By Brad Andrews
In
my earlier blog on how art and archaeology work together, I summarized the work
of Michael Stasinos, professor of Art at Pacific Lutheran University. Michael
has provided our project with a means of artistically bringing to life the city
of Calixtlahuaca based on the archaeological efforts of the Calixtlahuaca
Project. He has now finished the market scene, a site-wide shot of the
Calixtlahuaca cityscape with a marketplace in the foreground. As I pointed out
before, Calixtlahuaca’s actual marketplace has not been identified, but
Mesoamerican archaeological and ethnohistoric scholars agree that it was an
extremely important economic institution throughout Central Mexico and beyond
(Smith 2003). By the time of the Spanish conquest the market was an important
component of what is referred to as the highly commercialized Postclassic
Mesoamerican world system focused on the Basin of Mexico (Smith 2001). As
applied to the study of prehistoric societies, the world systems concept refer
to a macro-regional network of trade that linked individual political units -
societies – into larger functioning units. For Prehispanic Mesoamerica, it has
been argued that the market was the primary means by which people provisioned
themselves with daily material necessities, both utilitarian and ceremonial.
As I mentioned in my
previous blog on the topic, Michael’s challenge began by selecting a photo of
Cerro Tenismo, upon which Calixtlahuaca is situated, that provided a “sense” of
the whole, but enabled the incorporation of details in the foreground. The
foreground is the focal point of the market scene, which he masterfully brought
to light in consultation with those of us working on the Calixtlahuaca Project.
The details of the market-focused daily activities were inspired by other
ancient Mesoamerican market scenes, photographs of modern Mexican markets, and
ethnohistoric information from a variety of sources. Hours of painstaking
revisions were necessary to give full magic to the final product. Besides the
market, he incorporated a reconstruction of the monumental Structure 4 (pyramid
complex in the central part of the scene), the hillside populated with domestic
households, vestiges of the water control ditches that drained the site during
the rainy season, temples that occupied the top of the hill (complete with
smoke produced by the probable burning of copal incense), and an ethereal
skyscape of clouds, complete with birds drifting round and about. Note the
increased density of households in the upper left-hand portion of the cerro.
This detail depicts the variation in the layout of the urban center that was
identified during the project’s survey efforts. Lots to see here, much of which
is unfortunately obscured at the scale needed for this posting.
We extend many thanks
to Michael Stasinos for his invaluable contribution to our project. We hope you
agree his efforts were well worth it!
Smith, M. E.
2001 The
Aztec Empire and Mesoamerican World System.
In Empires, edited by S. E. Alcock,
T. N. D'Altroy, K. D. Morrison and C. M. Sinopoli. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
2003 The
Aztecs. Second Edition ed. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Massachusetts.
