A chacmool (also spelled chac-mool or Chac Mool) is a form of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sculpture depicting a reclining figure with its head facing 90 degrees from the front, supporting itself on its elbows and supporting a bowl or a disk upon its stomach. These figures possibly symbolised slain warriors carrying offerings to the gods; the bowl upon the chest was used to hold sacrificial offerings, including pulque, tamales, tortillas, tobacco, turkeys, feathers, and incense. In Aztec examples, the receptacle is a cuauhxicalli (a stone bowl to receive sacrificed human hearts). Chacmools were often associated with sacrificial stones or thrones.Miller and Taube 1993, 2003, p. 60. The chacmool form of sculpture first appeared around the 9th century AD in the Valley of Mexico and the northern Yucatán Peninsula.
Aztec chacmools bore water imagery and were associated with Tlaloc, the rain god. Their symbolism placed them on the frontier between the physical and supernatural realms, as intermediaries with the gods.
Form The chacmool is a distinctive form of Mesoamerican sculpture representing a reclining figure with its head facing 90 degrees from the front, leaning on its elbows and supporting a bowl or a disk upon its chest. There is great variation among individual chacmools, with some possessing heads that are right-facing and others left-facing, and some with the heads facing upwards; some examples have movable heads. The figure may be lying on its back or on its side and the abdomen can be sunken below the level of the chest and knees or at the same level. Some chacmools were raised upon rectangular bases. Some of the figures are richly attired whilst others are almost naked.López Austin and López Luján 2001, p. 60.
The chacmools of Chichen Itza and Tula depict young men with warrior attributes, while the chacmools of Michoacán depict elderly men with wrinkled faces and erect penises. A chacmool from Guácimo, Costa Rica, combines human and jaguar features and grips a bowl.Solano, 21 February 2012. The face of the figure looks upwards and the bowl was apparently used to grind foodstuffs.Solano, 26 February 2012.
A wide variety of materials were used to sculpt chacmools, including limestone and hard metamorphic and igneous rock types. Other materials employed include ceramic and cement.
Discovery and naming The ancient name for these types of sculptures is unknown. The term chacmool is derived from the name "Chaacmol," which Augustus Le Plongeon in 1875 gave to a sculpture that he and his wife Alice Dixon Le Plongeon excavated within the Temple of the Eagles and Jaguars at Chichén Itzá in 1875; he translated Chaacmol from Yucatecan Mayan as the "paw swift like thunder."Desmond, Lawrence G. "Chacmool." In Davíd Carrasco (ed). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures : Oxford University Press, 2001 Le Plongeon believed the statue, which he had found buried beneath the Platform of the Eagles and the Jaguars, depicted a former ruler of Chichen Itza. Le Plongeon's sponsor, Stephen Salisbury of Worcester, Massachusetts, published Le Plongeon's find, but revised the spelling to "Chac-Mool."Salisbury, 1877, p. 80.
Le Plongeon sought permission from Mexico's president to display the statue at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, a request that was denied. In 1877 the Yucatecan government seized the statue and brought it to Mérida. Weeks later Yucatán turned over the statue to the federal government, which brought it to Mexico City to the National Museum of Anthropology.Desmond 1988, chapters 5 and 6 Museum worker Jesús Sanchez realised that the Chichen Itza sculpture was stylistically similar to two sculptures from central Mexico and the wide occurrence of the form within Mesoamerica was first recognised.Miller 1985, p. 7. The 19th century discovery of chacmools in both central Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula helped to promote the idea of a Toltec empire although the chacmool sculptures may have originated in the Maya region.Miller 1986, 1996, p. 174.
Although the name chacmool was inappropriately applied, it has become a useful label to link stylistically similar sculptures from different regions and periods without imposing a unified interpretation. Besides these sites, the sculpture was also found in Michoacán, where it is called Uaxanoti (The Seated One) in the Purépecha language.Diccionario de Mitología y Religión de Mesoamérica, Yolotl González Torres. Edt. Larousse pp. 56, 57
Distribution
Examples of chacmool sculptures have been found widely across Mesoamerica from Michoacán in Mexico down to El Salvador. The earliest examples date from the Terminal Classic period of Mesoamerican chronology (c. AD 800–900). Examples are known from the Postclassic Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, from the central Mexican city of Tula and from the Maya city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatán Peninsula.Read and González 2000, pp. 58–59. Fourteen chacmools are known from Chichen Itza and twelve from Tula. The chacmool from the palace at Tula is dated to the Early Postclassic (c. AD 900–1200).Miller 1986, 1996, p. 175. Further examples are known from Acolman, Cempoala, Michoacán, Querétaro and Tlaxcala.Miller 1985, p. 7. López Austin and López Luján 2001, p. 61.
In Chichen Itza, only five of the fourteen chacmools were securely confirmed in architectural contexts, those in the Castillo, the Chacmool Temple, the North Colonnade, the Temple of the Little Tables and the Temple of the Warriors. The rest were found interred in or near important structures. The five that were found in secure architectural contexts were all placed within entrance areas near a ritual seat or throne.Miller 1985, p. 11. The chacmools in Tula also had an association with thrones or raised seating platforms, either in front of the throne or at the entrance to a chamber containing a throne.Miller 1985, p. 12.
Two chacmools have been recovered that were associated with the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. The first was discovered in 1943, on the junction of Venustiano Carranza and Pino Suarez, about two blocks south of the temple itself. The second chacmool was excavated in the sacred precinct.Miller 1985, p. 15. This is the only fully polychrome chacmool that has been recovered anywhere; it had an open mouth and exposed teeth and stood in front of the temple of Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god; its sculpted bowl probably received heart and blood sacrifices.Read and González 2000, p. 257. This latter sculpture is by far the older of the two.
Chacmools have been reported as far south as the Maya city of Quiriguá, near the Guatemalan border with Honduras.Martin & Grube 2000, p. 225. The Quiriguá chacmool most likely dated to the Postclassic period and is stylistically similar to those of Tula rather than Chichen Itza. Two chacmools were reported from Tazumal, a Maya site in western El Salvador.Cobos 1994, 1998, pp. 74, 80. A chacmool was excavated at Las Mercedes in Guácimo, Costa Rica.
Dating and origin The oldest chacmool ever discovered was the Terminal Classic. The form was unknown in such important Mesoamerican cities as Teotihuacan and Tikal. After the first appearance of the form, it was rapidly disseminated throughout Mesoamerica, spreading as far south as Costa Rica. Although a central Mexican origin is generally assumed, there are no antecedents pre-dating the Toltecs and the form is not present in central Mexican codices.Miller 1985, pp. 7–8.
The positioning and context of the chacmool form do have antecedents in Classic Maya art and art historian Mary Ellen Miller has argued that the chacmool developed out of Classic period Maya imagery.Miller 1985, p. 8. No central Mexican chacmool has been found that clearly predates the Chichen Itza examples. However, Tula and Chichen Itza may have developed simultaneously with rapid communication of the chacmool form from one city to the other.Miller 1985, p. 14.
The wider variety of chacmool forms at Chichen Itza has also been used to support the development of the form there; no two possess identical form, dress and proportions. At Tula the chacmools have a standardised form with little variation in position or proportions. Miller has proposed that the chacmool developed out of Classic Maya iconography and underwent a transition into three dimensional sculpture at Chichen Itza, perhaps spurred by the influence of central Mexican sculptural forms. A chacmool from Costa Rica was dated by the excavators to approximately AD 1000.
Aztec Chacmool
During the 1930 excavation of Templo Mayor, the only fully polychrome chacmool to be found at that site was in its original context on the top level of the Tlaloc side (the rain god) of the temple. The position of this chacmool statue mirrored the position of the sacrificial stone on the Huitzilopochtli (the Aztecs' patron deity, associated with war) side of the temple. Archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma posits that this mirroring confirms his interpretation that the chacmool acted as an "intermediary between the priest and the god, a divine messenger," in the same way the sacrificial stone on the Huitzilopochtli side does.
The pigment that remained on this chacmool sculpture was crucial to its identification, as it does not contain any sculpted iconography or symbols associated with the rain god Tlaloc. Archaeologists were able to create a reconstruction of the sculpture's original colors, which they then compared to pictographic representations of Tlaloc. This comparison confirmed that the polychrome chacmool discovered at Tlaloc's side of the Templo Mayor was a representation of the deity itself. Characteristics such as the "chia circles on the cheeks, the circular gold pectoral medallion, and the color combination of the petticoat, as well as the black skin, the red hands and feet, and the white headdress and bangles" echo the iconography of other depictions of Tlaloc. Art historians Leonardo Lopez Lujan and Giacomo Chiari argue that this "confirms that there is symbolic continuity between the early and late Mexica [Aztec] chacmool," due to early Aztec chacmools containing iconographic nods to Tlaloc.
A second chacmool discovery from the Templo Mayor, dating to a later period, displays iconographic features which are distinct from the larger corpus of chacmool figures but consistent with other sculptures (Tlaloc ritual vessels and bench reliefs) found in a similar context at the Templo Mayor. Whereas Tlaloc's eyes are generally represented with a round goggle-like frame, the later chacmool, the vessels, and the bench relief feature a rectangular eye frame within which almond eyes are engraved.López Austin, Alfredo. 1983. "The Masked God of Fire," The Aztec Templo Mayor: a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 8th and 9th October 1983, edited by Elizabeth 135 Hill Boone. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection: 257–292. All three sculptures also include large fangs at the corners of the god's mouth. The ornaments worn by the later chacmool and included in the vessels and the bench relief also differ from other representations of Tlaloc. The later chacmool, vessels, and bench relief sport oversized circular earspools, rather than the characteristic earspools with a square plug and central dangal; they are also adorned with a multistrand, beaded collar in which one strand has larger beads that have been interpreted to be hanging bells. The chacmool holds onto a cuauhxicalli vessel that is engraved with the face of Tlaloc, including the same rectangular eye and mouth features.