This programme has turned out to be more about what we don't know than what we do. Our statue's commanding physical presence speaks to us with peremptory directness, but of all the objects in our history, she is perhaps the hardest to read confidentl...
Kim Richter may of course be right, and these statues may simply be representations of the local elite, but I find it hard to believe that these geometric naked female statues are merely aristocratic family likenesses, even of the most ritualised sor...
The Aztec expert Kim Richter gives us her more secular understanding of the statue: I've argued that the sculptures represent the Huastec elite, who dressed up with these fancy costume elements that were actually common within the international elite...
So it's pretty hard to come to any firm view about our statue's meaning, and now some scholars are even questioning whether she's a goddess at all. Back to the evidence we have got - the statue in the gallery. Her most striking feature is a huge, fan...
Just as Tlazolteotl was held to consume actual filth, and thus restore life and goodness, she did the same in moral terms. She was, the Aztecs told the Spaniards, the goddess who received confessions of sexual sin: One recited before her all vanities...
The simple fact is that childbirth and infancy are always very messy affairs. To achieve even a minimum level of hygiene means devising systems for coping with filth - and mother goddesses have to deal with filth on a cosmic scale. So it's not at all...
It's important not to say that all mother goddesses are the same. A lot of times the mother goddesses are related to the spring, to vegetation, to that kind of fertility - not just human, animal fertility. Then in terms of fertility you enter the are...
But she does have two humanising aspects. Her small head is unexpectedly animated, she appears to be looking up and to the side towards something, and her lips are open, as though she may even be speaking. And below her breasts are the only surface d...
Here in the Mexico Gallery at the British Museum, I am looking at a statue of a woman. Not just one woman, in fact, because although she is in prime position, she is presiding over a group of companions, three sandstone sisters, all carved to the sam...
Everybody knows about the Aztecs, and how the great Aztec Empire was conquered by the Spaniards in the 1520s. We hear much less about the people that the Aztecs themselves had conquered to build their empire. One of the most interesting people subjug...