Before Calixtlahuaca: the site of Huamango

According to our excavations, the city of Calixtlahuaca was founded at the beginning of the Middle Postclassic period (ca. A.D. 1100) and flourished until the Spanish conquest (1519-1521). García Payón’s excavations in the 1930s evidently turned up remains from earlier periods, including a group of Epiclassic vessels from Oaxaca (described in (Smith and Lind, Ancient Mesoamerica, 2005). With the exception of a few eroded Classic-period sherds at the bottom of a barranca, we failed to find ceramics earlier than Middle Postclassic in our excavations or surface collections. Thus the question of an earlier occupation at the site remains clouded. Perhaps García Payón’s materials came from another nearby site (I think this is the most likely explanation), or perhaps we simply failed to find earlier occupations.

Nevertheless, there was a major Early Postclassic site an hours drive north of Calixtlahuaca at Huamango. Huamango was excavated by Román Piña Chán and William Folan in the 1970s (see references below). It consists of a small ceremonial zone with some temples, located on a ridge overlooking the Valle de los Espejos, just north of the city of Acambay. The dating of Huamango is not as certain as one would like; there are no radiocarbon dates and the regional ceramic chronology is not well developed. Various lines of evidence, however, point to an Early Postclassic (Toltec period) date for the site.

The polychrome ceramics look post-Teotihuacan in date (see photo). The lack of Coyotlatelco ceramics is a good sign that the site does NOT date to the Epiclassic period (AD 700-900), and the presence of some types similar to Tollan-phase Tula supports the Early Postclassic dating. Finally, the LACK of Matlatzinca ceramics (the Middle to Late Postclassic ceramics of Calixtlahuaca and Teotenango) at Huamango suggests that the occupation did not extend into that period. Not the strongest evidence, to be sure, but it’s the best we have to go on right now.

Huamango was likely a major political capital in the area immediately north of the Toluca Valley during Early Postclassic times, perhaps subsidiary in some way to the Toltec polity to the northeast. It is hard to say yet whether its zone of control included the region around Calixtlahuaca in the Northern Toluca Valley. The origin of the distinctive Matlatzinca polychrome and bichrome ceramic style is not known, but perhaps it developed out of the geometric Huamango style (see photo).

To read up on Huamango, see:

Folan, William (1979) San Miguel de Huamango: un centro tolteca-otomí. Boletín de la Escuela de Ciencias Antropológicas de la Universidad de Yucatán 6(32):36-40.

Folan, William J. (1989) More on a Functional Interpretation of the Scraper Plane. Journal of Field Archaeology 16:486-489.

Folan, William J. (1990) Huamango, estado de México: un eslabón en la relación norte-sur de la gran Mesoamérica. In Mesoamérica y norte de México, siglos IX-XII, edited by Federica Sodi Miranda, pp. 337-362. vol. 1. 2 vols. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.

Folan, William J., Lynda Florey Folan and Antonio Ruiz Pérez (1987) La iconografía de Huamango, municipio de Acabay, Estado de México: Un centro regional otomí de los siglos IX al XIII. In Homenaje a Román Piña Chán, edited by Barbro Dahlgren, Carlos Navarrete, Lorenzo Ochoa, Mari Carmen Serra Puche and Yoko Sugiura Yamamoto, pp. 411-453. Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.

Granados Reyes, Paz and Miguel Guevara (1999) El complejo Huamango y su área de interacción. Paper presented at the III Coloquio Internacional Otopames, Toluca.

Lagunas Rodríguez, Zaid (1997) Costumbres funerarias y características bioculturales de la población prehispánica de Huamango. Expresión Antropológica (Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura) 6:7-28.

Piña Chán, Román (1981) Investigaciones sobre Huamango y región vecina (Memoria del Proyecto). 2 vols. Dirección de Turiso del Gobierno del Estado de México, Toluca.

The site is maintained by the Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, a branch of the State of Mexico. It is easy to reach by car, about an hour's drive north of Toluca, and a few km north of Acambay.

Here are some web resources (en español):

Article in México Desconocido

Information from the State of Mexico

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.