ABSTRACT
Based on the large number of hunched backs, paralytic limbs, contorted spines, and other corporeal distinctions that appear in the arts of the ancient Americas, a number of scholars of pre-Hispanic history contend that disability and so-called “bodily deformation” were once endemic among New World populations.2 These archaeologists and art historians have relied primarily on visual analysis of artworks carried out in relation to contemporary Western medical pathology, resulting in interpretations including diagnoses of spina bifida, facial paralysis, syphilis, and widespread achondroplasia (the most common form of dwarfism).3 However, in electing to articulate disability as a “pathology” or “sickness” (enfermedad) rather than as an imposed social, cultural, or political identity, such analyses assume that many of the most extraordinary examples of non-Western art were modeled on literal, even prosaic, examples of bodily anomaly. Consequently, these sculptural figurines have come to be viewed not as objects of artistic creativity, but rather as historical records of identifiable illness. Such is the case in scholarly discussions of one Mesoamerican artistic motif in particular: a short-statured figure known in Mesoamerican scholarship as “the dwarf.”4
