Large Jalisco seated couple, San Juanito style, Protoclassic, ca. 100 B.C.-A.D. 250

the youthful ancestral pair of majestic proportions, each distinguished by the stylized elongated heads with narrow, deeply slit eyes and mouth, and adorned with raised cicatrice shoulder tatttoos, reddened collars, rounded headbands,  tassel earrings, and armbands, the male with long slender arms and hands on the raised knees, the female with diminutive arms and palms open.

Bloomingdales, New York, 1968

 

This monumental couple, with strikingly similar features, exemplifies the ancestral couple concept, perhaps identifying a clan lineage or simply defining the primordial union. The San Juanito substyle from the Magdalena Basin region, is one of the most abstract and stylized of the Jalisco regional types. For the style, see Kan, Meighan, Nicholson (1989: cat. no. 80).