A separate issue is the identification and analysis of the many objects and appurtenances shown on the tomb figurines. These include clothing, weapons, armor, pottery cups and vessels, musical instruments, and beads and ornaments. Some of these accessories are modeled in the clay; others are depicted by painted representations. Archaeologists can inspect the collections from the sites to see if any have been found as artifacts and can gain fuller cultural information from them rather than relying only on simplified representations on the figures.

Von Winning (1974: 25-27) provides a comprehensive list of objects and adornments represented on the tomb figures and points out that even naked figures have at least one item of jewelry. Of this extensive list of accompaniments, what items have been found archaeologically? We do not expect to find perishable items such as garments, the bags carried by many figures, wooden objects, remains of food offerings and the like (although had the tombs bee excavated by trained archaeologists, we would expect that traces of many of these things might have been recovered). What remains in tombs and village sites of the same periods are the imperishable items made of stone, bone, shell, and clay.

Of pottery, the tombs contain many vessels aside from the figures themselves, including some identical to the small bowls held by some of the tomb figures. Also found widely in West Mexico are pottery whistles, rattles, and flues (Crossley-Holland 1980). Other musical instruments occurring with the figures and also found as archaeological specimens include bone rasps, turtle carapace rattles or drums, and shell trumpets (no. 45).

The warrior figures portray armor, shields, clubs, atlatls, and slings. None of these has been found archaeologically, and only the chipped stone points of weapons and the curved shell or ceramic pieces that served as atlatl finger loops have been recovered.

The personal adornments portrayed on the figures are represented by a considerable variety of shell ornaments: solid and ring-shaped earspools and shell objects used as nose clips or ornaments in the septum. Rods worn in the nose are also show; these were probably made of bone, but no actual examples are known. Many shell beads, pendants, and ornaments have been recovered, some from the shaft-chamber tombs themselves and many from contemporaneous sites. Shell arm rings have also been found; these are generally classified as bracelets, although Von Winning (1874: 27) points out that they occur on the upper arms of the figurines.

It is curious that no earrings have been found among the many adornments that can be recognized in the archaeological record. Earspools, both solid and ring-shaped, are well represented in West Mexican archaeological collections, but earrings are not recognizable in existing collections, and so far as is known none has been found in any of the tombs. Both Nayarit and Jalisco-style tomb figurines often show multiple rings along the edges of the ears (nos. 13-18, 82), and perforated earlobes occur specifically in several styles. Such perforations, and sometimes multiple perforations along the edge of the ear, constitute a stylistic feature common in northern South America, where figurines have been found with metal earrings in place. They are portrayed on the West Mexican tomb figures as small rolls of clay that the “clamped” to the ear, but this is probably a function of the difficulty of manufacturing fine details in clay.

The earrings may have been made of perishable material such as fiber or cordage, but this seems unlikely. An interesting possibility is that some of these multiple earrings might have been metal. We know of no metal objects of the antiquity we ascribe to the West Mexican shaft-chamber tomb figures, though metal was in common use in South America by that time. The oldest dated metal objects in West Mexico are placed at about A.D. 600-700, three to five centuries later than the dated shaft-chamber tomb figures, and a great abundance of metal artifacts is characteristic of the Postclassic after A.D. 900. Nevertheless the oldest metallurgy in Mesoamerica appears to occur in West Mexico, and this is one of the features convincingly attribute to an introduction from South America by sea (Mountjoy 1969(. Furthermore, later contexts do yield a considerable number of small rings made of copper write (Mountjoy and Torres 1985: 141).

Given that metal is the most obvious material to use for the earrings portrayed and that nothing else in the archaeological record could represent such earrings, the multiple earrings shown on West Mexican shaft-chamber tomb figures are intriguing indications of some interesting possibilities. First, the use of metal may be older in West Mexico than is now known. Second, some of the womb figures may continue later than our present dating evidence would indicate. Neither possibility is proven; however, it would not be surprising to find one or both borne out when fuller information is acquired.