Informal reports from current archaeological research at Calixtlahuaca. Calixtlahuaca was a large urban center of the Matlatzinco culture, closely related to the Aztecs.
With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Michael E. Smith and an international team of colleagues will conduct a series of technical analyses of archaeological artifacts and deposits excavated at the Aztec site of Calixtlahuaca. NSF-supported excavations uncovered a series of houses and terraces that present a unique opportunity to answer important questions about ancient urban centers. Like the shantytown areas that surround many Latin American cities today, the residential zones at Calixtlahuaca extended up steep slopes, with houses built on stone terraces. Yet the residents of this Aztec city were not poor rural immigrants; instead, their houses and artifacts reveal that they forged a prosperous way of life. Many families engaged in the production of textiles, stone tools and other craft items, and most houses contained ceramic vessels, stone tools, and bronze jewelry imported from distant zones. How did a hilltop city in a provincial area achieve such a high and sustainable standard of living for its residents? The analyses will help answer this question.
The NSF funds will be used for three major types of study. First, the excavated artifacts need to be counted, classified, and described. Professionals and students from the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Canada will spend two months in each of the next three years doing this work. The results will shed light on the lifestyles, activities, and social conditions of the urban residents of Calixtlahuaca. All such research will take place in a laboratory facility in Toluca, Mexico. The second type of study will be technical scientific analyses of artifacts. Chemical analysis and other techniques will allow researchers to determine the places of origin of imported objects, to reconstruct the procedures of manufacture of local items, and to determine the ages of the houses and features of the sites through radiocarbon dating. The third group of analyses will be scientific studies of the soils and plant remains excavated in terraces and other deposits. This work will shed light on a unique Aztec form of successful agriculture: urban terraced cultivation. An understanding of this ancient sustainable farming system may help agronomists design appropriate small-scale agricultural strategies for the hilly areas of Mexico today.
When the analyses are completed, Dr. Smith will compare the results to his former excavations in Morelos, another region of central Mexico. Both were prosperous areas conquered by the Aztec Empire for their resources. Together, the two sets of results will clarify the processes of ancient imperial expansion and its impact on cities, farming, and society.
Numerous graduate and undergraduate students—U.S., Mexican, and European—will receive laboratory training and experience on this project. International cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico will be promoted through the work of several Mexican collaborators as well as through interactions with local archaeologists and historians working in the Toluca area. Dr. Smith’s laboratory facility at the Colegio Mexiquense in Toluca contributes to an improved scientific infrastructure in this Mexican city.
Stay tuned for more information.................................
I just got word from the National Science Foundation that the Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project will be funded for another three years! The new grant will cover sherd sorting over the summers of 2009 - 2011, other artifact classification and analysis, and a series of technical studies, from chemical analyses of obsidian to grain-size analysis of soil samples. Student research is continuing, and maybe some of the students can be enticed to contribute some of their experiences and ideas to the blog.
Now I will be busy for the next few weeks getting the new grant up and running and then off to Toluca for June and July in our lab at the Colegio Mexiquense. If you are in the vicinity, stop by and see us.
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.
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.
