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Description

A thousand years ago, women from the Mimbres Valley embarked on an incredible journey. They knew that far to the south and east, there were lands rich with religious knowledge. This faraway place was perceived as a centre of learning, somewhere you could go and come back transformed. Traders and merchants had told tales of this land, and a few precious objects from there had occasionally made their way to the Mimbres people. But the journey ahead of the women was not one of mercantile gain. They were pilgrims, religious seekers. They set out on a long road in order to acquire new knowledge of rituals and stories that would help them order the world back home. Relying on their trade contacts would only get them so far - beyond that, they would need to learn the lay of the land from locals, availing of their hospitality and generosity of knowledge to get them to their destination.

And what a place that destination was. The Huasteca region of Mexico was unlike anything the Mimbres people had seen at home. Gone were the arid deserts they were used to. This was a lush, verdant land that faced a vast expanse of ocean. The leaders here wore colourful, elaborate headdresses, their jade and gold jewellery glittering in the tropical sun. They filed their teeth to points and decorated their bodies with swirling tattoos, layered with meanings the Mimbres yearned to understand. The men and women who came all the way from the Mimbres Valley were eager to learn the stories of this place, and the rituals that enacted those stories in real time. But what seems to have captured their imaginations above all were the Haustec's beautiful birds.

The scarlet macaw is a tropical bird, and the Huasteca region is the northernmost part of its natural range, which sweeps down from the Gulf of Mexico through Central America and into the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Like the Huastec people, whose language was at the Mayan language family's northern edge, the birds who made their home here were a small outpost compared to larger populations further south. But their proximity to northern lands gave the visiting Mimbres access to a rich world of religious knowledge centred around these birds. While macaws can be tamed, they are never fully domesticated, and the Huastec parrot keepers must have spent considerable time training the Mimbres in their care. And from the art that the Mimbres created after learning how to care for these birds, it is clear that most of their keepers were women.

A baby scarlet macaw who is reared by humans will create strong bonds with the person who raises it. In fact, scarlet macaws become extremely picky and can show hostility to other people, only cooperating with the person who cared for them as a hatchling. They are particularly aware of gender and always prefer the gender of the person who raised them. This makes down-the-line trade of macaws an unlikely explanation for their proliferation in the Mimbres Valley from around the 10th century onward. Scarlet macaws used in ritual often only lived to be a year old, as they were sacrificed at the spring equinox once their long tail feathers had grown in and given richly furnished burials. With these factors in mind, scholars have argued that the scarlet macaws found at Mimbres sites in New Mexico were brought directly by their handlers from their birthplace in the Huasteca region to their final home in the Mimbres Valley.

Strengthening the support for such direct contact between the Huastec and the Mimbres is the explosion of Mayan iconography in Mimbres pottery starting around the year 1000. Imagery of two mythological brothers known as the Hero Twins is common throughout much of the Americas. However, the way that Mimbres women portrayed the Hero Twins on pottery shows a remarkable similarity to the version of the story later recorded in the Mayan Popol Vuh. Their unusual births, their battles with their arch-enemy Seven Macaw, their various deaths and rebirths - all of this is reproduced with uncanny fidelity in Classic Mimbres bowls. At the same time as the scarlet macaws arrived in New Mexico, so too did the entire Mayan saga of the Hero Twins Hunahpú and Xbalanqué. Whether the Mimbres called them by these Mayan names is lost to time, but they clearly learned the story from the same people who gave them the scarlet macaws. In fact, parrots feature more heavily in Mimbres versions of the story depicted on pottery than they do in the Popol Vuh itself.

Burials of women from various parts of Mexico in Mimbres sites suggest that the traffic wasn't completely one-way, either. It's quite possible that some Huastec women accompanied Mimbres women back to New Mexico and helped them establish their parrot-related rituals. While some Mexican women settled in Mimbres communities, others may have been more transient travellers. At the Mimbres site of Wind Mountain, for example, a single scarlet macaw burial is the only evidence of direct contact with the south. Perhaps some Huastec women circulated among a few Mimbres communities, passing on their knowledge before heading back on the long journey home. Among the Mimbres, these precious pieces of religious knowledge added prestige to the people who had travelled so far to get them, and the scarlet macaws were the living embodiment of that knowledge. Most Mimbres religious rituals were led by men, so the macaw rituals were an especially powerful way for women to demonstrate their own ritual prestige. In later centuries, a halfway point would be established at the macaw captive breeding site of Casas Grandes, but in the year 1000, acquiring a macaw probably meant venturing all the way to the home of the Huastec people.

In this illustration, a Mimbres woman eagerly collaborates with her Huastec guest to train a young scarlet macaw. The Huastec woman's headdress is full of scarlet macaw feathers, signalling to any observers that she is an expert in these matters. While the locals may not understand all the meanings behind her tattoos and face paint, they trust that the Mimbres woman who brought her here will be able to interpret the most salient points for them. The Mimbres woman, who has been raising this macaw since it first hatched in its tropical home, watches with excitement as it successfully flies through a wooden hoop. Spectacles like this will be memorialized in pottery sculpted by women artists for generations to come. For now, though, these two women are simply exhilarated to be sharing in this moment of religious knowledge and cultural exchange, represented by a beautiful bird in flight.

This one took a very long time to research but I'm so excited to finally share it with you. I went back and forth on whether or not to make the visiting woman from La Huasteca or Casas Grandes, since Casas Grandes was a later site of captive parrot breeding closer to the Mimbres Valley. However, there isn't any archaeological evidence yet of macaw breeding in Casas Grandes until centuries after the first scarlet macaws arrived in New Mexico, and I was also very persuaded by scholars' arguments about the Hero Twins mythological cycle and Mimbres pottery. So in the end, I went with a Huastec woman who's travelled all the way up from the tropical Gulf of Mexico to the arid Mimbres Valley. I picked the site of Wind Mountain because its scarlet macaw burial has been radiocarbon dated to AD 1000 or thereabouts. I used this stock image as a pose reference for the Mimbres woman. The art of Daniel Parada (kamazotz ) was also really helpful for interpreting some of the faded tattoos on the Huastec statuary.

This is my 60th illustration in the Women of 1000 series. I can't believe it's come this far. I'd like to dedicate this illustration and the milestone it represents to my recently departed cat Poe . Poe has been my companion through drawing much of the series, and in his final month, he sat on my lap while I researched this picture. He was a true "phenomenal cat." For over half of my life, Poe has been there for me through hard times. As a newly adopted kitten he purred on my forehead when I was home sick from school with a migraine, which gives you a glimpse of the empathy and love he expressed all his life. So many of the stories in the Women of 1000 series were researched, drawn, and written with Poe in my lap. I even made an April Fools drawing installing him as an entry in the series two years ago. In the last year, he'd become particularly attached to sitting with me in the study for most of the day. We all miss him so much, and our lives won't be the same without him. ~ August 16, 2022

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/parro…

Others in the series include...

The Dog Breeder of Desolation Sound (Canada)
Ladies Li, Liu and Yang (China)
Queen Heonae (Korea)
Maga'håga (Guam)
The Lovers of Amesbury Abbey (England)
Ayagigux' (Alaska)
Hrugs 'or za (Tibet)
The Royal Dancer of Gao (Mali)

Bharima (Bangladesh)

Gunnborga (Sweden)

Description

A thousand years ago, women from the Mimbres Valley embarked on an incredible journey. They knew that far to the south and east, there were lands rich with religious knowledge. This faraway place was perceived as a centre of learning, somewhere you could go and come back transformed. Traders and merchants had told tales of this land, and a few precious objects from there had occasionally made their way to the Mimbres people. But the journey ahead of the women was not one of mercantile gain. They were pilgrims, religious seekers. They set out on a long road in order to acquire new knowledge of rituals and stories that would help them order the world back home. Relying on their trade contacts would only get them so far - beyond that, they would need to learn the lay of the land from locals, availing of their hospitality and generosity of knowledge to get them to their destination.

And what a place that destination was. The Huasteca region of Mexico was unlike anything the Mimbres people had seen at home. Gone were the arid deserts they were used to. This was a lush, verdant land that faced a vast expanse of ocean. The leaders here wore colourful, elaborate headdresses, their jade and gold jewellery glittering in the tropical sun. They filed their teeth to points and decorated their bodies with swirling tattoos, layered with meanings the Mimbres yearned to understand. The men and women who came all the way from the Mimbres Valley were eager to learn the stories of this place, and the rituals that enacted those stories in real time. But what seems to have captured their imaginations above all were the Haustec's beautiful birds.

The scarlet macaw is a tropical bird, and the Huasteca region is the northernmost part of its natural range, which sweeps down from the Gulf of Mexico through Central America and into the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Like the Huastec people, whose language was at the Mayan language family's northern edge, the birds who made their home here were a small outpost compared to larger populations further south. But their proximity to northern lands gave the visiting Mimbres access to a rich world of religious knowledge centred around these birds. While macaws can be tamed, they are never fully domesticated, and the Huastec parrot keepers must have spent considerable time training the Mimbres in their care. And from the art that the Mimbres created after learning how to care for these birds, it is clear that most of their keepers were women.

A baby scarlet macaw who is reared by humans will create strong bonds with the person who raises it. In fact, scarlet macaws become extremely picky and can show hostility to other people, only cooperating with the person who cared for them as a hatchling. They are particularly aware of gender and always prefer the gender of the person who raised them. This makes down-the-line trade of macaws an unlikely explanation for their proliferation in the Mimbres Valley from around the 10th century onward. Scarlet macaws used in ritual often only lived to be a year old, as they were sacrificed at the spring equinox once their long tail feathers had grown in and given richly furnished burials. With these factors in mind, scholars have argued that the scarlet macaws found at Mimbres sites in New Mexico were brought directly by their handlers from their birthplace in the Huasteca region to their final home in the Mimbres Valley.

Strengthening the support for such direct contact between the Huastec and the Mimbres is the explosion of Mayan iconography in Mimbres pottery starting around the year 1000. Imagery of two mythological brothers known as the Hero Twins is common throughout much of the Americas. However, the way that Mimbres women portrayed the Hero Twins on pottery shows a remarkable similarity to the version of the story later recorded in the Mayan Popol Vuh. Their unusual births, their battles with their arch-enemy Seven Macaw, their various deaths and rebirths - all of this is reproduced with uncanny fidelity in Classic Mimbres bowls. At the same time as the scarlet macaws arrived in New Mexico, so too did the entire Mayan saga of the Hero Twins Hunahpú and Xbalanqué. Whether the Mimbres called them by these Mayan names is lost to time, but they clearly learned the story from the same people who gave them the scarlet macaws. In fact, parrots feature more heavily in Mimbres versions of the story depicted on pottery than they do in the Popol Vuh itself.

Burials of women from various parts of Mexico in Mimbres sites suggest that the traffic wasn't completely one-way, either. It's quite possible that some Huastec women accompanied Mimbres women back to New Mexico and helped them establish their parrot-related rituals. While some Mexican women settled in Mimbres communities, others may have been more transient travellers. At the Mimbres site of Wind Mountain, for example, a single scarlet macaw burial is the only evidence of direct contact with the south. Perhaps some Huastec women circulated among a few Mimbres communities, passing on their knowledge before heading back on the long journey home. Among the Mimbres, these precious pieces of religious knowledge added prestige to the people who had travelled so far to get them, and the scarlet macaws were the living embodiment of that knowledge. Most Mimbres religious rituals were led by men, so the macaw rituals were an especially powerful way for women to demonstrate their own ritual prestige. In later centuries, a halfway point would be established at the macaw captive breeding site of Casas Grandes, but in the year 1000, acquiring a macaw probably meant venturing all the way to the home of the Huastec people.

In this illustration, a Mimbres woman eagerly collaborates with her Huastec guest to train a young scarlet macaw. The Huastec woman's headdress is full of scarlet macaw feathers, signalling to any observers that she is an expert in these matters. While the locals may not understand all the meanings behind her tattoos and face paint, they trust that the Mimbres woman who brought her here will be able to interpret the most salient points for them. The Mimbres woman, who has been raising this macaw since it first hatched in its tropical home, watches with excitement as it successfully flies through a wooden hoop. Spectacles like this will be memorialized in pottery sculpted by women artists for generations to come. For now, though, these two women are simply exhilarated to be sharing in this moment of religious knowledge and cultural exchange, represented by a beautiful bird in flight.

This one took a very long time to research but I'm so excited to finally share it with you. I went back and forth on whether or not to make the visiting woman from La Huasteca or Casas Grandes, since Casas Grandes was a later site of captive parrot breeding closer to the Mimbres Valley. However, there isn't any archaeological evidence yet of macaw breeding in Casas Grandes until centuries after the first scarlet macaws arrived in New Mexico, and I was also very persuaded by scholars' arguments about the Hero Twins mythological cycle and Mimbres pottery. So in the end, I went with a Huastec woman who's travelled all the way up from the tropical Gulf of Mexico to the arid Mimbres Valley. I picked the site of Wind Mountain because its scarlet macaw burial has been radiocarbon dated to AD 1000 or thereabouts. I used this stock image as a pose reference for the Mimbres woman. The art of Daniel Parada (kamazotz ) was also really helpful for interpreting some of the faded tattoos on the Huastec statuary.

This is my 60th illustration in the Women of 1000 series. I can't believe it's come this far. I'd like to dedicate this illustration and the milestone it represents to my recently departed cat Poe . Poe has been my companion through drawing much of the series, and in his final month, he sat on my lap while I researched this picture. He was a true "phenomenal cat." For over half of my life, Poe has been there for me through hard times. As a newly adopted kitten he purred on my forehead when I was home sick from school with a migraine, which gives you a glimpse of the empathy and love he expressed all his life. So many of the stories in the Women of 1000 series were researched, drawn, and written with Poe in my lap. I even made an April Fools drawing installing him as an entry in the series two years ago. In the last year, he'd become particularly attached to sitting with me in the study for most of the day. We all miss him so much, and our lives won't be the same without him. ~ August 16, 2022

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/parro…

Others in the series include...

The Dog Breeder of Desolation Sound (Canada)
Ladies Li, Liu and Yang (China)
Queen Heonae (Korea)
Maga'håga (Guam)
The Lovers of Amesbury Abbey (England)
Ayagigux' (Alaska)
Hrugs 'or za (Tibet)
The Royal Dancer of Gao (Mali)

Bharima (Bangladesh)

Gunnborga (Sweden)