Scientists use dichotomous keys to identify, organize, and classify living things into groups based on their characteristics. Many of the adornos on this incense burner lid are modeled after elements of the natural world. As a class, use the many symbols and elements of this artwork to practice making your own dichotomous keys.

1. First, take note of all the decorative elements present in the work of art. How would you describe each one? Are they realistic, stylized, or abstract?
2. Guide students to divide the group of elements into two based on a defining characteristic: i.e., abiotic and biotic. On a sheet of paper or on the board, list or draw the elements in each group.
3. Guide students to divide each group, again based on observable characteristics of each group. For example, the biotic group could be divided into “plant” and “animal”. If possible, each subgroup should have more than one item in it.
4. Repeat the process of subdividing based on physical characteristics until you can make no more divisions. Create a unique name for each decorative element based on its defining physical characteristics.
5. After practicing on the incense burner lid, apply your new skills to insects, leaves, or other natural phenomena.

Higher-order thinking skills are difficult to teach. Analyzing relationships and information is a tangible way for students to explore their own higher-order thinking. Investigating or designing new systems or structures requires a detailed examination of the properties of different materials, and the structure of different components, to reveal its function and/or to solve a problem.

• What words would you use to describe this incensario lid? How would you explain it to someone who has never seen it?
• Look closely at this incense burner lid. What different techniques might the artist have used to create and decorate the object?
• Look at the many different decorations, or adornos, on the lid. What words would you use to describe them, as a group? Are they organic or geometric? Realistic or stylized?
• Only traces of the original paint remain on this object. This is rare for such an old object, but in its prime, this lid would have been even brighter in color. Imagine the way it must have looked with all of its decoration and pigment intact. What effect would it have had on the viewer or user?
• Consider that this is the top half of a complete incense burner—the bottom half, now missing, would have been hourglass-shaped and would have contained the burning pine resin that created smoke. Based on your observations, where would the lid release the smoke?
• Focus on the face and jewelry in the center of the lid. How would you characterize the person represented here?

• Imagine the full incense burner as it would have been in Mesoamerican Teotihuacan: standing tall with bright, full decoration, and in use with smoke billowing out. How might the object have made an impression on its users and viewers? How would the presence of incense changed its effect?
• Why might the creators of this object have selected the points of smoke release that are present in this lid? How would this object, and its effect on its viewers, change if the smoke was released from a different point?
• Take inventory of the many different symbols and adornos on this object. What might these symbols have meant to the people of Teotihuacan?
• Imagine the process that this object’s creators must have gone through to produce this incensario.  Consider the base structure, the individual adornos, the painted decoration, and the final assembly of all the parts for use. How much work must have gone into this object? How much time?
• What does this object’s complexity reveal about its function and role in society?
• Why might the incensario’s creators have gone to such lengths to create such an intricate vessel for burning pine resin? What do they gain from this incensario, rather than just burning the pine resin on an undecorated dish or in a plain vessel?

Although the maker of this incense burner (incensario) lid is unknown, there was probably more than one artisan involved in the construction of this common ritual object. Individual pieces, such as the base, lid, chimney, and armature, were mass-produced in ceramic workshops located throughout the city of Teotihuacan, usually near temples or other buildings that appear to have had a religious affiliation. Clay symbols called adornos that decorated incensarios were similarly usually mass-produced with molds in workshops. However, many of the adornos on this lid were handmade, which makes it unusual. Adornos could be individually selected and placed on an incensario to serve the worship practices or other representational needs of the person commissioning the piece. Such commissions were probably common because no identical Teotihuacán incensarios are known to exist.

 

Incensarios were used in many kinds of religious rituals throughout Mesoamerica. Like this one, they were covered with layers of complicated symbolism. The face in the middle of this lid may represent a deceased ancestor or deity within a temple. The butterfly, flower, and seashell adornos—symbols of transformation, the soul, war, water, and fertility—would have been appropriate emblems for a vessel honoring ancestors or the gods. The triangle and rectangle motif that appears three times between the flowers in the headdress is the glyph for a year and is also related to warfare. The head of the feathered serpent at the top of the lid represents an important deity to which the largest temple at Teotihuacan is dedicated.  A popular god in many Mesoamerican cultures, it was called Quetzalcoatl by the later Aztecs and was usually associated with the sky, rain, and fertility.

 

At Teotihuacan, an incense burner consisted of an elaborate conical lid and an hourglass base (now missing from this work). The copal, or tree resin, burned in the base sent smoke wafting heavenward through the lid as part of a ritual and prayer. This smoke represented rain clouds and, ultimately, fertility. In this example, the smoke would have been expelled from the serpent’s mouth at the top of the lid and from the eyes of the face in the center. Most of the adornos on this lid were handmade and attached using lime-stucco cement. Traces of the original paint remain on this remarkably preserved work.

 

The ruins of Teotihuacan lie approximately forty-five miles northeast of modern-day Mexico City. In its day, the city was a cultural, religious, and economic focal point of the Mesoamerican world (from about 450–650 A.D.). With a population of 120,000 to 200,000, the area was one of the largest preindustrial cities in the world at the time, and people converged at its center to exchange goods and to pay homage to their gods. Centuries later, the Aztecs (c. 1325–1521) stood in awe of the architectural sophistication of the ruins of the city’s temples and pyramids. In honor of that splendor, they named it Teotihuacan, a word in their native Nahuatl language meaning “city of the gods,” and consecrated the ruins as a sacred and ceremonial site for worship.