Informal reports from current archaeological research at Calixtlahuaca. Calixtlahuaca was a large urban center of the Matlatzinco culture, closely related to the Aztecs.
Showing posts with label Toluca Valley archaeology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toluca Valley archaeology. Show all posts
Two weeks ago, Julie and I visited the archaeological project
at Cerro Toloche, just north of the center of Toluca. The project has finished
a topographic mapping of the hill, surveyed the surface for artifacts, and are
currently digging systematic test pits across the whole hill. Daniel Granados, who is the field director
for the project, took our survey methods into consideration when he was
developing his own, so hopefully we will be able to compare the two datasets. They plan start more extensive excavations
this fall.
Toluca from the top of Cerro Toloche. Note the location of the cathedral.
Cerro Toloche was the center of Tollocan, or prehispanic
Toluca. The site is only five or six
kilometers from Calixtlahuaca and the relationship between the two prior to the
Aztec conquest is unclear. (For that matter,
whether the Tollocan existed prior to the Aztec conquest of the region is open
to question.)
From the archaeological evidence so far, it looks like
Cerro Toloche had at least two groups of monumental architecture and a primarily Postclassic occupation. The artifacts the project has recovered so
far look very similar to the ones from Calixtlahuaca, with a mix of Matlatzinca
and Aztec sherds, plus a few figurines from earlier time periods. Hopefully the
excavations will clear up whether there is a single, mixed Matlazinca/Aztec
component or a primarily Matlatzinca component followed by a mixed one.
Anthropology major Anne Beyens is scanning some of the drawings of ceramics from Teotenango to use in our ceramic type guidebook. Teotenango (see photo) is a large site in the southern part of thToluca Valley.
The first pot shown here is an E-1 tripod bowl, a type whose decoration is similar to the Macana red-on-brown type from Tollan-phase Tula. The second bowl is a Malinalco import (type D-1). These drawings are nice - very clear, good reproduction in black-and-white. They are from:
Tommasi de Magrelli, Wanda
1978 La cerámica funeraria de Teotenango. Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de México, vol. 61. Estado de México, Toluca.
In 2002, I photographed the Teotenango vessels and recorded attributes, and some day I'll find time to work this material up for publication. Some preliminary information is found in:
Smith, Michael E., and Jennifer Wharton
2003 Postclassic Funerary Ceramics from the Toluca Valley, Central Mexico. Paper presented at the 2003 Annual Conference, Society for American Archaeology, Milwaukee.
The Teotenango ceramics are from a series of burials in the plazas of the site. The plazas shown in the site photo at the top were filled with burials. The photo on the right is a reconstruction of a burial, in the museum at the site (which is a great museum, well worth a trip). The monumental architecture was probably built during the Epiclassic period, then perhaps abandoned during the Early Postclassic (this isn't clear), and then during the Middle/Late Postclassic period, people put in all these burials. The ceramics are very similar to Calixtlahuaca, although with different quantities (e.g., red-on-white, our grouop D, is common at Teotenango but rare at Calixtlahuaca).
A new paper by Brian Tomaszewski and I on the political geography of the Toluca Valley is in press at the Journal of Historical Geography. The proof copy is now online.
Historical interpretation of political dynamics in pre-conquest central Mexico from indigenous records is fraught with difficulties. Beyond the basic challenges involved in interpreting fragmentary evidence is the fact that the majority of evidence comes from the dominant imperial polity (Tenochtitlan) and paints a biased and overly generalized view of political and social dynamics in provincial areas.We present a reconstruction of the political geography of the Toluca Valley of central Mexico in Aztec times that avoids these biases by focusing not on the events described in native histories, but on the individual towns and their spatial locations. We find that a theoretical perspective that defines political entities by networks and relations among people more adequately captures the historical situation than traditional models that define polities based on territory and boundaries.
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.
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:
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 TolucaValley 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 NorthernTolucaValley. 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.
