Mysterious Calixtlahuaca: Memo to TV producers

Memo to TV producers:

Tonight I watched the PBS/National Geographic show, “Ghosts of Machu Picchu” that emphasized the mysterious nature of this Inca site. When you make your million-dollar documentary on Calixtlahuaca, here are some of the mysteries you could emphasize. Based on the fact that many of the so-called “mysteries” that structured the Machu Picchu show have not been at all mysterious since John Rowe’s 1990 paper (Rowe 1990), I will list some “mysteries” of Calixtlahuaca and their solutions (so that you can avoid the real information until the end of the show, for dramatic effect).

• Why was the main pyramid circular in form? Was this a sacred shape, perhaps a symbol of the cosmos? Might the shape relate to the statue of the wind god found buried in the pyramid? Could it indicate that the people of Calixtlahuaca were in tune with the weather and the cosmos? You can use haunting and spooky flute music in this segment.
• Reality check: The role of circular temples and the wind god has been known since the first codices were studied, and the topic was thoroughly analyzed in Pollock (1936).
• Why did so many of the human long bones excavated at Calixtlahuaca in the 1930s have deep parallel notches? Could these have been sacred musical instruments that produced an eerie percussion sound used in secret rituals? Why did these skeletons disappear after 1935?
• Reality check: The uses of these objects as musical instruments has been understood at least since Seler’s work over a hundred years ago (Seler 1992). We don’t know what happened to the bones, though.
• Why was this city built on a hill? Was it to worship the gods of the sky, or perhaps the sun god? Can this be explained by the “sacred landscape theory” that explains Machu Picchu according to Nova last night? (actually I prefer Rowe’s more prosaic explanation). Just like Machu Picchu, there were sacred volcanoes to the south and the east of Calixtlahuaca (and probably to the north and west, although I haven’t looked yet).
• Well, I guess I have to admit that the placement of the city on a hill is really a mystery of sorts, something that we are working on. But it is hard to attribute the location to a “sacred landscape theory” when nearly all other Aztec-period cities were NOT built on mountains, whereas the basic belief system was widespread.

Sincerely yours,

M. E. Smith, skeptical archaeologist

Now, here are some REAL mysteries, but probably not the kind of mystery that TV producers would be interested in:

• Why do so many people insist in attributing mystery to archaeological sites and ancient peoples? Weren’t ancient people humans like you and me, living regular lives like people all over the world? Why must the past be portrayed as mysterious and so very different from the present?
• Why do people seem amazed that ancient peoples did the things they did? Inka stonework is admirable for its skill and aesthetics, but there is nothing mysterious about it. They put thousands of people to work cutting stone, they had expert masons, and they took whatever time was needed to do things right. The Mayas had an advanced calendar and writing system, and they were pretty smart people, but there is nothing mysterious about this. (And no, the world will NOT end in 2012). The Aztecs used one of the most highly productive agricultural systems known to the preindustrial world (chinampas, or raised fields), but this is not mysterious. They had the skills, the labor, and the economic and political structure to do what they needed to do.

REFERENCES:

Pollock, Harry E. D.

1936 Round Structures of Aboriginal Middle America. Publications, vol. 471. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC.

Rowe, John H.

1990 Machu Picchu en la luz de documentos del siglo XVI. Histórica (Lima) 14(1):139-154.

Seler, Eduard

1992 Ancient Mexican Bone Rattles. In Collected Works in Mesoamerican Linguistics and Archaeoalogy, pp. 62-73, vol. 3. Labyrinthos, Culver City.

Calixtlahuaca structure 3 is on YouTube

Max Farrar has posted an animated 3-D rendering of structure 3, the Ehecatl temples, on You Tube. Click here.

What language was spoken at Calixtlahuaca?

I seem to get asked this question quite a bit. People want to know how to label the people who built and lived in the city of Calixtlahuaca. During the excavations, a group of people from the group "Unión de los Pueblos del Valle de Toluca" visited us and asked if we knew which language was spoken. They represented indigenous people from the western part of the State of Mexico, including speakers of the Mazahua, Matlatzinca, and Otomi languages. It turns out that these three languages, plus Nahuatl, were all present in the Toluca Valley at the time of the Spanish conquest. Here is René García Castro's map of the non-Nahuatl language distribution at that time.
Calixtlahuaca is just above Toluca. It is within the area of Matlatzinca, near its northern border, and also within the area of Otomi (near its southern border). The Mazahua area is not far to the northwest. And we know that Nahuatl was spoken in much of the valley also.

It seems that we cannot answer this question about languages on the basis of present data. My guess is that the city was founded by non-Nahuatl speakers, but by the time the Mexica king Axayacatl conquered the city in the 1470s, there were speakers of all four languages. But that is mostly a guess. Perhaps better data from historical linguistics could help provide a more precise answer. Perhaps if we had better information on the Calixtlahuaca bird, we might be able to narrow down the choice of languages, at least for the ruling dynasty.

This lack of precision is frustrating, but it does not both me unduly. The language(s) spoken and ethnic identity of the inhabitants of Calixtlahuaca are less interesting to me than are their activities and accomplishments.

The map shown above is from García Castro (2000); see his 1999 book for documentation.

García Castro, René
1999 Indios, territorio y poder en la provincia matlatzinca: la negociación del espacio político de los pueblos otomianos, siglos XV-XII. CIESAS, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and El Colegio Mexiquense, Mexico City and Toluca.

García Castro, René
2000 Los grupos indígenas del valle de Toluca. Arqueología Mexicana 43:50-55.

Calilxtlahuaca lectures draw a big crowd !

The AIA lecture that Emily and I gave last week drew a big crowd (see photo). Now either Calixtlahuaca is becoming hip and popular among the in-crowd, or else some professors bribed their intro classes into coming by giving extra credit points. Hmmm ........The actual attendance was 217, perhaps not enough to fill a big arena like this, but a good crowd nevertheless. And people asked some excellent questions:

• Q: Were the terraces centrally planned and built by the state, or were they organized and built by individual households?
• A: Very good question by Cinthia Carvajal. I'll let my grad students figure out an answer to that one. This is an important issue in both the terracing/agriculture literature, and in the urban literature.
  

• Q: Was there some special local weather condition related to the winds on Cerro Tenismo that may have influenced the placement of the wind-god temple half-way up the hill?
• A: Another good question. My answer was "I have absolutely no idea!"
  

Calixtlahuaca lectures at ASU

On November 12, Emily Umberger and I will each give a half-hour talk on our research at Calixtlahuaca. This is part of the Archaeological Institute of America lecture series, called "Notes From the Field: Aztecs."

New and Old Excavations at Calixtlahuaca, an Aztec Regional Capital
Speaker: Michael E. Smith

Reassembling the Calixtlahuaca Sculptural Corpus
Speaker: Emily Umberger

This even will be Thursday Nov 12, 6:30 - 7:30, in Business Administration C, Room 316.

Why Build a City on a Mountain?

Why was the city of Calixtlahuaca (3 square km of occupation, probably 10,000+ inhabitants) built on a mountain? Most Mesoamerican cities built on mountains (think of Monte Alban or Xochicalco) were placed there for reasons of defense. Images of mountaintop cities in Mesoamerican codices (see my earlier blog entry on these) tend to show battles and defensive walls. But for several reasons, we don't think that defense was a major factor in the layout of Calixtlahuaca:

1. We did not find any defensive walls or ditches.
2. The largest civic buildings were not built in a protected location.

The second factor is quite striking. The royal palace was at the base of the hill, completley unprotected, as was a large unexcavated platform (a possible ballcourt). The two largest temples, structure 3 (circular temple, dedicated to Ehecatl) and structure 4 (rectangular temple, dedicated to Tlaloc) were built part-way up the hill, but closer to the base. Again, these were relatively unprotected. When defense is an issue, the main civic buildings are almost always built at the top of the mountain or hill (again, think Monte Alban or Xochicalco).

Well, what is so surprising about building a city on a mountain if defense was NOT a major consideration? The answer is the effort required to build the site. Every house that was built had to be accompanied by the construction (and constant maintenance) of stone terraces. Temples 3 and 4 required massive platforms and large excavations into the hillside to build level areas for these temples and their groups.

I have some hunches about why Calixtlahuaca may have been built on a mountain, but I will refrain from saying them now. One thing I am doing is looking for other ancient cities around the world whose residential zones were built on mountainsides, with the civic architecture at the base of the hill. Ephesis (the Roman occupation) is one example (see photo), and I am looking for others. If you have suggestions, let me know.

Project update

Sorry, the blog has not been active lately. Well, we will soon have a bunch of new posts, so stay tuned. I have been very busy with several things:

(1) A trip to France and Sweden. In Paris, I participated in the the doctoral dissertation hearing of project member Maëlle Serghereaert at the Université de paris I-Sorbonne-Panthéon. Maëlle passed at the highest level. Here she is drawing stone on structure 4:Here is her thesis, a truly excellent study of the organization of the Aztec emire:

Serghereaert, Maëlle
2009 L'expansion mexica (1430-1520 après J.-C.): La question du contrôle impérial dans les provinces extérieures de l'Empire. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Archaeology, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

In Paris, I also gave a lecture on the Calixtlahuaca project, and Cindy and I also found time for museums, medieval churches, and pastries.

(2) I was working on our final report for the National Science Foundation for the first grant (funding for the fieldwork). This is now submitted, and we can get on to publications and a report for the Mexican government.

(3) Here is a positive development. This blog has been an inspiration for a new blog on excavations at Xaltocan in the Basin of Mexico. Lisa Overholtzer, a graduate student of Elizabeth Brumfiel at Northwestern University, as started a blog on her current excavations of Aztec-period houses at Xaltocan. These are important excavations, and it is a very nice blog. Please check it out!

Virtual tour of Malinalco

I have just seen a nice virtual tour of the site of Malinalco, on the INAH web site (thanks to Dave Grove for the suggestion).

Click here for the tour.

Malinalco was contemporaneous with Calixtlahuaca, and it is possible that it fell within the political domain of our site (prior to Axayacatl's conquests in the 1470s, that is).

This map is from my book, Aztec City-State Capitals, where I have a short discussion of Malinalco:

Aztec pyramids on the Discovery Channel

In 2008 I was filmed by a crew from the Discovery Channel for a new series called "Out of Egypt." The idea was to compare Egypt with other ancient civilizations, based on real ideas and research, something more sophisticated than the normal simplistic and sensationalist archaeology on TV. The host, Dr. Kara Cooney, is an Eygptologist at UCLA. I tried to get them to come shoot at Calixtlahuaca, but for various reasons the work had to be done in Mexico City, so we filmed at Tlatelolco, together with Salvador Guilliem Arroyo (the archaeologist in charge of Tlatelolco).

The first two episodes of this series will air Monday, August 24, from 9:00-11:00 pm (EDT and PDT). My segment on Aztec pyramids will be in the second show.

Below is a view of the main double-stair pyramid at Tlatelolco, with a 16th century Christian Church and a 20th century apartment building in the background. (This is called the "Plaza of the Three Cultures"). For more information on Tlatelolco, see my book, Aztec City-State Capitals.

Workshop on the Calixtlahuaca project

Today we held a workshop on the project at the Colegio Mexiquense. It was called, "Mesa de trabajo: Los artefactos de Calixtlahuaca y las interpretaciones sociales.” Here is the program:

Presentación

Mtro. Raymundo C. Martínez García/ El Colegio Mexiquense

Introducción a la ciudad antigua de Matlatzinco (Calixtlahuaca), y al Proyecto Arqueológico Calixtlahuaca

Dr. Michael E. Smith / Arizona State University

Artefactos de superficie y reconstrucción de la forma y organización urbana

Mtra. Juliana Novic / Arizona State University

Tecnología de la producción de herramientas de obsidiana e implicaciones para la economía de Calixtlahuaca

Dr. Bradford Andrews / Pacific Lutheran University

Raspadores, malacates y el uso económico de maguey en Calixtlahuaca

Mtra. Angela Huster /Arizona State University

La producción e intercambio de cerámica en el Valle de Toluca y Guerrero

Dr. Jennifer Meanwell / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Las terrazas agrícolas y habitacionales de Calixtlahuaca

Dr. Aleksander Borejsza / Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

La cerámica de Calixtlahuaca y las actividades domésticas: alimentos, artesanías, e ritual

Dr. Michael E. Smith / Arizona State University

Comentarios finales

Arqlgo. Víctor Osorio Ogarrio/ Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura

Mtro. Rubén Nieto / Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México

Dr. Xavier Noguez / El Colegio Mexiquense

This was an interesting session, and we all learned something from it. Thanks go to the Colegio Mexiquense for organizing and hosting the event.