An Unshaggy Dog Story 



A bizarre canine is living evidence of prehistoric contact between Mexico and Peru 

 by Alana Cordy-Collins 



When the Spaniards came to the Amer- 

 icas in the early sixteenth century, among 

 the novel animals they encountered in 

 both Mexico and Peru was the hairless 

 dog. "It is a dog with no hair at all; it goes 

 about completely naked. It sleeps upon a 

 cape which covers it," wrote the mission- 

 ary-ethnographer Bernardo de Sahagun, 

 who observed that the animal was raised 

 by peoples throughout the warmer parts of 

 Mexico and was frequently sold in the 

 bustling markets. The Aztecs called the 

 hairless dog xoloitzcuintli, a name com- 

 posed of the word for dog, escuintli, and 

 the name of a monstrous, doglike deity, 

 Xolotl. Similar dogs existed in China, 

 Africa, and the Middle East, but these 

 were unknown to the Spaniards, who con- 

 sidered the creature one of the extreme 

 oddities to be found in the Americas. Four 

 hundred years later, the descendants of 

 those animals seem no less bizarre, with 

 the wrinkles and warts of their bare and 

 often mottled skin unrelieved by hair ex- 

 cept for some on the crown of the head, the 

 feet, and tip of the tail. 



The animal's presence in the New 

 World can be traced at least as far back as 

 the Colima culture, which flourished in 

 western Mexico between 250 B.C. and a.d. 

 450. Colima artists created hundreds of 

 pottery vessels in the shape of dogs, usu- 

 ally in a highly burnished redware, and 

 buried them along with other pottery 

 forms (human, animal, plant) in the deep 

 shaft-tombs of their deceased. Many 

 scholars believe Colima society was 

 shamanistic. Although the culture is long 

 extinct and left no written records, repre- 

 sentations of the hallucinogenic peyote 

 cactus, homed warriors, even the occa- 

 sional homed or masked dog, all give rise 

 to this interpretation. In fact, my initial in- 

 terest in Colima ceramics was sparked by 

 the possibility that they carried a meaning 

 deeper than met the eye. 



Most of the Colima dog vessels are 

 modeled into squat, rotund little animals 

 that probably represent dogs with coats. 

 But not every Colima dog is a sleek, round 

 creature — some are unequivocally bald, 

 displaying the wrinkled skin, warts, and 



34 Natural History 2/94 



