Informal reports from current archaeological research at Calixtlahuaca. Calixtlahuaca was a large urban center of the Matlatzinco culture, closely related to the Aztecs.
Although we don’t have a lot of exciting news or hot discoveries to announce, the Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project is moving ahead on several fronts. This is the “quiet” stage of an archaeological project. The fieldwork, with its constant excitement and new finds, is done (except for some minor activities planned for the next few summers). We are moving ahead with various analyses, but these have not proceeded far enough to yield results. We are busy, but it won’t be obvious to outsiders for a while.
Here is a summary of what is happening during the 2008-2009 academic year. Most of these activities are taking place at ASU.
Project Director Michael Smith is involved in two major tasks: (1) Writing grant proposals to fund a large group of expensive analyses (from chemical studies of obsidian and sediments to the recording of music played on reconstructions of our flutes and whistles). (2) Working on our excavation report to the Mexican government.
Emily Umberger continues her analysis of the sculptures and reliefs; she and Casandra Hernández are working on a paper on this material.
Juliana Novic is continuing her GIS-based spatial analyses of the surface collection data. She has updated our initial map of the site and is starting to piece together the nature of social and economic variation across the urban landscape.
Angela Huster has started on our quantitative ceramic seriation. Eventually this will allow us to assign the excavated deposits to chronological phases, and then the C14 dates will provide calendar dates for the phases and deposits. Angela is also working on several other analyses of the Calixtlahuaca data and graphics.
Amy Karabowicz is analyzing a sample of burned daub that we exported last summer. She will soon have information on the nature of the clays used for house construction, and the temperature at which the houses burned down.
Victoria Bevolden is hard at work digitizing our excavation plans and profiles.
Aleksander Borejsza (at UNAM in Mexico City) has initiated the geoarchaeological analysis of soils and sediments from the terrace excavations; most of his work will be done if and when we get funding in the form of a major grant.
First in a series of discussions of interpretive problems
We had hoped to locate and excavate at least one elite residence at Calixtlahuaca, but none of the houses we dug are obviously elite houses. So, where did the elites live? One possibility is that we just happened to miss the elite houses at the site, and all of our houses were residences of commoners. Another possibility is that one or two of our excavated houses were indeed the abodes of elite households; they just don’t stand out architecturally like elite houses in other areas. Solving this puzzle is an important part of our analytical research.
What I expected elite houses to look like
My initial expections were based on my prievious fieldwork in the state of Morelos, southeast of the Toluca Valley. One of the nice features of Postclassic sites in Morelos is that its easy to tell commoner houses from elite houses. Commoners lived in small (ca. 25 square meters), one-room adobe houses built at the level of the ground. Elites, on the other hand, lived in large (ca. 500 square m) sumptuous compounds with better construction methods and many rooms. I excavated two such elite houses, at Cuexcomate (Smith 1992) and Yautepec (Smith, et al. 1999); the Yautepecstructure is shown here. It is not possible to confuse elite and commoner houses at these sites in Morelos. Yautepec also has a royal palace (ca. 7,000 square meters), again impossible confuse with other kinds of houses.
So why didn’t we find any large elite structures at Calixtlahuaca? I am excluding consideration of the royal palace here, a huge compound not too different from other Aztec palaces. Could it be that there were simply no elites beyond the royal family at the site? This is extremely unlikely; all known Aztec cities had significant number of elites, generally around 5% of the total population (Smith 2008). So, we either just missed the elite houses, of some of the ones we did excavate did pertain to the elite.
Could units 507 or 509 be elite houses?
The excavations of these two structures are described in earlier posts from the fieldwork season. These are not any larger than other houses at the site, leading to our initial hypothesis that they were commoner houses. But after we had excavated a bunch of houses and none were much larger than the others, the thought comes up that perhaps some of our houses were indeed elite residences.
House 507 was in poor condition. It did yield the densest midden deposit (the infamous 34 bags of sherds). We have not yet analyzed enough of the ceramics and other artifacts to evaluate whether they could suggest elite consumption patterns. But one thing immediately stood out at this house: lots of copper-bronze objects (mostly bells and bell fragments). A few are shown in the photo. This house yielded nearly half of all the copper we excavated at Calixtlahuaca. Copper bells and tweezers were elite items in Aztec-period Mesoamerica, so perhaps this material indicates an elite status for the residents of unit 509.
House 509 was in somewhat better condition than 507. It showed a pattern found at some other excavations: the house itself had an earth floor, but exterior areas were covered with well-made stone pavements. The distinctive thing about the material recovered in unit 509 was the presence of a number of stone architectural ornaments. Some of these are shown in the photo. They include “clavos,” tapered cylinders used as architectural ornamentation on Aztec temples and palaces, as well as a stone with thin-line reliefs in a glyph-like pattern. Other excavated houses did not produce anywhere near the quantity of architectural ornaments recovered in unit 509. So perhaps this suggest an elite presence.
How will we evaluate these possibilities? Domestic artifacts are typically good markers of wealth (Smith 1987), and we will use quantified measures based on the artifact inventories of these and other houses to evaluate wealth distributions at the site. We will also consider other likely material indicators of wealth and status (architecture, location within the city, etc.). First, however, we need to get our chronology in order so that we can compare houses and artifacts from particular time periods. Stay tuned.
References
Smith, Michael E.(1987)Household Possessions and Wealth in Agrarian States: Implications for Archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 6:297-335.
Smith, Michael E.(1992)Archaeological Research at Aztec-Period Rural Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Volume 1, Excavations and Architecture / Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Sitios Rurales de la Época Azteca en Morelos, Tomo 1, Excavaciones y Arquitectura. University of Pittsburgh Memoirs in Latin American Archaeology vol. 4. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.
Smith, Michael E.(2008)Aztec City-State Capitals. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Smith, Michael E., Cynthia Heath-Smith and Lisa Montiel(1999)Excavations of Aztec Urban Houses at Yautepec, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 10:133-150.
Today, October 14, 2008, is "Open Access Day." Please see my Publishing Archaeology blog about this. Open Access is important for many reasons, including the fact that we plan to post all papers and reports from the Calixtlahuaca Project on our web site (when we have time......).
On Saturday (September 27, 2008), Calixtlahuaca project members Mellissa Ruiz and Tim Brown got married in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The tables at their reception were labeled with the names of archaeological sites (Monte Alban, etc.), and the head table was labelled Calixtlahuaca.
Mellissa and Tim met on the project in 2006 and both excavated with us in 2007. Here are photos of them in the field.
If other project members want to add details, please feel free - this is just a quick post right after the wedding.
For many decades, Calixtlahuaca was a regular stop on the circuit for artifact collectors in central Mexico. In the late 19th and early 20th century, visitors purchased hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of objects at the site, and many of these ended up in museums in Mexico, the U.S., and Europe.
The objects pictured here are just a few of these. We have been gathering information on such museum collections outside of Mexico for some time, and now ASU student Lindsay Davis is organizing this information. When she is done we hope to have a good idea of how many objects, and what kinds of objects, from Calixtlahuaca are in museums outside of Mexico. This will help the project in a number of ways.
Stay tuned for more information on this and other student projects on Calixtlahuaca.
Marc Levine sent me a citation for a vessel that matches our odd "fondue-pot" pretty closely. Several of these have been excavated at Cholula. Geoff McCafferty (2001:43) calls these "lantern censers" within his type Xicalli Plain, and illustrates two complete examples from the Universidad de las Américas excavations at Cholula.The vessel in the drawing shown here (from p.43) is from UA-79. This is a "minor vessel form" at Cholula, with 56 sherds excavated (table, p. 44). The overall type Xicalli Plain (with numerous vessel forms) is found in the entire sequence from Epiclassic through Late Postclassic, but its not clear whether the lantern censers occur in a more limited time span.
Geoff cites Muller (1978:129) for a photo of another example (see photo here). Muller calls this a brazier lid of the type "Cerámica Fresco Seco." She dates it to the Cholulteca III period, but her chronological assignments are often wrong.
This is as close to our odd ceramic type 180 as I have seen yet. Thanks to Marc Levine for pointing out the discussion in Geoff McCafferty's Cholula ceramics report.
This bring up the larger issue of using the internet to help identify unusual archaeological objects. In this case some good comparative materials were published, but we had yet to locate the descriptions. But in many cases the relevant comparative material is either not published or is published in obscure places that are difficult to find. Archaeologists always have a box of weird sherds that they can't identify, and when colleagues visit the lab one is sure to pull out the box to see if any of the sherds can be identified. I have found Tlahuica polychrome sherds (from Postclassic Morelos) in many such collections at labs outside of Morelos. Woudln't it be nice if there were a central website where people could post their odd sherds and get help identifying them? Perhaps something like "The Weird Aztec Sherd Site." Until that happens, though, I guess a blog like this can help in a small way.
McCafferty, Geoffrey G. (2001) Ceramics of Postclassic Cholula, Mexico: Typology and Seriation of the Pottery from the UA-1 Domestic Compound. Monographs vol. 43. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, Los Angeles.
Muller, Florencia (1978) La Alfarería de Cholula. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Our odd vessel (photo at right; see prior post) is probably some kind of 3-prong brazier. We had figured this out in general terms, but the only examples I knew were the "3-prong burners" from Teotihuacan, which are very different from our "fondue-pot." But thanks to a tip from Liz Brumfiel I looked at the article in Latin American Antiquity by Joe Ball and Jennifer Taschek (2007), and found some vessels not too different from the Calixtlahuaca forms. (I should have been familiar with this myself, but I was several months behind in my journal reading.....). Ball and Taschek note that these vessels from Belize had been confused in the literature with incense burners that share some similar traits. But their finds from a number of sites suggest that these 3-prong braziers were stoves, not censers: "The three-prong brazier was an article of everyday domestic service, not of mystical ritual use" (p.454). The illustration here (one of several very nice drawings) is from p. 452 of their article. Note that the flat base of this and other Maya examples have "a solid, center-point 'wing-nut' or 'bow-tie' applique" (p.451), just like the circular base of the Calixtlahuaca examples.
We are still trying to figure out what the top of the vessels were like. Our "prongs" open up on top into some kind of upper framework, but we haven't figured out yet what it may have looked like. But for our continuing work on this (and other) ceramic mysteries, the very informative (and witty) article by Ball and Taschek has been a great help. I tip my hat to Mayanists like Ball and Taschek for doing a much better job of publishing their ceramics than we Aztec folks (see also Borhegyi 1959, and other sources cited by Ball and Taschek).
Ball, Joseph W., and Jennifer T. Taschek 2007 Sometimes a "Stove" Is "Just A Stove": A Context-Based Reconsideration of Three-Prong "Incense Burners" from the Western Belize Valley. Latin American Antiquity 18:451-470.
Borhegyi, Stephan F. de 1959 The Composite or Assemble-it-Yourself Censer: A New Lowland Maya Variety of the Three-pronged Incense Burner. American Antiquity 25:51-58.
One of the reasons we are working at Calixtlahuaca is to try to understand the site as an urban center. This was a major Aztec-period city, and not to many such sites have been intensively studied. I've been working on and off on Mesoamerican urbanism since my first fieldwork in Mexico, with William T. Sanders in 1974. I'm sure that Bill Sanders visited Calixtlahuaca during his long archaeological career. But the title of this entry refers to the influence of Sanders's thought on my own approach to urbanism in general and to Calixtlahuaca in particular.
William Sanders passed away a few weeks ago. I've already blogged about my relationship with Sanders and about his impressive publication record, and I just sent in a post to H-Urban, a listserv on urban history, that outlines Sanders's work on urbanism. I often argued with Sanders, in person and in print, and I frequently criticized his approach to urbanism as too limiting and confining for ancient Mesoamerican cities. That said, much of what we are doing at Calixtlahuaca are things that Sanders would consider important activities for urban archaeology.
After two seasons of fieldwork, we are still not in a position to make a credible population estimate for the site. This is completely unacceptable to me--probably because of the influence of Sanders on my thinking. Yes, it is limiting to put too much emphasis on urban population levels. But we certainly do need those data. So in our next grant we will include funds for some geophysical prospecting that will allow us to figure out how many people lived at Calixtlahuaca. We are also working to document the houses of Calixtlahuaca, and the entire spectrum of the urban economy, from gardening to using imported bronze bells, topics that Bill Sanders would want to know about the site.
So apart from any personal visits he may have made, the ideas and inspiration of William Sanders have certainly been to Calixtlahuaca, and they continue to influence this project.
The site of Calixtlahuaca has been the target of looting for over 100 years. It’s impossible to calculate how many pots, figurines, copper bells, and obsidian lip plugs have been removed from the site. But several observations point to a long-time looting of the site. Perhaps Indiana Jones is responsible. After all, he is a looter and plunderer, not an archaeologist. I used to think that Indiana Jones was all right. He is a Hollywood character, designed to make money for film studios, and one should not confuse Hollywood fantasy with reality. The films are great fun, and perhaps the publicity they generate for archaeology is a good thing. The Archaeological Institute of American seems to think this way, because they recently made Harrison Ford a member of their Board or Directors. Hey, if the movies increase enrollments in archaeology courses, this is a good thing, isn’t it?
After reading the comments on Indiana Jones and the AIA on the very interesting blog Safe Corner: Cultural Heritage in Danger, however, I started thinking about the relationship between Indiana Jones and the looting of Calixtlahuaca. I doubt that any big-time looter like Jones (or his real-world counterparts) has ever found any treasures at the site. The looting has been very small in scale. I know about this from three sources. (1) Calixtlahuaca was a popular stop on the antiquities-collecting circuit of Mexico in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. A number of collectors (including some major names in mid-20th century Mesoamerican archaeology) sold or donated their collections from the site to the Smithsonian Institution and the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, where I have studied the material and the acquisition records. I’ve published on one such collection, made by Wilhelm Bauer around 1900 (Smith, Michael E. (2001) Postclassic Ceramics from the Toluca Valley in U.S. Museums: The Bauer and Blake Collections. Mexicon 23:141-146).
(2) Numerous elderly residents of San Francisco Calixtlahuaca have told me that in their youth, the surface of the site was littered with whole pots, partial vessels, and other ancient remains. But now, they say, most of this is gone. “There is nothing left” I was informed on several occasions (well, we did manage to excavate over a half million potsherds in one season). These informants noted that foreigners would come to the site, often camping out for several days, to buy pots and other objects from local farmers. (The apparent abundance of whole and partial vessels on the surface may be due to the disturbance of burials and offerings when the terraces were enlarged a century or more ago).
(3) Several people tried to sell me, or other project members, ceramic pots. This was mostly during our first season, before word got out that not only did we not purchase such items, but we gave lectures on the legality of selling ancient artifacts, not something that the sellers wanted to hear.
So, what does this have to do with Indiana Jones?
Archaeological sites like Calixtlahuaca cannot be protected from looting by fences and guards. There just isn’t enough money to protect this and the thousands of other sites in Mexico (and elsewhere) that can yield commercially valuable artifacts. The main protection for the site lies in the attitudes and actions of the people of San Francisco Calixtlahuaca. If they want to protect the site, then looters will have a hard time operating. If local people don’t care about the site as their patrimony or heritage, then destruction and looting would be encouraged. During our fieldwork at Calixtlahuaca (and continuing during out lab analyses) we spent a fair amount of time and effort in public education—lectures and tours to school classes, presentations in the town hall, numerous conversations in town and at the site, free distribution of brochures and guidebooks we wrote, etc. There are reasons to believe that the people of Calixtlahuaca are in fact doing well by the site (this is a topic for a future post).
But against our modest academic activities stands the huge media publicity of Indiana Jones. What are its messages in relation to archaeological sites and research? Plundering and looting are just fine. In fact they are exciting and sexy. The goal of archaeology is to bring home goodies (that is, bring them across international borders, illegally). Generating knowledge about past societies is not important, nor is the preservation of cultural heritage. Of course few viewers are going to confuse the activities of Indiana Jones with those of real archaeologists. But the context or the framing of his activities (i.e., the messages listed above) comes across very clearly. This is the pernicious part of these movies.
Although I cannot prove this empirically, my suspicion is that people who watch the Indiana Jones movies are more likely to take a casual attitude toward looting and the preservation of the archaeological heritage. Now maybe I’m all wet. Maybe I underestimate the intelligence or good sense of the movie-going public. But still, I’m not comfortable with a media hero who is a looter and plunderer at a time when such activities continue to do irreparable harm to the archaeological record and to our understanding of the human past.
So, even if Indiana Jones has never set foot in Calixtlahuaca, I fear that his influence may extend to the site, and that is not a happy thought.
