Numerical Systems and Early Writing

Regardless of when or where they were used, the hieroglyphic writing programs of ancient Mesoamerica were both the product and producer of a shifting set of cultural values, embodied expectations, and negotiated cosmological frameworks. From writing’s earliest appearances in the first half of the Preclassic era to its fluent incorporation into contemporary street art, Mesoamerican writing occurs in a social context. Diachronic changes within a discrete script tradition indicate shifts not just in ways of speaking or in the ability of the system to capture fine-grained phonological and grammatical complexity but also in ways of being and thinking-about-being in the universe.

Across the ancient world, cases of “first writing” do not exhibit high—or, in some cases, any—linguistic fidelity (Baines Reference Baines and Houston2004:150–151) to local vernaculars or prestige languages. For this reason, scholars have theorized that the earliest written systems may not have been designed to record the sounds of spoken language. Compounding the situation in Mesoamerica is the fact that text and image are embedded in a rich visuo-verbal narrative system that demands both a textualized reading of art and an iconographic reading of script.

This said, early writing cross-culturally includes both logograms and signs for numbers. Systems of numeration may have developed concurrently with word signs but more likely predated them (Chrisomalis Reference Chrisomalis and Houston2012), and tally marking has been proposed for contexts as early as the Upper Paleolithic (D’Errico and Cacho Reference D’Errico and Cacho1994). Despite intricately interwoven etymologies, the history of numeration is often set apart from the history of writing, even though the former may anticipate the latter. We suggest that Mesoamerica is uniquely poised to serve as a case study in the role of numeration in the earliest examples of writing. Numbers (particularly 1–13) and the vigesimal place-notation system are integral components of calendrics, astronomy, divination, name making, and accounting across ancient Mesoamerica.

Before continuing, we would do well to acknowledge the slippery and contested boundaries between where one scholar’s “proto-writing” or “pre-writing” ends and another scholar’s “first writing” or “secondary writing” begins. Although debates about the nature of early writing are not our focus, a synopsis of the central arguments introduces the subject at hand: early Mesoamerican numeration and its potential contexts, including on small-scale portable objects such as figurines. Scholars have argued that there is a critical difference between a string of iconic elements and “true writing,” in which texts graphically represent a spoken language (recording both sound and meaning), adhere to a fixed reading order, and accommodate an expandible syntax (Houston Reference Houston and Houston2004a; also see Justeson Reference Justeson1986; Marcus Reference Marcus1992:17; Prem Reference Prem, Heizer and Graham1971:114). But not all criteria for “true writing” are in evidence in the early script traditions that emerged in Mesoamerica during the Preclassic period. Rather than designating these early texts as “proto-writing”—something that anticipates or approximates writing but falls short of fulfilling the benchmarks of “true” writing—it may behoove Mesoamerican scholars to follow the lead of experts from elsewhere around the globe. For example, scholars of the earliest scripts in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China view “proto-writing” as an early form of “true writing”: these scripts are not qualified as “pre” anything, as Stephanie Strauss (Reference Strauss2018:94–97) phrased it. Wherever they developed, first writing systems and ensuing secondary scripts took a variety of paths to the graphic representation of a particular spoken language. Although the developmental trajectories of precocious writing programs elsewhere are often more straightforward than in ancient Mesoamerica, a comparable approach—in which “proto-writing” is considered an early and necessary form of “true” writing—is productive in Mesoamerican studies as well.

Because numbers constitute some of the earliest written signs in Mesoamerica, it is possible that they were part of an ancient representational system ancestral to all Mesoamerican scripts. John Justeson (Reference Justeson1986:440) suggested, in fact, that Mesoamerican numeral systems “are probably much older than writing.” Numerals—conventional symbols that represent a number—are found in nearly all languages worldwide (Justeson Reference Justeson, Morley and Renfrew2010:43). Conventionality in this definition signals a level of conceptual and pedagogical control over the making/negotiation of meaning between the signifier (the symbol/glyph) and the signified (its numeric meaning). By the transition from the Middle (1000–300 BC) to the Late Preclassic period, numerous Mesoamerican groups in the greater Maya, Zapotec, and Isthmian regions were using a bar-and-dot numerical system in which a single dot signified “one” and a bar “five.” This system is demonstrated on Monte Alban Stela 12, from the Valley of Oaxaca, which displays a monumental Zapotec inscription including the numerals “four” and “eight” (Figure 3a). This persistent notational system was used for centuries of Mesoamerican numerical inscriptions, although its most common usage concerned the representation of dates, usually in the 260-day sacred calendar composed of 13 numerical coefficients and 20 day signs. This sacred calendar was used primarily for ritual, prognostication, and divination, and it appears to have predated the first appearance of writing (Coe Reference Coe and Nicholson1976:110; Justeson Reference Justeson1986; Marcus Reference Marcus1992:33).

Figure 3.

Early Mesoamerican numeration or dot motifs: (a) Monte Alban Stela 12 (MA-D-139) from Building L, 500–300 BC; (b) Oxtotitlan cave painting 3; (c) Chiapa de Corzo Francesa phase flat stamp; (d) Chiapa de Corzo Francesa-Horcones phase stamp; (e) Chiapa de Corzo Francesa-Guanacaste phase stamp; (f) Motif on the “Young Lord” statuette. Drawings by Stephanie Strauss after (a) Urcid and Joyce (Reference Urcid, Joyce, Tsukamoto and Inomata2014:Figure 9.11); (b) Grove (Reference Grove1970:Figure 15); (c) Lee (Reference Lee1969:Figure 40e); (d) Lee (Reference Lee1969:Figure 42h); (e) Bachand et al. (Reference Bachand, Murrieta and Lowe2008:184); (f) Princeton Art Museum (1995:280, cat. no. 193, Figure 2).

Even though the earliest writing systems likely emerged in linguistically diverse, “fragmented ‘script communities’” (Houston Reference Houston and Houston2004a:299), the consistent bar-and-dot format for Mesoamerican numeration points to pan-regional and cross-linguistic borrowing that eventually resulted in the establishment of broadly shared numerical conventions (Houston Reference Houston and Houston2004a:300; Pohl et al. Reference Pohl, Pope and von Nagy2002:1984; Strauss Reference Strauss2018:329–333). Thomas Crump (Reference Crump1990:34) contended, “No part of speech is more susceptible to linguistic borrowing and cultural diffusion than numerals.” Such borrowing and diffusion, he acknowledged wryly, also make the lexical origins of numerals exceedingly difficult to trace. Notwithstanding numbers’ inevitably murky origins, their permanent recording was “fundamental in the emergence and evolution of writing” (Crump Reference Crump1990:42). Karl Taube (Reference Taube2000:5) further noted that because bar-and-dot logographs express specific numerical terms and quantities, coefficients constitute writing. Yet the earliest examples of Mesoamerican numeration are few and far between, often contested, and may lack clear syntax, which perhaps accounts for the lack of sustained attention to their developmental trajectories.

Before turning to the La Blanca figurine, a few specific ideational aspects of numbers are worth considering. Crump (Reference Crump1990:1) emphasized that the cognitive basis of numbering “cannot exist without some set of signs representing the series of natural numbers, 1, 2, 3 . . .” (emphasis in original). Numbering was driven, he argued, by the need to record the quantities of objects, as well as more abstract things such as units of time: because of this latter function, it was linked to memory (Crump Reference Crump1990:2, 29–30; Prem Reference Prem, Heizer and Graham1971:112, 128). Memory, moreover, is facilitated by the ease of retrieval, which in turn hinges on the storage of information according to some formula or principle of organization. The shared conventions of Mesoamerican numeration illustrate one such organizational formula. Yet the bar-and-dot structuring of much Mesoamerican numeration was only one of several notational systems, albeit the most enduring. There is a sort of “survival of the fittest” when it comes to numerical systems, according to Crump (Reference Crump1990:148). Thus, there is always the possibility that, preceding the adoption of the bar-and-dot system in Mesoamerica, other mechanisms for numeration were developed and eventually abandoned.

By the same token, we know from later eras that there was occasional variation in numerical systems. For example, bar-and-dot numerical systems were used between approximately 600 BC and AD 900 by Maya, Zapotec, and Epi-Olmec/Isthmian scribes. At minimum, Maya and Epi-Olmec scribes also shared the Mesoamerican Long Count, with its placeholder zero and modified vigesimal base system for recording higher-order calendrical dates. However, after about AD 1300, a system using only dots signified the numbers 1–13 in Mixtec and Aztec visual records (Marcus Reference Marcus1992:96). There are other anomalous programs: for example, slabs discovered by Manuel Gamio in Teotihuacan’s Templo de Tlaloc display a combination of lines (apparently signifying single units) and bars (signifying five; Beyer Reference Beyer1921; González Casanova Reference González Casanova1920). This convention, although unusual, persevered in early colonial central Mexico (Taube Reference Taube2000:5). Perhaps, as Taube surmised, this unusual departure at Teotihuacan accommodated quickly slashed, freehand computations.

Given the essentially fixed signaling value of a single dot as the numerical “one,” surely a string of dots (or even thin lines) could easily be counted as units of one by anyone fluent in the bar-and-dot system. The ebb and flow in the popularity of stringed dots, including their vogue in later eras, likely correlated with stylistic, economic, and other sociopolitical considerations. In the Mixtec and Aztec codices, one easily becomes accustomed to reading even long strings of single dots and quickly approximating their quantity, a visuo-summation process known as subitizing (Everett Reference Everett2017:24, 102–108). Artist-scribes had regularized ways of framing higher-order numbers within a composition to facilitate immediacy when reading stringed dot numerals. And no matter what form Mesoamerican numerals took, the vigesimal system was rooted in metaphors/mnemonics of the body: specifically, 10 fingers and 10 toes and concepts of personhood anchored to the number 20 (see the later discussion).

Middle Preclassic Numeration and Consecutive Circles

In Mesoamerica, the “linguistic processing” that tied numerals to independent symbols possibly emerged by way of the 260-day calendar, in which numbers partner with calendrical signs (Justeson Reference Justeson1986:445). David Grove (Reference Grove1970:18–20) pointed to Painting 3 (Figure 3b) in Oxtotitlan Cave, Guerrero, Mexico—its Middle Preclassic date supported by its stylistic, iconographic, and archaeological associations (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2005)—as a rare early example of a calendrical inscription with a number. Painting 3 portrays the head of a zoomorphic creature framed by two rows of three horizontally arranged dots. Grove (Reference Grove1970:32) suggested this represents the date “3 Cipactli” in the 260-day calendar (if one takes into consideration only the three lower dots) or “6 Cipactli” if one includes the dots above the creature’s head. Notably, if all six dots are included, Painting 3 serves as Middle Preclassic evidence of stringed dots accounting for values greater than four. Arnaud Lambert (Reference Lambert2013) raised the possibility that this glyphic collocation served as a personal name based on well-known Mesoamerican conventions in which calendrical glyphs carry nominal values based on the 260-day calendar date on which an individual was born (Justeson Reference Justeson1986:446; Marcus Reference Marcus1992:191). Whether a date or name/nominal, the collocation’s early coefficient might represent “the earliest number glyph yet known” (Grove Reference Grove1970:20).

Possible numbers also appear on a cylinder stamp from San Andrés, Tabasco, Mexico, a satellite center within the political orbit of La Venta during the Middle Preclassic period (Pohl et al. Reference Pohl, Pope and von Nagy2002; see Figure 4a). As Justeson (Reference Justeson1986:444) noted and David Mora-Marín (Reference Mora-Marín, Chen and Tschanz2019:281) confirmed, examples of early or proto-writing occur primarily on portable objects, such as this stamp. The San Andrés stamp was excavated in a domestic context that is dated by its stratigraphy and associated radiocarbon assays to approximately 650 cal BC. Mary Pohl and colleagues (Reference Pohl, Pope and von Nagy2002:1985) suggested that its design, which portrays a bird whose beak emits speech scrolls terminating in glyph-like elements, reflects “the initial stages of logographic writing” and conveys words “spoken” by the bird. The graphic forms incorporate clear Olmec iconography, including U- and E-shaped motifs, brackets and scrolls, and a double merlon (Strauss Reference Strauss2018:98). Pohl and colleagues argued that the glyphic elements were arranged in two columns, one of which contains three circles signifying the number “3,” adjacent to a possible calendrical glyph; each circle is paired with an inverted V or dart-shaped motif. Six circles paired with dart-shaped motifs also appear adjacent to a rectangular main sign on a flat stemmed stamp from a Francesa phase context (450–300 BC) at Chiapa de Corzo, Chiapas, Mexico (Figure 3c; see Lee Reference Lee1969:79, Figure 40e). Another Francesa-Horcones phase stamp from Chiapa de Corzo (Figure 3d; see Lee Reference Lee1969:82, Figure 42h) includes a stepped logogram and bar-and-dot numeral “8,” a combination that Strauss (Reference Strauss2018:Figure 198b) argued served a locative function in the Late Preclassic period as displayed on La Mojarra Stela 1 (Winfield Capitaine Reference Winfield Capitaine1988).

Figure 4.

Middle Preclassic stringed dots: (a) San Andrés cylinder, horizontal orientation; (b) San Andrés cylinder, vertical orientation; (c) detail of Chalcatzingo Monument 2. Drawings by Stephanie Strauss after (a and b) Pohl et alia (Reference Pohl, Pope and von Nagy2002:Figure 2) and (c) Grove (Reference Grove1984:Figure 9).

Yet another flat stamp from a Francesa-Guanacaste phase deposit at Chiapa de Corzo may show the numeral “5,” expressed as a series of five dots rather than a single bar (Figure 3e). Although only two dots are intact, Bruce Bachand and colleagues (Reference Bachand, Murrieta and Lowe2008:183, Figure 114c) suggested that a series of five stringed dots originally appeared beneath a sign that resembles both Isthmian hieroglyphs from La Mojarra Stela 1 (Strauss Reference Strauss2018:221) and Classic Maya ajaw signs. This plausible reconstruction suggests that both a single bar and a series of five stringed dots could signify the number “5” at Middle Preclassic Chiapa de Corzo. Admittedly, it is possible that the five circles on the stamp in Figure 3e illustrate round beads, dangling beneath a graphic insignia. In many ways, the Chiapa de Corzo stamps illustrate the difficulties in distinguishing between dots that serve as numerals and consecutive circles that serve decorative or iconographic purposes.

Pohl and colleagues (Reference Pohl, Pope and von Nagy2002:Figure 3i) compared the cartouche adjacent to the three circles on the San Andrés seal (Figure 4a) to early Maya glyphs signifying ajaw, a day sign in the 260-day calendar; they argued, by extension, that the San Andrés collocation signified “3 Ajaw” and referenced either a date or a personal name. To bolster their arguments, they compared the stamp’s design to three circles above another ajaw-like motif incised on the greenstone body of the privately owned “Young Lord” statuette, reputedly from the Preclassic Pacific Coast (Figure 3f; see Princeton Art Museum 1995:cat. no. 193). But there is danger in reading every circle as a number, and we would note that the three circles of this motif, which decorates the back of the statuette’s right hand, are not the only ones featured on the “Young Lord.” A string of four circles also appears on his right thigh where they mark the back of a supernatural zoomorph. An additional string of three circles emerges from below the zoomorph’s mouth, adjacent to a shell. They may represent water symbols (Princeton Art Museum 1995:281), or in the case of those emerging from the zoomorph’s mouth, they more likely represent breath or speech bubbles.

In one final noteworthy example, three consecutive circles, apparently oriented vertically, appear on a cylindrical stamp from Tlatilco (Kelley Reference Kelley1966:Figure 1). The imagery is organized into three tiers dense with symbols, including one that anticipates the Lamat (Venus) sign of later calendrical inscriptions. Although hesitant to label this imagery as writing because of its early date, David Kelley (Reference Kelley1966:744; also see Sharer and Sedat [Reference Sharer and Sedat1987:380–381] for discussion) nonetheless reasoned that, if such a configuration of circles appeared in a later Mesoamerican writing system, it would be interpreted as the number “3.” But, as with the rounded forms decorating the body of the “Young Lord,” interpreting the circles on the Tlatilco cylindrical stamp as numerals veers far into speculative territory. These examples remind us that circular forms served several roles during the Preclassic era, from the numerical to the iconographic.

The San Andrés cylinder stamp illustrates the difficulties in parsing potential early texts, whose presumed orientation and reading order should be questioned. In his analysis of the Early Preclassic Cascajal Block, Mora-Marín (Reference Mora-Marín2009:399, Reference Mora-Marín, Chen and Tschanz2019) cogently argued for presaging internal lines of evidence (such as the organization of text versus negative space and the patterned repetition of linked sign sequences) to reconstruct reading order. In a similar vein, Strauss (Reference Strauss2018:98–101) emphasized comparative iconicity in her analysis of the San Andrés cylinder, reasoning that the composition was intended to be read vertically, with the bird above, in a diving position (Figure 4b). This orientation situates the E- and bracket-shaped motifs so that they face downward, as often seen in Olmec-style iconography (Figure 4c), and it fits with the strong evidence for the patterned use of motifs pan-regionally by the Middle Preclassic (Houston Reference Houston and Houston2004a:284). It also, she noted, alters the reading order of the possible numerical coefficient: rather than read top to bottom, with the number above the main sign (see Figure 4a), it would be read right to left (based on the convention of reading numerical prefixes first, before their corresponding main signs); for variable reading order in early writing systems, see Strauss (Reference Strauss2018:104) and Mora-Marín (Reference Mora-Marín, Chen and Tschanz2019).

The patterned use of motifs is not necessarily indicative of writing, however, and Pope and colleagues’ interpretation of the San Andrés cylinder’s imagery as an initial stage of logographic writing was questioned by several scholars. Stephen Houston (Reference Houston2004b:293) opined that its imagery was “suggestive” of writing but not “conclusive”; he felt it more likely that the motifs represented “iconic elements,” rather than writing per se. More pointedly, David Stuart and coworkers (Reference Stuart, Hurst, Beltrán and Saturno2022) questioned whether the cylinder recorded the date “3 Ajaw”; they suggested instead that the motif functioned iconographically and its “supposed numeral” calendric coefficient was open to alternative interpretations.

Finally, the earliest evidence for an unambiguous calendrical date in Mesoamerican inscriptions comes from the site of San Bartolo, Guatemala, on a small lime plaster mural fragment (#4778) from the sub-V phase of the “Las Pinturas” pyramid (Figure 5); it was radiocarbon dated to between 300 and 200 BC (see Stuart et al. [Reference Stuart, Hurst, Beltrán and Saturno2022:Table 2] for other later calendrical dates from the Las Pinturas chamber and elsewhere dating to between the first century BC and the second century AD). The fragment contains a vertical column of glyphs including the date “7 Manik’” (7 Deer) in the 260-day calendar. The number “7” is recorded in bar-and-dot notation above the Manik day sign. Because of the incomplete nature of the stucco fragment, only the bar and one dot of the number are visible. However, Maya convention suggests that artist-scribes would have opted for symmetry and balance when recording the dot numerals. In short, if a single dot is preserved at the far end of a bar numeral, as in this case, another dot would counterbalance it on the opposite side (conversely, a single dot would always be centered in the middle of the bar). Stuart and colleagues acknowledged that the “7 Deer” collocation at San Bartolo might—as Pohl and coworkers (Reference Pohl, Pope and von Nagy2002) argued for the San Andrés stamp and Lambert (Reference Lambert2013) for the Oxtotitlan painting—serve as a personal reference, rather than an isolated date.

Figure 5.

San Bartolo mural fragment (#4778) from sub-V phase of the “Las Pinturas” structure. Drawing by David Stuart.

Only one extant monument with a calendrical inscription may predate the San Bartolo fragment, although its secondary archaeological context makes this difficult to affirm. Chalchuapa Monument 2 bears a fragmentary Long Count date that begins with the number “7” (Ito Reference Ito, Nakamura, Adachi and Ogawa2023:Figure 12a, b; Ito et al. Reference Ito, Manzano, Aiba, Arroyo, Salinas and Alvarez2020:Figures 7 and 8). Cycle 7 monuments—so nicknamed by Coe (Reference Coe1957)—are rare examples of stone monuments inscribed with a numeral “7” in the b’aktun position. These texts can be dated mechanically, even without additional Long Count information, to between 353 BC and AD 41. Other known Cycle 7 monuments have more complete dates and fall in the second half of the b’aktun, as does the Epi-Olmec Tres Zapotes Stela C (7.16.6.16.18, or 32 BC). Numerals make appearances on stone monuments from other regions during the same general period as the securely dated San Bartolo “7 Deer” inscription. The single column of glyphs on El Portón Monument 1 (Sharer and Sedat Reference Sharer and Sedat1987:361–362, Plate 18.1) contains several bars indicating the number “5.” This monument, from the Guatemalan Highlands, dates to roughly 400 BC. Likewise, Monte Albán Stelae 12 (Figure 3a) and 13, dating to 500–300 BC, display hieroglyphic inscriptions with bar-and-dot notation. As these examples attest, conventions for conveying numerical and calendrical information were in place across much of Mesoamerica by the time of the transition to the Late Preclassic period.

La Blanca Figurines

Having surveyed the variegated evidence for early Mesoamerican numeration, we now turn to the subject at hand: the Middle Preclassic ceramic figurine from La Blanca (Figure 1). Its possible numeration includes only dots; there are no bars. The 11 dots were impressed before the figurine was fired, indicative of intent and preplanning at the time of creation. The dots are organized into three vertical columns: the leftmost with three dots, and the center and rightmost with four dots each. Before delving into the potential numerical significance of these dots, we first provide background on the figurine tradition at La Blanca and the nature of this type of figurine, which is colloquially referred to as a “tab” figurine.

La Blanca rose to prominence on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala between 1000 and 900 BC (Figure 2), eventually controlling a regional system that was significantly larger and more hierarchically structured than anything previously seen on the coastal plain (Love Reference Love2007:288–289). It maintained its regional dominance for nearly 300 years, boasted some of the largest Middle Preclassic architecture in Mesoamerica, and was characterized by marked social stratification, made visible in household assemblages (Love Reference Love2002, Reference Love, Traxler and Sharer2016; Love and Guernsey Reference Love, Guernsey and Lesure2011).

Most of the more than 5,000 hand-modeled figurines found at La Blanca across decades of excavation portray humans, although animals—naturalistic and whimsical—and anthropomorphs with supernatural attributes are also documented. La Blanca figurines mostly come from the trash middens of households of all rank, which suggests that they represent the residue of shared domestic rituals or other household activities (Arroyo Reference Arroyo and Love2002; Love and Guernsey Reference Love, Guernsey and Lesure2011). When figurines appear in civic spaces, it is usually in secondary contexts of structural fill composed of discarded domestic refuse. Their depositional contexts—along with their representational variability—indicate that figurines were used in a variety of social settings and circumstances (see Bailey Reference Bailey2005, Reference Bailey, Renfrew and Morley2007; Joyce Reference Joyce2003; Marcus Reference Marcus2018). Their widespread use at La Blanca, combined with the fact that recurring types of figurines appear in multiple households, indicates that figurines were used to negotiate and maintain social identities across the community and to materialize understandings of personhood that extended beyond the human domain. The fragmentary nature of figurines at La Blanca—of the more than 5,000 found to date, only two are nearly complete—further indicates that acts of deliberate, bodily fragmentation and the dispersal of constituent fragments were often central to their meanings (Bailey Reference Bailey2005; Chapman Reference Chapman2000; Gillespie Reference Gillespie, Scarborough and Wilcox1991; Guernsey Reference Guernsey2020; Joyce Reference Joyce1998; Miniaci Reference Miniaci2023).

Most La Blanca figurines display animated facial features that convey a capacity for multisensory engagement. Although figurine bodies also reveal crucial details of anatomy and costume, heads are the most frequent locus of expressive detail and attest to the antiquity of Mesoamerican understandings of the head as “the essential manifestation of the body” (Houston et al. Reference Houston, Stuart and Taube2006:68). Although the expressivity of La Blanca figurines is remarkable, there are also many hundreds of examples of recurring figurine types with strikingly consistent features and attributes. One type of recurring figurine at La Blanca, for which we have identified close to 120 examples, bears puffy facial features, jowly cheeks, and closed, heavily-lidded eyes: it may represent an ancestor (Figure 6a; see Arroyo Reference Arroyo and Love2002:210–213; Figure 7; see Guernsey Reference Guernsey2012:103–109; Guernsey and Love Reference Guernsey, Love, Laporte and Arroyo2008). Other recurring types—some ostensibly human and others likely supernatural—share characteristic facial expressions, physiognomic features, and hairstyles (see Guernsey and Love Reference Guernsey and Love2019:Figure 2b). In another recurring type, dubbed “Shriners,” each figurine displays the same facial expression and headdress, although decorative details and relative head size vary (Figure 6b). More than 60 Shriner figurines have been found to date in households of all ranks (Guernsey and Love Reference Guernsey and Love2019).

Figure 6.

Recurring figurine types at La Blanca: (a) puffy-featured figurines in the Edwin Shook Collection, Universidad del Valle, Guatemala. Photo by Robert Rosenswig, courtesy of the Department of Archaeology, Universidad del Valle; (b) “Shriner” figurines. Photo courtesy of the La Blanca Archaeological Project.

Figure 7.

“Tab” figurines at La Blanca: (a) SM-90–34-7-8-137; (b) SM-90-37-3-20-A-168/174; (c) SM-90-34-4-7-99; (d) SM-90-37-1-16B-247/SM-90-37-1-15-184. Photos courtesy of the La Blanca Archaeological Project.

The repetition of specific physiognomic types was clearly not the result of limited ingenuity or a narrow repertoire of facial expressions. Nor was it done to achieve efficiency, because each recurring type also reveals unique attributes, subtle costume variations, or size differences: they are strikingly similar but never identical. The choice to handcraft recurring figurine types was, Guernsey and Love (Reference Guernsey and Love2019) argued, intentional, meaningful, and presumably concerned with portraying stock characters or types of individuals—whether real or imagined, living or dead—within La Blanca society.

We refer to another recurring type at La Blanca as a “tab” figurine (Figure 7), adopting the term coined by Coe (Reference Coe1961:112–115, Figure 58d; see Arroyo Reference Arroyo and Love2002:215–221) for the same type of figurine at the nearby site of La Victoria, Guatemala. The La Blanca figurine with the dots in Figure 1 is an example of a tab figurine whose lower body has been snapped off. Tab figurines, when complete or nearly complete—as in Figure 7a and b—possess anthropomorphic lower bodies with navels and breasts not unlike those of other figurine types, but from there the similarities end. Above the chest, the upper bodies take the shape of tapered tabs, which substitute for heads. More than 300 tab figurines have been found at La Blanca, distributed across households of all ranks; most are missing their lower bodies, which indicates that they endured the same ritualized fragmentation as other figurines.

The “tab” portion of these figurines is often incised with a vertical slit on the front that usually terminates, at the top, in a cleft tip, a trait visible in Figure 7d. Sometimes, at the base of the vertical slit, there is a chevron or inverted V (visible in Figures 7b and d). Some of the bases of the projecting tabs are marked with a horizontal band that includes decorative elements; similar decorative bands appear in the coiffures of many La Blanca human figurines. One such horizontal “headband,” with a round decorative fillet at the center, appears beneath the dot columns on the tab figurine in Figure 1. Another headdress band of this type appears on the tab figurine in Figure 7a, although, in this case, it displays two decorative fillets at either end, in addition to a central dangling element. Other tab figurines sport earspools, which also serve as visual cues to read the projecting tabs as heads (Figure 7c). The horizontal band on the tab figurine in Figure 1 not only visually marks the projecting tab as equivalent to a head but also serves, in compositional terms, as a base for the three columns of dots above.

The tab figurine in Figure 1 was recovered in excavations (Operation 49) approximately 1 km northwest of the ceremonial center of La Blanca in the Joyas Group area of the ancient city (see Love and Rosenswig Reference Love, Rosenswig, Love and Guernsey2022:Figure 7.2). The Joyas Group was a Middle Preclassic complex that included a 5 m tall public mound and more than a dozen smaller, apparently domestic structures (Love and Guernsey Reference Love, Guernsey and Lesure2011:174). Households in the Joyas Group were of various socioeconomic levels, with the tab figurine pertaining to a household on the lower end of the spectrum. It was found at a depth of 70–80 cm at the edge of a household floor in association with Features 218 and 220, which included a post mold, the collapsed wall of a domestic structure, another fragmentary figurine head, several figurine limbs, obsidian fragments, and miscellaneous potsherds and stone fragments.

The context is dated ceramically to the Conchas E subphase. Three radiocarbon dates for the Conchas E subphase from other contexts have means around 600 BC (uncalibrated) or about 650 cal BC. Although this date range falls within the “Hallstatt plateau,” a flat period in the calibration curve that makes determining precise calendar dates difficult, the context of the Joyas Group tab figurine almost certainly predates 600 BC. The date also coincides with an era in which La Blanca witnessed a decline in population density. In fact, most Conchas E occupations are found only at the extreme northern and southern ends of the site; ruling elites had quite likely abandoned the city’s ceremonial center by 650–600 BC, resulting in diminished activity in the urban core. Importantly, there is also sparse evidence of figurine use in the Conchas E subphase, and no other tab figurines have been found in Conchas E contexts. This evidence suggests that the figurine was found in a secondary context in the Joyas Group and had most likely been crafted prior to the Conchas E subphase. Data analyzed so far indicate that all other examples of tab figurines with good archaeological contexts date to the Conchas D subphase, which corresponds to roughly 750–650 cal BC. It is possible that this figurine was kept, or heirloomed, for several generations, but because there is no clear indication that it was part of a cache, it is also possible that it was simply part of accumulated household detritus.

Despite their formal consistencies, each La Blanca tab figurine is unique. The tab figurine’s most salient attribute is the absence of a naturalistic head and face, a quality shared with some figurines from other parts of the world (Niederberger Reference Niederberger, Clark and Pye2000). Noting the lack of faces on Neolithic Balkan figurines, Douglass Bailey (Reference Bailey, Renfrew and Morley2007:111) commented that such a practice runs counter to human instincts: as psychologists have demonstrated, faces provide the most potent visual foundation for recognizing individuals. Bailey (Reference Bailey, Renfrew and Morley2007:111–114) emphasized the “representational importance of absence” with figurines like the tabs. In representational absence, key features or body parts are omitted from the moment of conception. But, as Bailey qualified, representational absence requires a certain amount of context to be effective. This is certainly the case with tab figurines: for the three or four extant examples with intact lower bodies, their fleshiness provides a fundamentally anthropomorphic context for the abstract tab “heads” (Guernsey Reference Guernsey2020; Guernsey and Love Reference Guernsey and Love2019).

Bailey (Reference Bailey, Renfrew and Morley2007:113–114) argued that absence invites “stimulus for thought.” With the tab figurines, the projecting tabs may indeed become blank slates, ripe for the creation of an identity—whether human or supernatural—freed from a prescribed set of facial features or expressions. Although one might counter that the elided heads of the tabs quelled aspects of identity, the unique details of each convey the potential for variation, even within the confines of the “tab identity” (Guernsey and Love Reference Guernsey and Love2019:11). The 11 dots on the La Blanca Joyas Group tab figurine (Figure 1) become a critical component of this variable category of identity. This figurine is the only example, tab or otherwise, from La Blanca to bear potential numeration, yet the positioning of the numbers in the head/headdress—a location consistently associated with the expression of individuality in Mesoamerica—suggests that the dots relayed key information concerning identity.

More Dots: The Cupule Monument Tradition

Although the dots marking the La Blanca Joyas Group tab figurine are unique, so far as we are aware, notational systems using similar circular forms do appear on cupule monuments dating to the Preclassic era. Monument 13 from Las Mangales, Salamá Valley, Guatemala, displays glyph-like signs accompanied by a series of dots, some arranged into two columns of four dots each (Figure 8b). Monument 13 (along with Monument 14, also with cupules) served as a crypt lintel in Structure D6-1 (Sharer and Sedat Reference Sharer and Sedat1987:Figure 4.4, Plates 18.10 and 18.11). Given its secondary context, Robert Sharer and David Sedat dated the small monument to 500–200 BC, noting that it may have been carved earlier. Although its columnar format of dots adheres to an organizational framework strikingly similar to that on the La Blanca tab figurine, the arrangement of cupules on other Los Mangales monuments is less clear. Sharer and Sedat (Reference Sharer and Sedat1987:378, 381) suggested that the organizational format of the cupules on Monument 13 represented a notational or “partial writing” system, part of a “developed graphic heritage” shared by elite specialists versed in its usage as early as the Middle Preclassic period; however, they noted that similar cupules on other monuments at Los Mangales and elsewhere seemed less likely to be numerical indicators. Los Mangales Monument 21, a large boulder sculpture, displays dozens of cupules of varying sizes, arranged haphazardly except for a group of six framing a pecked cross (Sharer and Sedat Reference Sharer and Sedat1987:Plates 18.26–18.29).

Figure 8.

Headdresses, notational systems, and the cupule tradition: (a) detail of back of head of hollow figurine attributed to Tenenexpan, Veracruz; height of figurine 40.6 cm; (b) Los Mangales Monument 13;height 86 cm. Drawings by Stephanie Strauss after (a) Princeton Art Museum (1995:141, Figure  1) and (b) Sharer and Sedat (Reference Sharer and Sedat1987:Figures 18.10 and 18.11).

Sharer and Sedat (Reference Sharer and Sedat1987:380) compared the Monument 21 pecked cross to similar devices carved on rock outcrops near Teotihuacan. According to Anthony Aveni (Reference Aveni2001:226–229), such pecked crosses relate to astronomical phenomena associated with the 260-day calendar. It appears that cupules could serve a variety of purposes, at times signifying numbers (see Los Mangales Monument 13) and, in other cases, conveying astronomical and calendrical information. In this sense, cupules reveal some conceptual overlap with the dots on the La Blanca tab figurine, which may have functioned numerically or as some form of calendrical mnemonic.