Había un Dios Principal que estaba en el Cielo y lo habíá criado todo, y que de haber jucio final; y que el mundo tuvo principio, y que hizo Dios un hombre y una mujer de barro, y q[ue] se fueron a bañar, y que no se deschicieron, y q[ue], de aquéllos, empezó elm undo. [There has a principal god who lived in heaven and had created everything, and there was to be a final judgment; and the world began and god created a man and a woman of clay and they went to bathe and they came apart in the water; and the god made them over again from ash and certain metals and sent them to the river to bathe and they did not come apart and it was from those two that the world began.] (Acuña 1987: 36)

This account of human origins appears in the Relación Geográfica from Ajuchitlán, to answer a question the Spaniards posed concerning the beliefs of the native peoples. The document reports that the deity created the original human beings from “ceniza y ciertos metals” [ash and particular metals]. The narrative suggests that metal was sacred and animate: an optimal material for the first human couple. I argue here that the metallurgical technology that coalesced in West Mexico was shaped by technical decisions based on this premise, manifest in the properties of metal that smiths chose to elaborate and in the ways metal objects were used. Most were worn or used in ritual: bells, hair ornaments, sheet metal disks and diadems, and large ornamental tweezers. These metal objects identified the individuals who wore them with supernatural forces through their form and through two key material properties: sound and color. Through sound and through color these objects created a sacred domain of experience in which priests and other religious functionaries could enact in ritual basic societal propositions, contributing structure and meaning to the lives of these ancient peoples.

Sacred power inhered in many materials and substances known in ancient Mesoamerica. Clay was formed into ritual censers; cloth was woven into religious regalia. Jade, amethyst, and obsidian was chipped, abraded, or ground into small objects representing divine and sacred beings; artisans used basalt and other rock for monumental sculptures representing humans emerging from the mouths of jaguars or snakes, and events such as the death of Coyolxauhqui (figure 8.1), the goddess of the moon and sister of the great Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli. Nonetheless, the proportion of metal objects made to serve ritual, symbolic, and status ends is unusually high when compared, for example, to the metallurgies of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, where bronze allows also were widely available and used for utilitarian ends. In West Mexico and elsewhere in Mesoamerica, metal including the characteristically utilitarian bronze allows, were endowed with exceptional and sacred qualities.

Both of the properties that shaped the technology, sound and color, were developed in bells. Bell sounds and metallic colors themselves are linked linguistically at least in Nahuatl, a language widely spoken in Central Mexico and in some areas of the metalworking zone. As I have shown, bells were fashioned elsewhere in the ancient Americas, but only in West Mexico did they become central, orienting elements of the technology. Metallic color, while vivid in bells, was most dramatically apparent in the shimmering, reflective, brilliantly golden and silvery colors of sheet metal, crafted into diadems, disks, and other objects. Tarascan nobility, religious functionaries, and other elites, as well as rulers and elites elsewhere in West and Central Mexico, wore these objects, usually in ritual, affirming their own sacred power and affiliation with the supernatural.