INTRODUCTION The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) holds an important collec- tion of Mesoamerican mosaic-encrusted masks and shields, which were accessioned by the museum at two different moments. The first lot, including eight whole or fragmented masks, eight whole or fragmented shields, one hourglass-shaped earplug, a smoking tube, some small pieces of gum (incense?) tied with bark cloth (amate), and two carved wooden atlatls, was bought in 1922 by George Gustav Heye from Carl Albert Purpus, a German-born botanist who traveled and lived in Mexico (Scott, 2001; Domenici, 2018; Berger et al., this volume). 1 Marshall Saville, who since 1920 played an important role in the negotiations between Heye and Purpus, published photos and detailed descriptions of the mosaic-covered artifacts in his book Turquois Mosaic Art in Ancient Mexico (Sav- ille, 1922), in which he presented the new acquisition of the Museum of the American Indian. 2 According to the information that Saville obtained from Purpus, the objects were found by an “Indian . . . in a cave in the mountains of the Mixteca region of the State of Puebla” (Saville, 1922:47). In NMAI’s archival records the cave is said to be in the vicinities of the town of Acatlán, southwest of Tehuacán, Puebla, an area of the Mixteca Baja that Purpus had repeatedly visited in 1907–1908 (Souza Sánchez, 1969:5; Figure 1). Unfortunately, in a published paper, Purpus was very generic in his description of the provenance of the masks, shields, and atlatls—briefly mentioned at the end of the text—stating only that they were found in “caves of which there are many in this Sierra [Mixteca],” together with “amate and copal balls wrapped in amate” (Purpus, 1926:61). The fact that Purpus did not describe their archaeological contexts in an article aimed at describing archaeological sites he had visited suggests that he obtained the objects from other persons, maybe on a later date, so we cannot know whether all the materials came from the same cave. 3 In 1919, Seler viewed photos of the objects when they were still in Mexico and briefly mentioned them in 1923 (Seler, 1961:368–369). The second NMAI lot, including at least 43 whole or fragmented masks, was given to the museum in 1971 by Robert L. Stolper; its materials were recorded as proceeding “from a cave just outside of the city of Tehuacan,” where they were looted in 1967–1968 (Berger, 2019; Berger et al., this volume). 4 Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna, Piazza San Giovanni in Monte 2, 40124 Bologna, Italy. Correspondence: davide.domenici@unibo.it Manuscript received 4 May 2020; accepted 30 August 2021. The Gaze of the Ñuhu Bundles: An Interpretation of Mesoamerican Mosaics at the National Museum of the American Indian Davide Domenici