Resignifying Mouths as Portals between Two Worlds. Artifi cial Dental Contouring in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and validate a new taxonomy of dental arches artifi cially contoured by fi ling or cutting, constituting a widespread and varied practice among preHispanic Mesoamerican populations, who used to complement it with engraving and inlays. Based on a list of 30 generic arcade designs that Javier Romero proposed from the buccal iconography of Mesoamerican populations, we distinguish diff erent Indigenous Leitmotive, resorting to Mesoamerican thought on human oral and dental functions. With this, we propose four groups with a total of 16 variants that diff erentiate ways of sculptingsigns of the vital breath ik’ in the dental line and faunistic motifs from simply serrated and/or furrowed anterior dentitions. For the validation of the taxonomy, we resorted to the Romero Collection of 535 dentitions, documented in different Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic Mesoamerican spheres. The new two-dimensional taxonomy allows group identification in 96 % and the precise pattern identification in 86 % of the evaluable dentitions. Their collective examination demonstrated the Mesoamerican evolution of dental patterns, highlighting regionalisms as well as the pan-regional adoption of certain signs, such as the Teotihuacan motif of the “butterfly” breath. At least, five hundred years before the Spanish conquest, emblematic values that were still invested by their human bearers during the Classic period are being lost and replaced by unified simple patterns. We conclude that our new table will benefit the systematization of one of the most emblematic and ancestral Mesoamerican practices and will also facilitate the cultural valorization of its expressions among their ancient human bearers.