Animation of the Ehecatl pyramid

Raúl Miranda Gómez, a Mexican student who worked on the project in 2007, created a short animation file that shows Structure 3, the Ehecatl pyramid.

View the animation here

Open Access Day

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......).

Calixtlahuaca Project Wedding!

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.

Calixtlahuaca Around the World

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.

"Lantern censer"

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.

3-Prong Brazier

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.

Has William Sanders been to Calixtlahuaca?

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.

Has Indiana Jones Been to Calixtlahuaca?

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 19^th and early 20^th centuries. A number of collectors (including some major names in mid-20^th century Mesoamerican archaeology) sold or donated their collections from the site to the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum 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.

10,182 potsherds

Sorry if I'm still obsessing about this one ceramic collection, but in its size, good preservation, and diversity it tops any single sherd collection I've ever worked on. These piles of sherds on a lab table (probably 700 or so) are JUST THE DECORATED SHERDS from our big midden. This is somewhere near the total size of an average sherd collection.

The next photo shows a couple of piles of sherds by type (Red rim bowls o the left, and polished red, type B-0, on the right). The classification of these sherds is done by our excellent sherd wizards. These women, from the village of San Francisco Calixtlahuaca, started off last year washing sherds and other artifacts as they came in from the excavations. Our lab director, Cindy, had the women start working on some classification and cataloging in addition to the washing, so we hired them again this year, and they are doing a great job.

Here is another photo, with all four included this time. It took all week to get this level done, and we can now move on to a few of the other one thousand or so collections that need to be sorted.

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.