Las Limas figure

The faces on the shoulders and knees

Profile heads with a cleft at the crown are incised in double lines on the man’s shoulders and knees. They share one shape and differ in the eyes, nose and lips. Hernando Gómez Rueda of INAH sets out the readings. Michael Coe identified four Aztec gods in them: the god of spring, the fire serpent, Quetzalcoatl and the god of death. The design incised on the man’s own face, two fantastic faces round his mouth and over his chin, has been called the maize god. The infant, for many scholars a rain god, has a jaguar-like face with wavy bands across the forehead and down the sides.

Coe and Peter David Joralemon identified the infant as the Olmec rain god, and Karl Taube writes that study of the Las Limas figure showed the Olmec had an array of distinct gods, not just a Were-jaguar rain god. Taube has since argued that Joralemon’s infant rain god, God IV, is more likely the seed stage of the Olmec maize god. Gómez Rueda would rather not name them yet. He relates the four profiles to the four corners of the cosmos, the points that mark the solstices, and points to the crossed bands on the infant’s chest.

A statue carried in procession?

Under the man’s arms are two perfectly round holes, about 3 cm across, which run through to the space under the infant’s back and are hard to see from the front. Gómez Rueda argues that they were made for a cord to carry the statue. He proposes that it was carried in procession at dates fixed by the sun, as some Maya communities today carry a statue from one temple to another at the solstices, and that the infant is offered in a sacrifice of children to bring rain, of which, he notes, there is evidence at El Manatí. Henri Noel Bernard Medina, director of the Xalapa museum, calls the travelling-cult idea a hypothesis still to be confirmed or ruled out.

What stone is it?

Arqueología Mexicana’s caption calls it jadeite; its text calls it serpentine, probably brought from the Motagua valley in highland Guatemala. Non-destructive tests in December 2021 by UNAM’s LANCIC laboratory, led by José Luis Ruvalcaba Sil, found that the main mineral is antigorite serpentine, which does not occur at Las Limas or near it. Bernard Medina names a large source at Tehuitzingo, in Puebla, but says comparisons are still needed. The tests also showed that the reddish-orange colour still visible between the teeth and in the mouth is cinnabar, a pigment the Olmec used. Bernard Medina adds that the figure was carved by a different and more skilled hand than the one, or ones, that made the incisions, which may be later and the work of more than one sculptor.