At the Matson Museum: The Dancing Dogs of Colima

I was on campus, and I had a few minutes before I needed to catch my next bus. As I walked past Carpenter building, there was a sign saying the Matson Museum of Anthropology was open. And I'd never been there, in all of my years at Penn State. So on this day, I walked in to check it out!

The museum is small, just a few rooms full of stuff. But it is very varied stuff, and some of it is pretty cool. There were shrunken heads, and dolls, and skeletons, and textiles, and whistles, and hats, and shards of this and that.

But a thing that caught my eye was a small sculpture of a pair of dancing dogs. So this was one of the pictures I took. Then, as I often do with things I take pictures of, I went and looked it up online. And I learned a few things.

These are the dancing dogs of Colima, Mexico. They were based on Xolos, the first dogs of the Americas, a relative of the Chihuahua or the Mexican hairless. As is typical with such statues, the dog on the left is wrinkly, while the one on the right is smooth. Such statues were sometimes placed in tombs to accompany souls on their journey to heaven.

I thought the little statue was charming. It appeared as though the dog on the left was whispering a joke into the ear of the dog on the right, who was smiling or laughing in response. So say hello to the dancing dogs of Colima!

The soundtrack is Led Zeppelin with Dancing Days.