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Product Description
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Carved from a small deer antler bone, this RARE piercer / awl is in perfect preservation and comes from the mysterious Teotihuacan Pre-Columbian civilization. A piercer / awl like this would have been used to pierce animal hides for making various handcrafts and clothing. The sharp tip could have also been used to pierce human skin in various blood-letting rituals that were used. A portion of the original antler outer surface can still be seen while the rest has been carved and shaped to a very sharp needle-like tip. The entire awl is perfect and exactly as it was made over 2000 years ago! The tip even shows a polished finish which is evidence of repeated use. Ancient objects like this that are made of organic materials, often do not survive the ravages of time, making this a rare artifact of this enigmatic culture!
The Allen Heflin Collection - Dr. Allen Heflin was a specialist veterinarian with the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) who worked in 40 countries over 4 decades. During his years of service in Mexico from 1946-1962, he actively collected and researched a number of sites, publishing several articles in Mexican anthropological journals. His large estate consisted of over 8,000 pieces, with 70% being from Pre-Columbian cultures of Central America, 20% from North American Indian cultures, 5% of Old World and Middle Eastern antiquities, and the remaining 5% being ethnographic objects of various cultures.
HISTORY
In the first millennium A.D., the central American mega-city of Teotihuacan was THE largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas and had a broad influence on its neighboring cultures both, in simultaneous existence to it and even long after. At its peak in 450 A.D., with an estimated population exceeding 200,000 at this time, it was one of the largest cities in the world. The founders of this great city are a mystery and much debate has circled around who exactly built the city. Because the inhabitants seem to have been multi-ethnic (Nahua, Otomi, Totonac and Mayan) the culture is not attributed to a specific ethnicity or tribe but is called TEOTIHUACAN or TEOTIHUACANO.
Teotihuacan was an enormous industrial city and trading center housing a variety of trades and craftspeople. The quality of artistry in the thousands of mural paintings from Teotihuacan artists rivaled anything that was to be produced by many master painters of Renaissance Europe much later in time. Perhaps, the most famous industry the city was known for was its extensive production of obsidian objects.
Many of the same gods worshipped by other pre-Columbian cultures of the surrounding region were worshipped by the inhabitants of Teotihuacan. Gods such as the Feathered Serpent and the rain god, which were later worshipped by the Aztecs in their own culture. It is believed the Mayans and later period Aztecs, along with many other tribes, were heavily influenced by Teotihuacan and like those cultures, human sacrifice was practiced in Teotihuacan. This is evidenced by numerous human skeletons showing signs of ritual sacrifice, excavated from the sites where the pyramids were built.
The end of Teotihuacan is as much a mystery as its beginning. Most recent studies now show the city's decline began some time around the 6th century A.D. and may have been caused not by a conquering neighbor but by internal civil unrest and uprising.