Woman Grinding Corn, ceramic, Western Mexico, 200 BCE, 200 CE, AD&A Museum, Santa Barbara, 2017.015.013 (photograph by Moises Guerrero Gallegos).
Moises Guerrero Gallegos has published an essay on one of the AD&A Museum’s ceramic figurines, Woman Grinding Corn, in the new issue of Imagine: A Promise & McNair Scholars Undergraduate Journal. The piece, “Fragments of History: The Incomplete Biography of Woman Grinding Corn in Mexican Art Life,” grew out of his work with faculty mentor and MIRL collaborator Alicia Boswell. The material examination and direct analysis of the object took place in MIRL.
The figurine, a woman kneeling at a metate in the Tuxcacuesco-Ortices style, has a complicated route to Santa Barbara. Guerrero Gallegos traces it from a looted shaft tomb in western Mexico through a private pilot’s collection, a failed sale, a stop at a Canadian museum, a Tennessee auction house, and eventually a donation to UCSB.
He also catches something the record had missed. The object has been catalogued as Colima since it arrived, but that attribution came from the donor, not from any material analysis. Looking at the clay and the soil composition, Guerrero Gallegos makes the case that the figure is actually from Jalisco, one more object from a region researchers have called “archaeologically orphaned.”