30 May 2025 / 10 House
Article suitable for older students
Find out moreWhat do Quetzalcoatl’s earplugs really look like?
Quetzalcoatl’s turquoise earplug; Codex Telleriano-Remensis, fol. 10r (detail)
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Nicholas H.: First of all, thank you so incredibly much for this website gift to the world. Because of your work, I have felt surprised and enlightened in many beautiful ways, especially with my exposure to the art and myths inspired me to make my own attempts at recreating the style on pen and paper (I’m practicing), and also I’ve been learning as much about the Aztec as I can.
My question is about the costume jewelry. The codex pictures give such amazing detail to the regalia of the gods, which intrigues me so much and gives me a lot to ponder. I understand that these items were summarily destroyed in the conquest, but I am wondering how much we know about these ritual objects, and if it would be possible to recreate any of them accurately today. Specifically, I am wondering if we know what Quetzalcoatl’s hooked earrings looked like in real life? If there are any surviving examples that you know of, or ways of remaking them today. I have searched hard for this, and have seen the earrings in plenty of paintings and sculpture, but I am still not able to exactly picture what the jewelry would look like when worn by an actual human being. I know they are also called Tzicoliuhqui Teocuitlatl Inacoch according to one of your articles but searching for this online doesn’t bring anything up. (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
We can only help you to a limited extent here. You saw that phrase in Nahuatl in a much earlier entry in our ‘Ask Us’ section, written by Julia Flood (link below for anyone else interested...). The phrase tzicoliuhqui teocuítlatl inacoch simply means ‘curved golden earring/earplug’. In the depiction of Quetzalcoatl in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis - that you saw in Julia’s feature - the colour is more red than gold (see main picture above), but that’s the nature of these reproductions.
We think the best we can do is to upload here an illustration of a xiuhnacochtli (‘turquoise earplug’) in a classic work by Salvador Mateos Higuera, in the hope that it will give you the best indication of what this artefact looked like. We’ve no idea where to go to see/find reproduction jewellery based on these images!
Mateos Higuera notes that the white part of the earplug would be shell. He adds that Quetzalcoatl also wore earrings made of jade as well as rock crystal.
In answer to Nicholas’s subsequent question, we quote the following (reference below):-
A range of tools would have been needed to prepare and work... very different types of shell. ‘Dead’ conch shells washed up on beaches might already have been fragmented into manageable pieces by wave action, but a heavy-duty implement, such as a stone hammer, would have been required to break up the dense shell of a live conch. In the case of Spondylus, a small stone tool may have been used to remove the spines and hinges of the shell and to grind smooth the radial bands on each valve. The more fragile Pinctada bivalve shell would have needed careful cutting and shaping with a sharp-edged obsidian or flint blade.
The fragments of Spondylus, Strombus and Pinctada were probably then marked out for precise cutting and shaping into tesserae using a lithic (stone) point or awl. The actual cutting [see picture] could have been carried out effectively with an angled lithic tool or by weaving away a cut made to an edge of the shell and working it with cord or fibres, perhaps also with the aid of a loose abrasive, such as fine quartz...
Images/sources:-
• Mateos Higuera, Salvador (1993): Los dioses creadores, Enciclopedia gráfica del México antiguo, Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, Mexico City
• Codex Telleriano-Remensis by Eloise Quiñones Keber, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995
• Image from the Florentine Codex scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.
Comments (1)
Nick
27th Nov 2022
Thanks for the reply. Very interesting to know the materials especially, I assumed shell for the white part. I wonder if maybe there is a special way to cut a conch shell perhaps, that makes that characteristic hook every time . It must have been something relatively easy to do + reproduce, since I’ve found shell can be super hard to cut. And I was doing it with power tools and steel! A long term goal of mine is to one day reproduce some jewelry inspired by what I’ve seen from mesoamerica, I think the style is super slick.
Mexicolore
The best source we’ve found to answer your follow-up question on conch cutting is Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico by Colin McEwan, Andrew Middleton, Caroline Cartwright and Rebecca Stacey, British Museum Press, 2006. We hope the quote that we’ve added to our text above may help a little...
Quetzalcoatl’s turquoise earplug; Codex Telleriano-Remensis, fol. 10r (detail)
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