Imported Ceramics, or the Lack Thereof

We’re still waiting for our Neutron Activation Analysis ceramic results from Missouri University, but in the meantime a look at decorative types can give some hint as to the patterns we may get.  The most striking of these (so far, at least) have to do with imports. Patterns of imported ceramics can tell us who the occupants of Calixtlahuaca were interacting with, and whether these patterns of interaction changed over time. This analysis is still a work in progress, so please consider all numbers given here as provisional estimates.

The first pattern is the increase in the imports over time. At Calixtlahuaca, there are very few imports from anywhere during the Middle Postclassic (the period prior to the foundation of the Aztec Empire), followed by a steady increase during the Late Postclassic-A and Late-Postclassic B (The periods when the Aztec Empire existed, divided approximately around the time the Empire conquered Calixtlahuaca). This pattern of steady increase is consistent for both Aztec style ceramics, and the few imports from other regions.

 

The second pattern is the low diversity of imports.  The ceramics that are imported overwhelmingly come from the Basin of Mexico.  None of the households had even a single piece of Tarascan ceramics, (though we do find West Mexican copper/bronze and obsidian at Calixtlahuaca) and the few other imported pieces come primarily from Morelos. My (currently unquantified) impression is also that even the Aztec imports represent only a subset of the motifs and/or variants of these types that are present in the Basin of Mexico. For example, with the exception of a piece or two, all of the polished redwares (guinda) that we excavated feature one of two patterns. 

Both of these points are in direct contrast to contemporary Late Postclassic sites in Morelos.  There, the LPC-A frequency starts out much higher than at Calixtlahuaca and drops during the LPC-B (Morelos data taken from Earle and Smith, 2012).  Sites in Morelos also show a higher diversity of sources for imports (Evidence – The sheer number of regional types in our classification guide which I’ve never seen an example of, and when I’ve asked Mike about them, he says “Well, we get them in Morelos!”. )

2012 and the End of the World

Nice comic from Bizarro last week. It is incredibly ironic that the Mayas did NOT predict the end of the world (in 2012 or any other time) and they get all the publicity, while the Aztecs DID predict the end of the world and no one pays any attention! Well, maybe in 2027 we will get some mileage out of the Aztec prediction.

See my earlier post on Publishing Archaeology about the bogus 2012 predictions.

And this is another good one, widely reproduced by now:

For the ancient residents of Calixtlahuaca, the end of the world came in the 16th century. Once Tenochtitlan fell to Cortés, it wasn't long before smallpox and other diseases, coupled with forced evacuation to Toluca, brought the city of Calixtlahuaca to a halt.

The Aztecs, 3rd edition

The third edition of my book, The Aztecs, is now out. I just received my advance copies; it should be available for purchase in about a month (although you can go ahead and order it now!). Calixtlahuaca is discussed in a number of places in the book, and there are some photos and drawings from our project.

I managed to get a photo of Calixtlahuaca on the cover of my book, Aztec City-State Capitals (2008). For the new edition of The Aztecs, the cover shows the nice double-stair pyramid of Teopanzolco in Cuernavaca.

The Aztecs of Calixtlahuaca

I've blogged before about whether it makes sense to call Calixtlahuaca an Aztec city. My answer is yes, of course. My definition of "Aztec" is the peoples who lived in central Mexico in the final centuries before the Spanish conquest. This is a wider definition than many scholars are comfortable with. In my perspective, the "Aztecs" included:

• Speakers of Nahuatl, as well as speakers of some Oto-Pamean languages
• People living in Tenochtitlan (the Mexica).
• People living in other places in the Valley of Mexico (there is no good indigenous term for these people).
• People living in the surrounding valleys (Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Toluca, etc.) who interacted heavily with those in the Valley of Mexico and shared many social and cultural trains with them.

I am now working on revisions for the third edition of The Aztecs. I used this opportunity to re-visit my own thinking about terms and definitions, and decided that I am satisfied with the definition of "Aztec" that I have been using. Therefore I am adding some material to the book from our excavations at Calixtlahuaca. These were "Aztecs" just as they were the "Matlatzincas" and probably a series of other named categories as well.

I realize that some colleagues, who want to limit the term Aztec to the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, will probably jump on me for my decision. But those of Tenochtitlan have TWO good names that they used themselves: Mexica, and Tenochca. But since the word "Aztec" was rarely used before the Spaniards arrived, and because there is no native term for the peoples of central Mexico at that time (although they clearly formed a significant social and cultural entity), and because no one has proposed a succinct alternative label, Aztec remains the term. Also, I doubt that Blackwell would want me to change the name of the book to "The peoples of central Mexico in the final centuries before AD 1519, including speakers and Nahuatl and other native languages."

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.

Felipe Solís, 1944-2009

Please see my entry on Felipe Solís in my other blog:

Publishing Archaeology.

Weirdest Object for this Season

What the heck is this thing? Please let me know if you have any ideas!!!

This is a partial ceramic object formed of a circular flat base with two small parallel linear projections, and three arms rising up at an angle. The arm on the left actually fits onto the base; the other two arms are just for illustrative purposes (there were clearly three arms).

We had the circular bases and arms classified in two different types (see photo 2). The bases were called "unidentified objects" and the arms were in the category "scored censers." It wasn't until Dorothy Hosler, our metallurgy expert, was puzzling over the circular objects and asking what kind of projections they had, that I thought to pull out some "handles" from the box of scored censers. Lo and behold, one of the arms fit right onto one of the bases (photo 3).

This thing is made of coarse paste with a crudely smoothed surface. Most pieces are heavily burned in an uneven fashion, suggesting that fire may have been involved in their use. The "tops" of the bases (with the two parallel projections) are more extensively burned than their bottoms.

The "tops" of the arms are all broken (photos 1 and 4). They are about 12 cm in length, after which they begin to curve inward. We have no idea how this thing looked in its upper part, but it seems logical to assume that the three arms were connected in some fashion.

The arms have crude deep irregular incisions on their top side (photo 4). These incisions were the justification for including the arms with our ceramic type "scored censers." This is a poorly understood low-frequency Aztec type made out of friable ware, and few if any whole vessels have survived. Now it is entirely possible that some or all of the "body sherds" of the scored censers type actually were part of the tops of these odd forms. We have tried refitting lots of sherds, but no luck yet.

So was this a stand for an ancient fondue pot? Was it a ritual object (always a good fall-back when considering an odd artifact). Or was it used in some kind of industrial activity? The crude nature of the ceramic material and finish, coupled with the extensive burning, suggest the latter possibility.

One reason for my ignorance about this (and many other fragmentary ceramic things) is that Aztec ceramic objects are poorly published. I discuss this broader issue in my Publishing Archaeology blog; see also my 2004 paper, Aztec Materials in Museum Collections: Some Frustrations of a Field Archaeologist, in the Nahua Newsletter.

So if you have any idea what this thing may have been used for, please post a comment, or better still, email me.

Terraced Hill Cities in Postclassic Codices

Calixtlahuaca covered the top and most of the slopes of Cerro Tenismo (see photo). There were a number of other terrace hill cities in ancient Mesoamerica. The best known are from the Classic and Epiclassic periods: Monte Alban and Xochicalco. Both were large complex cities with abundant public architecture on top of the hill and residential areas on terraces on the hillslopes. The site of El Palmillo in Oaxaca has less spectacular public architecture, but the residential preservation is good and recent fieldwork by Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas is providing important new information (Feinman, and Nicholas 2004; Feinman, et al. 2002; Feinman, et al. 2006).

The terraced hill cities of the Late Postclassic period are less well known, but this was a major settlement type. Just 15 km south of Calixtlahuaca is Tlacotepec, another Postclassic terraced hill city. It was damaged severely by Frederick Starr by his “excavations” around 1900, and today we know little about the site beyond the several thousand objects that Starr sold to the Field Museum of Natural History (McVicker 1992).

There are a number of representations of terraced hill cities in the codices. One such image from a Cuicatec codex, the Códice Fernéndez Leal (f. 13-14), is shown here (van Doesburg 2001: v.2, f.13-14). There is a battle in progress, with warriors standing on all of the terraces and fending off attackers at the base. Another Oaxacan example (see photo) is from the Relación Geográfica of Texupan (Acuña 1984-88: v.2, p222). The terraced site, on a hill looming above the Spanish colonial town, may have been the Postclassic citey of Texupan.

One final example is provided in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (Kirchhoff, et al. 1976:f. 42v), which is also the scene of a battle. The fact that two out of three codex images show battles suggests that military defense may have been important in the decision to build cities on hills in the Postclassic period. This is the interpretation of Gerardo Gutiérrez, whose 2005 article pointed me toward these images (Gutiérrez 2005).

For Calixtlahuaca, however, the defensive argument has less to support it. It is always difficult to argue from archaeological remains whether features such as city walls were built for defense or for symbolic reasons (there is a big literature on this, I won’t cite sources here). At Calixtlahuaca, two public buildings were built on the flat land at the base of the hill—the royal palace and a ceremonial platform that may have been a ballcourt. If defense were of paramount importance in the design of the site, one would expect that the royal palace would be built on the slopes, or perhaps on top of the cerro.

As far as we can tell from the native historical sources, Calixtlahuaca had no rivals as a political capital early in its history (this is from a paper by Brian Tomaszewski and me that is now in preparation), so perhaps its rulers did not worry about defense in laying out their city. But had they thought more of defense, perhaps they could have held off Axayacatl and the invading Mexica army a bit longer in the 1470s.

I wish someone would write a paper synthesizing what we know about terraced hill cities in Postclassic Mesoamerica.

REFERENCES:

Acuña, René (1984-88) Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI. 10 vols. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.

Feinman, Gary M. and Linda M. Nicholas (2004) Hilltop Terrace Sites of Oaxaca, Mexico: Intensive Surface Survey at Guirún, El Palmillo, and the Mitla Fortress. Fieldiana, Anthropology vol. 37. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.

Feinman, Gary M., Linda M. Nicholas and Helen R. Haines (2002) Houses on a Hill: Classic Period Domestic Life at El Palmillo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 13:251-278.

Feinman, Gary M., Linda M. Nicholas and Helen R. Haines (2006) Socioeconomic Inequality and the Consumption of Chipped Stone at El Palmillo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 17:151-176.

Gutiérrez, Gerardo (2005) Jardines defensivos: un acercamiento histórica-arqueológico al use de la vegetación en la guerra antigua. Anales de Antropología 39(1):51-78.

Kirchhoff, Paul, Lina Odena Güemes and Luis Reyes García (editors) (1976) Historia tolteca-chichimeca. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.

McVicker, Donald (1992) México: La Visión del Cosmos: Three Thousand Years of Creativity. The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago.

van Doesburg, Sebastian (2001) Códices Cuicatecos Porfirio Díaz y Fernández Leal. 2 vols. Grupo Editorial Miguel Angel Porrúa, Mexico City.

Can we call Calixtlahuaca an “Aztec” city?

Well, look what site is featured on the cover of the newly released book, Aztec City-State Capitals! This book cover proves that Calixtlahuaca was indeed an Aztec city.

To get serious now, the answer to the above question depends, of course, on one’s definition of the term Aztec. Although there are a few limited uses of “Azteca” in native sources, the term is basically a modern label, so scholars have been free to use it as they please. Some writers use “Aztec” to refer to just the Mexica peoples who inhabited the imperial capital, Tenochtitlan. This does not make sense to me, because the terms “Mexica” or “Tenochca” are indigenous terms that work just fine for that category of people. Others use Aztec for all of the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the Valley of Mexico, but I tend to use the term Aztec to refer to all of the people living in highland central Mexico on the eve of the Spanish conquest (see The Aztecs, 2^nd edition, 2003, Blackwell, chapter 1). There is no clear indigenous word for this category of people, but it is an important grouping in terms of social, economic, political, and religious dynamics.

Furthermore, this category of people—including mostly Nahuatl speakers but also significant numbers of speakers of Otomi and other Oto-Pamean languages—has a certain unity in terms of material culture. Each region (such as the area around Calixtlahuaca) had its own ceramic types and styles, but the Aztecs as defined above shared a number of ceramic traits. Also, a basic Aztec style of architecture was found throughout this area. And that is the subject of my new book (which, by the way, I have yet to see, even though my wife informs me that ten copies from the publisher showed up in Arizona last week).

Calixtlahuaca was a provincial city, hardly given a second thought by most of the Aztecs who lived in the Valley of Mexico (and hardly given a second thought today by people who associate "Aztec" with the Valley of Mexico). Yet some of the finest and best preserved Aztec public buildings (Aztec in style and form) are found at Calixtlahuaca. The publisher, University Press of Florida, initially wanted to put an image of Tenochtitlan on the book cover, but this goes against my informal alternative title for the book: “All the Aztec Cities Except for Tenochtitlan.” Besides, José Luis de Rojas is writing a book on Tenochtitlan for the same book series, Ancient Cities of the New World. So I sent them the photo of structure 3 at Calixtlahuaca, and voilá.

So my answer to the above question is yes, Calixtlahuaca was an Aztec city. But if someone wants to claim that it was a Matlatzinca city, that is also correct. The city was called Matlatzinco and it was the capital of a large territorial state also known as Matlatzinco, and some of its inhabitants probably spoke the language known today as Matlatzinca.

You can buy the book at the University Press of Florida.

The excavations are started

We started digging a week ago. Our first task is to explore the area close to the royal palace (known locally as the "calmecac"). We are starting here becuase farmers will begin to prepare these fields for planting in March, and we want to be done before then. The photo shows some of the rooms in the palace.

This work has several goals: (1) to see if we can find any houses (elite or other) or other features in this area. In our 2006 survey and surface collections, we found very little evidence of occupation on the plain (where the palace is located); nearly all occupational debris was found on the slopes of Cerro Tenismo. Was the plain really empty or settlement (beyond the palace), or were there Postclassic occupations that are now deeply buried? (2) We are looking for possible refuse deposits from the palace. No one has excavated refuse from an Aztec royal palace. What did the royals eat for dinner? Did artists (sculptors, featherworkers, etc.) work at the palace? We know little about the lifestyles of the Aztec rich and famous, apart from what their descendents told the Spaniards after the Spanish conquest. Most archaeologists want more direct information on such topics, and data from the palace garbage heap will have less bias than the biased claims of colonial Aztec nobles. Finally, (3) We need to investigate the stratigraphy of the area. We located what appear to be intact Postclassic refuse deposits buried under a meter and more of dense clay. To someone used to finding Postclassic deposits in and just under the plow zone, this is quite a change. We are below the level of the palace, but not immediately next to it, so we now have to figure out if the clay (from a flood or colluvial event) was deposited before or after the construction of the palace.