BORDER	FIGURES
Sketches of ancient figurines by P. Ruiz-Bayon
By John Woodford Photos by Bob Kalmbach When Patricia Ruiz-Bayon came to Michigan two years ago to work on her master's degree in fine arts, she already had one artistic objective in focus: to come to grips somehow with the small, mostly headless and female clay figurines found by the thousands on and just below ground in Central Mexico. "I'd seen them since I was a little girl and always felt a great affinity to them, yet they were still so mysterious," says Ruiz-Bayon, who is, as she puts it, "from Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. (I always say both because I am a border person, geographically, culturally, aesthetically and in all other senses.)

"I always wondered why so many of the figurines are female," Ruiz-Bayon continues, "where they have been found, who made them and why. I still can't answer the last two questions, although one of my theories is that they were portraits. No one knows if they were made mainly by women or by men or what purpose they served, such as for toys, for worship, for decorating dwellings and so on."

To guide her in her search for answers she found, quite by luck ("my antennae led me to him"), that U-M's faculty has one of the top experts in Latin American anthropology and archaeology, Jeffrey R. Parsons, professor of anthropology and curator of Latin-American archaeology, Museum of Anthropology. Parsons agreed to accept Ruiz-Bayon as his first Art School student in a reading course he usually offers only to graduate students in his field. Ruiz-Bayon plunged in.

"I tried to make sense of the huge amount of information about the figurines," Ruiz-Bayon says. "Jeffrey allowed me to work at the Museum where they keep the figurines in drawers. They have hundreds of them from all over Latin America. I focused on the Mexican specimens and did drawings from the collection."

How to make sense of a huge amount of information: Here Ruiz-Bayon found herself confronting a seemingly paradoxical challenge, one presented not just by the figurines that intrigued her, but by much of our information about the series of great civilizations that rose and fell in Meso-America from perhaps 3500 BC to the Spanish Conquest in the 1500s.

Ruiz-Bayon traces the source of the historiographic difficulties to the Conquest. "The Spanish Conquest–or Contact, as Professor Parsons calls it, which is the scholarly term–was like an alien invasion," she says. "What would bad people from space do to us? They'd force a change in our culture, language, religious practices and way of living. That's what the Spanish did. They took our gold, raped the country, and took our valuable treasures. They completely destroyed something very valid. They did their best to destroy all remnants of our culture."

Central Mexico is the home of the Olmec, Toltec, Aztec and Mayan civilizations, among others, although the Aztecs dominated it from 0-1500 AD. Major cities like Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan arose there. Teotihuacan (Tay-oh-teewhah-KAHN) stood from 600 BC to 650 AD, when it was destroyed by unidentified invaders. Some scholars call it the first major urban center in the Western Hemisphere. From at least 300 AD on, Teotihuacan featured huge pyramids, broad avenues laid out in grids and a huge plaza where 100,000 people, half the population, could attend civic events. Tenochtitlan (Ten-otch-teet-LAN), the Aztec capital, was 200 years old and in a golden age when die Spaniards under Cortez destroyed it in 1521. Mexico City sits on its ruins.

Figurines spanning 2,600 years–1000 BC-1600 AD–turn up in the landfills at these and other ancient sites. What were they for? "When archaeologists don't know the answer to that question," Professor Parsons replies with a laugh, "they call it a 'ritual item.' That's a way of saying we don't know, but it was probably for an activity at the household level. They are found in trash dumps, casual places and in all contexts. Some are in offering caches in temples, however. They are ubiquitous. If they were connected with rituals, we don't know what those rituals were.

"People made things like these all over the world in ancient times, yet nowhere are they nearly so abundant as in Mexico. There are other artifacts that are also found more abundantly in Mexico than elsewhere. The little clay flywheel, called a whorl, that makes a spindle go fast during spinning is incredibly common in Mexican digs. They were used elsewhere, too, but apparently nowhere near as much as in Mexico."