Covering eight square miles (twenty one square kilometres), and housing upward of 125,000 people, Teotihuacán was the most significant city in the Americas from its foundation in 100 BC until its destruction sometime around AD 600. The city was embellished with phenomenal public buildings, including the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, the largest structures in Mesoamerica before the modern era. The technological achievement was remarkable; the Pyramid of the Moon, for example, was surmounted by a 22 tonne stone figure of their Great Goddess, which was brought from ground level by means unknown. The accomplishments of Teotihuacános are well-known, and the site is one of the most famous and most visited in the Americas. But surprisingly little is known about the people themselves. While their goods – especially obsidian tools – and artistic output was traded widely around Mesoamerica, there is no evidence that they maintained a large territorial empire. And when the city was destroyed by burning and the extreme weather events of the mid-Sixth Century AD, the Teotihuacáno culture mysteriously disappeared. When the Aztecs rediscovered the remarkable city centuries later, they named it Teotihuacán – ‘the birthplace of the gods’.

One of the characteristic artistic forms of Teotihuacáno culture is the so-called funerary mask. Funerary masks are heavy stone faces, some partially hollowed on the inside. Their weight, and the lack of eye and mouth holes indicates that they were not designed to be worn by living humans, and archaeologists have resultantly presumed that they were attached to mummy bundles. However, it should be noted that no such funerary mask has ever been discovered in a scientifically excavated burial; most of the masks were found among the public buildings that line the Avenue of the Dead, an important ceremonial route through Teotihuacán, on which can be found the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. It is possible, then, that they were designed to be attached to figures made of perishable materials, perhaps as idealised representations of the ancestors. This small, exceptionally well-preserved, Teotihuacáno mask exhibits the traditional features of the form: a roughly trapezoidal face, with a flattened forehead and chin; small, rectangular, ears; wide staring eyes; a triangular nose with aquiline profile; and an open mouth with thick full lips. The mask is small – only nine centimetres tall – and one must wonder whether this reflects the status of the individual represented. However, the workmanship is stunning. Note how the artist has broken up the flat surface of the face to indicate the bags under the eyes, and the curve of the eyeball. Note also the elegance of the nose, which in Teotihuacáno art is usually programmatically rendered, bit in this case has an understated elegance. The mask is made from greenstone (chalchihuitl in Nahuatl), the archaeological name for a group of stones including jade and serpentine, which held a special significance for Mesoamerican peoples. For the later Olmecs, these stones represented the young shoots of maize, and were considered to be water-retentive, emitting beneficial vapours to the surrounding vegetation.

The purpose of masks in Mesoamerican cultures was to transform the wearer; ritual masks, lighter and more appropriately-sized than these ‘funerary’ masks, were worn to assimilate the wearer with the gods and spirits represented. The beliefs of later Mesoamericans indicate that these ‘funerary’ masks may represent a different form of transformation. The Aztec account of death represented the journey to Mictlan – the grim and unforgiving Aztec underworld – as a gradual fading from one’s individual identity into a broader undifferentiated life-force. It is possible that the idealised features of Teotihuacán masks represents a similar idea: the individual gives up the features that made them distinctive, and instead transforms into a programmatic ideal of perfection attained after death.

References: similar small-scale Teotihuacán masks can be found in Florence (La Gallerie degli Uffizi Gemme 1921 no. 284) and New York (Vilcek Foundation 2001.05.1).