In Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands, Latin American, North American, and European researchers explore the meanings and functions of two- and three-dimensional human representations in the Precolumbian communities of the Mexican highlands. Reading these anthropomorphic representations from an ontological perspective, the contributors demonstrate the rich potential of anthropomorphic imagery to elucidate personhood, conceptions of the body, and the relationship of human beings to other entities, nature, and the cosmos.
 
Using case studies covering a broad span of highlands prehistory—Classic Teotihuacan divine iconography, ceramic figures in Late Formative West Mexico, Epiclassic Puebla-Tlaxcala costumed figurines, earth sculptures in Prehispanic Oaxaca, Early Postclassic Tula symbolic burials, Late Postclassic representations of Aztec Kings, and more—contributors examine both Mesoamerican representations of the body in changing social, political, and economic conditions and the multivalent emic meanings of these representations. They explore the technology of artifact production, the body’s place in social structures and rituals, the language of the body as expressed in postures and gestures, hybrid and transformative combinations of human and animal bodies, bodily representations of social categories, body modification, and the significance of portable and fixed representations.
 
Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands provides a wide range of insights into Mesoamerican concepts of personhood and identity, the constitution of the human body, and human relationships with gods and ancestors. It will be of great value to students and scholars of the archaeology and art history of Mexico.
 
Contributors: Claire Billard, Danièle Dehouve, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Melissa Logan, Sylvie Peperstraete, Patricia Plunket, Mari Carmen Serra Puche, Juliette Testard, Andrew Turner, Gabriela Uruñuela, Marcus Winter

Brigitte Faugère is professor at the Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. An archaeologist specializing in the north-central and western parts of Mexico, she is the director of an excavation project on the Preclassic Chupícuaro in the Lerma Valley and author of Entre Zacapu y Río Lerma: Culturas en una zona fronteriza, Las representaciones rupestres del centro-norte de Michoacán, and Cueva de los Portales: Un sitio arcaico de Michoacán, México.
 
Christopher Beekman is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver. His research focuses on sociopolitical organization in ancient western Mexico. He has directed excavation projects at Llano Grande and Navajas and surveys in the La Primavera region and the Magdalena Valley. He is a coauthor of the first volume of the Historia de Jalisco and has coedited several books, including Shaft Tombs and Figures in West Mexican Society.