque, La Tolita, Bahía, Manteño and Milagro-Quevedo artists. It should be remembered that these animals were sources of daily sustenance, used as sources for raw materials for religious paraphernalia, and they figure widely as elements in ritual meals and as sacrificial offerings to spirits. They certainly functioned as natural metaphors and could have represented the founding ancestors of lineages, the mistresses and masters of animal species, or creatures from the mythic past.

Prominent among the representations in our sample are
Figure 33 models of birds, including some impressive predator species.
Figure 34 In general birds have been great ritual companions to human beings, as well as good pets, sources of metaphors, and the suppliers of extraordinarily symbolic colored feathers. An 18th century watercolor depicts dancers impersonating birds during an agricultural festival in which they seem to display ears of corn in their hands.
Figure 35 The duck illustrated in Figure 36 is perched upon some sort of an arthropod (like a larva or shrimp), which might have served as its prey. Lowly creatures, like palm
Figure 36 grubs, are also potent natural symbols and valuable sources of food for human beings who sometimes serve them as party dishes.

Fish, commonly represented in Pre-Columbian art, also are prominent mythic actors and symbolically important.
Figure 37 Figure 37 presents a small lime container in the form of the body of a fish which would have suggested fertility to the ancient observer.
Figure 38 In Figure 38 we see a fish platter which would have reminded celebrants that food comes from the beneficent ancestors and from the Spirit Master or Mistress of Fishes.

Figure 39 Many effigy bottles, bowls and lime containers represent crustaceans whose carapaces are often found in pits with the remains of ceremonial meals. The Chorrera crab bottle
Figure 40 illustrated in Figure 6 has a whistling chamber at the base of its handle: the sound may have simulated
Figure 41 spirit voices, and we also know that auditory phenomena are manipulated in Amerindian healing ceremonies (Larco 1997; Olsen 1992).

Mollusk shells are widely represented and symbolically potent. Shells were common sacrifices understood as food for gods. (Stothert 2003)

Figure 42 Amphibians are strong natural symbols related to water, transformation, and fertility, and snakes figure among the key spiritual symbols of New World peoples. Regardless of what was decanted from the pair of matched snake cups
Figure 43 or the fabulous serpent serving jar illustrated here
Figure 44 , the sight of them would have provoked thoughts of death and rebirth, shamanic transformation, and communication with the spirit world.

Figure 45 Monkeys, which are eaten by some Amerindians and not others, are everywhere important in religious ideology. They are widely thought to be human ancestors, and are frequently kept as pets and even interred in tombs. The animal depicted here is humanized by the presence of a neck ornament .

Figure 46 In prehistoric Amerindian societies dogs were eaten and sacrificed, they frequently were buried in human-style graves, and they acted as companions to the living and guides for the dead.

Felines such as the jaguar
Figure 47 are prominent power symbols in Pre-Columbian art (Saunders 1998), and they are widely understood as the shaman's alter ego. Felines are hunted, eaten, their pelts used for costumes, and they have been sacrificed in many contexts.

Figure 48 Into modern times in the Americas the deer has been a main source of food and raw materials, but also an intermediary in shamanic communication and associated with fertility and agriculture.

Among the most charming ancient effigies are those representing small mammals that were eaten, sacrificed, and probably kept by humans. The symbolic significance of these animals that lived in intimate contact with humans stemmed from the association of the
Figure 49 reproductive prowess of these species and from their association with corn and abundance
Figure 50 (Benson 1997).

It is fitting to conclude this essay with the portrait of a wonderful opossum, a marsupial and a prodigious reproducer that knows how to play "dead" and which is associated with death and rebirth. This creature--which also digs in the ground, is notorious for stealing
Figure 51 corn, and carries its many offspring on its tale--is linked metaphorically with agriculture, fertility and abundance. In Figure 51 the awesome and spiritual polychrome opossum is supporting a serving dish, thereby expressing the central role of food in the cosmic process that includes nurturing the living and the dead.

 

1. The Day of the Dead is celebrated widely in Latin America where it is understood as a syncretism, a blending of ancient indigenous practices and Catholic ones. Descriptions of the feast in Mexico include Norget 1996.
2. The ethnographic and ethnohistorical literature of Latin America is rich in descriptions of sacrifice. See for example Bastien 1985, 1989; Duviols 1977; Friedel et al. 1993:213-219; Poma de Ayala 1980; Hocquenghem 1989; Isbell 1978; Roe 1982; Sharon 2001; Stothert 2003; Sullivan 1988; Wilbert 1987.
3. These feasts involved the exchange and sharing food (symmetrically or asymmetrically) and they create opportunities for the performance of social relations among kinsmen and political allies, and with the ancestors and other spirits. The importance of feasts in Amerindian social life is shown by Joyce 2000; Norget 1996; Bastien 1985; Clark and Blake 1994; Clark and Gosser 1995; Duran 1971; Poma de Ayala 1980.
4. At the early Valdivia site of Loma Alta excavators found a "cairn field in which jars and bowls containing food remains were buried" (Norton 1982:107, Figure 1). The "cairns" were probably pits containing stones, sherds, clay, charcoal, ash, shells, crustacean shell fragments, and animal bones (Norton 1984:26)--the remains of ceremonial meals.
5. The relationship between human beings and the parallel spiritual world is described in sources that deal with indigenous American religion, particular with "shamanism": Langdon and Baer 1992; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 1988; Roe 1982; Stothert 2003; Sullivan 1988; Wilbert 1987.

 

 

 

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