Informal reports from current archaeological research at Calixtlahuaca. Calixtlahuaca was a large urban center of the Matlatzinco culture, closely related to the Aztecs.
Today we held a workshop on the project at the Colegio Mexiquense. It was called, "Mesa de trabajo: Los artefactos de Calixtlahuaca y las interpretaciones sociales.” Here is the program:
Presentación
Mtro. Raymundo C. Martínez García/ El Colegio Mexiquense
Introducción a la ciudad antigua de Matlatzinco (Calixtlahuaca), y al Proyecto Arqueológico Calixtlahuaca
Dr. Michael E. Smith / ArizonaStateUniversity
Artefactos de superficie y reconstrucción de la forma y organización urbana
Mtra. Juliana Novic / Arizona State University
Tecnología de la producción de herramientas de obsidiana e implicaciones para la economía de Calixtlahuaca
Dr. Bradford Andrews / PacificLutheranUniversity
Raspadores, malacates y el uso económico de maguey en Calixtlahuaca
Mtra. Angela Huster /Arizona State University
La producción e intercambio de cerámica en el Valle de Toluca y Guerrero
Dr. Jennifer Meanwell / Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Las terrazas agrícolas y habitacionales de Calixtlahuaca
Dr. Aleksander Borejsza / Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
La cerámica de Calixtlahuaca y las actividades domésticas: alimentos, artesanías, e ritual
Dr. Michael E. Smith / ArizonaStateUniversity
Comentarios finales
Arqlgo. Víctor Osorio Ogarrio/ Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura
Mtro. Rubén Nieto / Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México
Dr. Xavier Noguez / El Colegio Mexiquense
This was an interesting session, and we all learned something from it. Thanks go to the Colegio Mexiquense for organizing and hosting the event.
This Juliana Novic here.I am the graduate student working with the Calixtlahuaca survey materials from the 2006-2007 field seasons. Mike has been after me for awhile to post something on the blog about the results of our survey analysis. While I plan to get to that post eventually, this time around I am going to post about something near and dear to my heart. That is the importance and relevance of anthropological archaeology as an approach to field research.Putting aside the theoretical and epistemological issues straining relations between archaeology and anthropology as disciplines, the experience of the archaeologist as anthropologist can be a rewarding one both personally and intellectually. For the last few years Mike has been posting about the great work that the women from Calixtlahuaca have been doing for the project as tepelcateras (sherd classifiers). They also have been wonderful cultural informants, mentors, teachers, and friends to project staff and visiting students.
One of our visiting students, Beth Taylor, took advantage of the opportunity to have both a cultural and archaeological experience while here.Judith, Julia, Janeth, Delfina, Asusena, and Beth developed a close friendship and cultural exchange. This despite the fact that Beth spoke very little Spanish and the women spoke no English!
Before Beth returned home, the women wanted to surprise her with a good-bye party at Calixtlahuaca.It was a
Our lab this week was very full - lots of people here at once, working on various projects.
(1) Mary Beth Taylor has been down for six weeks or so, helping with a variety of tasks. One of her skills is artifact drawing, so we put her to work on the figurines. Here are three of her drawings: A typical Aztec female head; A Spanish colonial robed figure (headless); and one I call the Matlatzinca Cyclist.
(2) Maelle Sergheraert spent part of the week sorting miscellaneous materials. She participated in both seasons of fieldwork, and is in Mexico (from Paris) for the Americanists conference next week. (3) Jennifer Meanwell, who will be doing ceramic petrography, is here looking at ceramic pastes, and helping the rock identifications and such.
(4) Angela Huster arrived a week ago, and is working on ceramics and chronology in preparation for her dissertation project.
(5) Brad Andrews, prof at Pacific Lutheran University, has been down for a while now with 2 students, Dave and Allissa (oops, I forget their last names!). They are working on obsidian technology and classification. (6) Julie Novic has been down all summer, working on general ceramic classification and on her dissertation material from the survey.
Plus, don't forget our five "tepalcateras" from Calixtlahuaca, keeping the ceramic classification moving right along.
Its fun with a lot of people in the lab, all working on interesting aspects of the project. But its also hectic and crowded.
Thanks to Mary Beth Taylor for her help this summer, and for her very nice drawings of figurines and spindle whorls!
I want to illustrate the importance of the context of objects. Ancient objects are often considered as art objects, fine examples of ancient art and craftsmanship. While there is nothing wrong with this, it is a very limited view of artifacts and finds. A broader perspective considers the context of objects--where they were found and what they were found associated with. This enriches our understanding of artifacts and ancient art objects greatly.
Consider this circular stone object. Becuase it is upside-down in the photo, here is a right-side-up drawing of the reliefs on the sides: (drawing by Hanns Prem). If we interpret this object without context, here is what we learn. This is an Aztec sacrificial altar, about one meter in diameter. Its form and the style of the carvings conform to the Mexica style of Tenochtitlan. The relief emblem is the symbol of precious blood. If one had to guess, the most likely place of origin would be Tenochtitlan. The object provides an additional example of Aztec sacrificial altars and give us a few insights into the symbolism of blood and sacrifice.
Now let us consider this object in context. The photo below shows the location of this altar as it was excavated in the 1930s by José García Payón in front of structure 3 at Calixtlahuaca: What else can we say about the object now that we know where it came from?
(1) An object in the Mexica style was used at Calixtlahuaca in the Toluca Valley. This brings up a number of questions: Was this stone lugged all the way from Tenochtitlan, or was it carved locally? Who carved it--a local artist familiar with the Mexica style, or a Mexica artist who went to Calixtlahuaca? How can we explain the implied interaction between Calixtlahuaca and Tenochtitlan? There are interesting and important questions, but they had no meaning until we knew where this altar came from.
(2) A sacrificial altar was excavated, and presumably had been used, at a temple dedicated to Ehecatl, the god of wind. Most prior archaeological evidence of Aztec human sacrifice has come from rectangular temples dedicated to other gods, not the circular temples of Ehecatl. So it seems that sacrifice may have been part of the cult of Ehecatl, which may be a new interpretation. (I must admit my somewhat limited knowledge of Aztec religion here; I hope that some of the experts will evaluate this statement and set me straight it it is not correct).
(3) Human sacrifice, at a temple built in the Aztec style using an altar carved in the Mexica style, was practiced in provincial areas like Calixtlahuaca. This find corroborates other evidence excavated at Calixtlahuaca by García Payón.
It is clear that context provides a much richer and more extensive interpretation of objects like this than when they are presented and considered in isolate as art objects.
I am thankful to Arquitecta Ana Luisa Elías Moreno of the Centro INAH Toluca for this photo from the 1930s excavations at Calixtlahuaca. I already had a copy of the first photo at the top, showing the alter in place, but it was not completely certain where at the temple the altar was found. The photo from the INAH office confirms this.
Here are some photos of one of our mystery ceramic types. We call these type 134, "Crude unfinished," which is descriptive of their shapes (crude, not symmetrical) and surface treatment (unfinished or poorly finished). They look like some kind of industrial objects, things used in a craft process and not in domestic or public serving activities. The trouble with that interpretation is that they are found in virtually all of the excavated domestic contexts. If they were used for a special craft process (metallurgy?? paints or pigments for some kind of product??), we would expect them to be concentrated in high frequencies in a few locations and rare in most places. Hmmmmm....... I have tentatively identified several different form-based groups: bowls (top left in the top photo); jars (middle row in the bottom photo); ladles (right side of the top photo); and small vessels, the most abundant category (bottom rows of the top photo). Not sure where this gets us, but we sure have a lot of these items (thousands of pieces so far).
We have just finished classifying the second-largest collection of sherds from a single excavated level. We got through the largest batch, 34 bags of sherds, in 2008. But here is the next-largest collection, 31 bags of sherds from a single 20-cm level in unit 323.
The photo shows four of our experienced "tepalcateros" (tepalcate is the Nahuatl term for potsherds, used frequently in modern central Mexican Spanish). These women are from San Francisco Calixtlahuaca, and they have become very proficient at ceramic classification and other analytical tasks. All of these sherds arefrom this one level. The big pile are undecorated jar sherds (always the biggest category). the women are holding up some of the partial vessels they were able to fit together.
This summer we are working our way through ceramics from some of the deposits that are important for chronological purposes. Unit 323 consisted of some trenches on a terrace quite high on the hill. We have some good stratigraphy, with Early Aztec sherds at the base and what we think are late markers at the top. But deep in the trench, in the final days of the field season, we hit the edge of a burned house associated with a rich artifact deposit. Most of the house went into the side wall, and at nearly 2 meters deep at the end of the field season we did not have time to expose it further. But we did get some rich floats full of seeds or beans or something (these are being processed by Emily McClung at UNAM in Mexico City), a bunch of burned daub, and nice dense trash deposits with the kinds of sherds shown here.
A full-page article on Calixtlahuaca just appeared in the newspaper, Milenio, June 18, 2009. Written by Ernesto de la Cueva, the article is a nice summary of what we know about the site from both earlier excavations and from our project. There are several color photos.
Click on the title to see the article.
I found only two errors, an excellent rating for newspaper journalism. One was calling the occupation Classic, instead of Postclassic indate. The other was attributing the project to the "Universidad de Arizona", rather than Arizona State University. Oh well. I corrected these on the pdf of the article, posted at the above address.
Here are a few more illustrations of labor tribute (see my previous post for the context here). I love Aztec codices, both for their information content and for their graphical style. Both are from the Codex Kingsborough, an account of encomienda tribute in the decades immediately following the Spanish conquest of 1521.
The first illustration shows the labor tribute paid by two towns, Mazahuacan and Caltecoya (the toponyms are in the left register). The clothing signals these guys as macehualli (commoners), and the digging stick indicates that this is coatequitl labor. Mazahuacan supplied one hundred laborers everh 80 days. The flag stands for 20, which is multiplied by the five dots. We know the period of collection from some latin words written on the document. Caltecoya was responsible for 40 workers, at the same schedule. Perhaps the guy from Mazahuacan looks sadder than his colleague becuaes of the heavier burden on his town. This corvee labor is only part of each town's payment; there are also payments in goods.
The second illustration is part of a listing of tribute paid to local indigenous nobles. A number of small named groups were subject to each noble; this illustration shows three such groups (these were probalby calpolli). The top row has the toponyms, and the names are also written in European letters above the toponyms. Sorry, I can't read the glyphs OR the European script. The lower register has the number of laborers (note the diging sticks); these three groups paid 20, 15 and 15 workers respectively
I was in the library of the Colegio Mexiquense looking at the codex (our Calixtlahuaca lab is at the Colegio, where I have an affiliation), when I realized that it was published by the Colegio. So I went round the corner to the bookstore and bought a copy! For some discussion on the theoretical context of this kind of labor taxation, see my post, "A 'new' kind of agency theory."
Valle, Perla (editor) 1995 Códice de Tepetlaoztoc (Códice Kingsborough), Estado de México: Edición facsimilar. 2 vols. El Colegio Mexiquense, Toluca.
Many people will probably interpret this question in ethnic terms. Were the buildings built by the Otomis, the Nahuas, the Matlatzincas, or someone else? Unfortunately, we don’t have an answer to the question of the ethnic or linguistic affiliations of the people of Calixtlahuaca. This question, on the other hand, is meant to address the kinds of people and the kinds or labor organization behind the construction of large buildings at Calixtlahuaca and other Aztec-period cities. I discuss this issue briefly in my book, Aztec City-State Capitals (Smith 2008), but here I will elaborate on the issue of labor taxation.
I should first justify using the term “taxation” for Aztec society. In reading both the primary sources and the entire scholarly literature on the Aztecs, one rarely encounters the term “tax.” Aztec specialists (including myself) typically use the term “tribute” to refer to the obligations people had to their local king or to the Aztec Empire. But if one wants to compare the Aztecs to other early states, then it makes sense to use standard comparative terminology. Most of the obligations that are typically called “tribute” are in reality taxes – payments that were regular, specified, organized, and recorded.
Of the many types of taxes in Aztec society, the one most relevant to building large buildings was called coatequitl, an example of the category of corvée labor. One definition of corvée labor is: “compulsory, unpaid labor demanded by a lord or king and the system of such labor in general.” The best analysis of coatequitl in Aztec society is by Teresa Rojas (Rojas Rabiela 1979). To summarize a complex set of information, each commoner household owed a certain number of days of labor each year to their local king. People were organized into groups or squads of 20 workers called a centecpantli, each with an overseer.
These work squads were sometimes further organized into larger groups of 100 or 200 workers, again under an overseer. The Codex of San Andrés (Galarza 1963) shows a group of 400 laborers, divided into 20 squads of 20 workers each (see first figure). The flag (“pantli”) is a sign for 20. These 400 workers face the overseer, who stands in front of a public building.
In early colonial Mexico City, Spanish officials adapted the Aztec system of coatequitland work squads to their own purposes, obtaining the labor to build churches, houses, and other buildings. In the second figure here, the Codex Osuna (Códice Osuna 1973) shows a group of workers who owed service to the Viceroy (pictured at the bottom). There are 20 unspecialized laborers (note the flag; the digging stick signals coatequitl labor), as well as a stonemason, a carpenter, and a plasterer. At the right is shown an emblem for 20 “indios de servicio,” personal servants for the Viceroy’s household.
We do not have any specific documents from Calixtlahuaca that talk of labor service or temple construction. But from a general knowledge of Aztec systems of labor and taxation, we can conclude that the large buildings were built by the commoner residents of the city, perhaps aided by residents of nearby towns subject to the king of Calixtlahuaca. People were expected and required to provide this labor service, which was a regular part of life for Aztec-period commoners. The situation is somewhere in between two popular views: (1) The old National-Geographic-Magazine view that ancient temples were built by gangs of slave laborers; and (2) the view that people willingly contributed their labor voluntarily to build temples to the gods (just as today people voluntarily give up their taxes to the IRS out of patriotic devotion to one’s country).
For more information on coatequitl labor in Aztec society, see: (Hicks 1978; Rojas Rabiela 1979; Rojas Rabiela 1986; Valle 2003). For some discussion of a theoretical context for this kind of labor taxation, see my publishing blog.
References
Códice Osuna(1973)Pintura del Gobernador, Alcaldes y Regidores de México:"Códice Osuna". 2 vols. Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Direccíon General de Archivos y Bibliotecas, Madrid.
Galarza, Joaquín(1963)Codex San Andrés (juridiction de Cuautitlan): Manuscrit Pictographique du Musée de l'Homme de Paris (II). Journal de la Société des Amréicanistes 52:61-90.
Hicks, Frederic(1978)Los calpixque de Nezahualcoyotl. Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 13:129-152.
Rojas Rabiela, Teresa(1979)La organización del trabajo para las obras públicas: el coatequitl y las cuadrillas de trabajadores. In El trabajo y los trabajadores en la historia de México, edited by Elsa Cecilia Frost, Michel C. Meyer and Josefina Zoraido Vázquez, pp. 41-66. El Colegio de México, Mexico City.
Rojas Rabiela, Teresa(1986)El sistema de organización en cuadrillas. In Origen y formación del estado en Mesoamérica, edited by Andrés Medina, Alfredo López Austin and Mari Carmen Serra, pp. 135-150. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.
Smith, Michael E.(2008)Aztec City-State Capitals. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Valle, Perla(2003)Por obra pública y coatequitl: mano de obra indígena en códices jurídicos del siglo XVI. In Proyecto etnohistoria: visión alternativa del tiempo pp. 17-21. Diario de Campo, Supplement. vol. 25.
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.................................
