Toluca, the travel destination

The Portales, center of Toluca

The city of Toluca, Mexico, definitely has a problem attracting tourists. Compared to other Mexican cities, it is less charming with fewer high-profile cultural and natural attractions. Yet is it close to Mexico City and it does have its high points, so I have always wondered why the city does not attract more tourists. Much to my surprise, this week the "Travel Detective," Peter Greenberg, taped his show from Toluca! It was pretty good, describing food, attractions in the city and those in the region for three hours Saturday morning, Feb 16. You can listen here.

The cosmovitral, a unique stained glass botanical garden

The producer asked if I could come and talk, but I'm in Arizona, not Toluca right now. But I put them in touch with the Colegio Mexiquense (home of our Calixtlahuaca lab), and Xavier Noguez and Gerardo Novo (from the Colegio) were interviewed. Xavier talked about Calixtlahuaca, Malinalco, and the history of the area. Gerardo gave some good tips on local attractions and points of interest. Greenberg also interviewed some other people I do not know, about Toluca museums, hang-gliding and monarch butterfly watching in Valle de Bravo, and about the natural and cultural attractions of the Nevado de Toluca volcano.

The INAH guards at Calixtlahuaca complain that not very many visitors come to see the site. There are many things that could be done by the relevant officials to improve the site, its publicity, and the visiting experience. There is no guidebook for the site. I wrote one, but can't get it distributed. The sign to the site on the highway going north from Toluca is in error, leading motorists to exit at the wrong place. There is little promotion of the site within the city of Toluca or the State of Mexico. The site infrastructure (signs, walkways, bathrooms, museum) leaves much room for improvement. A couple of years ago an aide to a politician asked me what could be done to improve Calixtlahuaca and the number of visitors. I listed the points outlined above (and some others), but little was done.

The Nevado de Toluca volcano

One of the problems is that the site and museum are split between three administrative units. The site is a  federal (INAH) archaeological zone. The museum was built and is owned and managed, by the city of Toluca. But the objects within the museum (mostly from García Payón's excavations in the 1930s) are controlled by the State of Mexico. It is difficult to get all three to work together.

Toluca street food: blue-corn quesadillas!!

Well, enough of my complaining. We've done our part with media interviews, public lectures, school lectures, and things like this blog. I was VERY PLEASED to see that a prominent international travel show was featuring Toluca (with mentions of Calixtlahuaca). Check out the  broadcast, and please go to Toluca and Calixtlahuaca! And, not mentioned in the show, make sure to sample the chorizo (the best in Mexico) and the blue-corn tortillas.

-Mike Smith

Sherd Digitizing

Archaeological reports are often illustrated with drawings of artifacts, rather than photographs.  Historically, this may be due to the difficulty of taking photographs or the cost of reproducing them. However, there are still at least two good reasons to use drawings rather than (or at least in conjunction with) photographs. First, drawings often reproduce better than photos; by the third copy of a copy, most photos are incomprehensible blurs of pixels.  Second, even in an original, schematic drawings often do a better job of presenting the characteristics of interest than photographs.  For example, it’s quite difficult to take a photograph that accurately presents the profile (cross section of the original pot shape) of a sherd, but drawing one isn’t all that hard.

 

Following this general logic, we drew several examples of each type in the Calixtlahuaca Project type collection.  The drawing was a piecemeal process over several field seasons, followed by an intensive push last summer to finish things off.  Especially during the last season, students from UAEM’s Tenancingo archaeology program did much of the drawing.  Hopefully, this provided them with a general idea of what Postclassic ceramics look like in the Toluca Valley, and knowledge of how our project chose to classify that diversity.

Rosario and Edgar drawing in the lab at the Colegio Mexiquense

Once back at ASU, we continue to rely on a dedicated team of student volunteers.  Here, they scan the field drawings and then trace the image of each sherd in Adobe Illustrator. With the exception of a few artifact types where showing relief is important (such as figurines), the resulting drawings are schematic, with paint colors represented by standardized shades of grey.  The images can be combined in various ways and will be useful not only for illustrating things in the next couple years, such as our final informe for the Mexican government, but also for publications years from now.

Kea digitizing in the office at ASU

Imported Ceramics, or the Lack Thereof

We’re still waiting for our Neutron Activation Analysis ceramic results from Missouri University, but in the meantime a look at decorative types can give some hint as to the patterns we may get.  The most striking of these (so far, at least) have to do with imports. Patterns of imported ceramics can tell us who the occupants of Calixtlahuaca were interacting with, and whether these patterns of interaction changed over time. This analysis is still a work in progress, so please consider all numbers given here as provisional estimates.

The first pattern is the increase in the imports over time. At Calixtlahuaca, there are very few imports from anywhere during the Middle Postclassic (the period prior to the foundation of the Aztec Empire), followed by a steady increase during the Late Postclassic-A and Late-Postclassic B (The periods when the Aztec Empire existed, divided approximately around the time the Empire conquered Calixtlahuaca). This pattern of steady increase is consistent for both Aztec style ceramics, and the few imports from other regions.

 

The second pattern is the low diversity of imports.  The ceramics that are imported overwhelmingly come from the Basin of Mexico.  None of the households had even a single piece of Tarascan ceramics, (though we do find West Mexican copper/bronze and obsidian at Calixtlahuaca) and the few other imported pieces come primarily from Morelos. My (currently unquantified) impression is also that even the Aztec imports represent only a subset of the motifs and/or variants of these types that are present in the Basin of Mexico. For example, with the exception of a piece or two, all of the polished redwares (guinda) that we excavated feature one of two patterns. 

Both of these points are in direct contrast to contemporary Late Postclassic sites in Morelos.  There, the LPC-A frequency starts out much higher than at Calixtlahuaca and drops during the LPC-B (Morelos data taken from Earle and Smith, 2012).  Sites in Morelos also show a higher diversity of sources for imports (Evidence – The sheer number of regional types in our classification guide which I’ve never seen an example of, and when I’ve asked Mike about them, he says “Well, we get them in Morelos!”. )

At long last...

586,394* sherds

1,289 lots

6 lab seasons

1 dedicated crew

I would like to announce that we’re officially done classifying the ceramics from the 2007 excavations.  I’d like to thank everyone who washed, classified, skimmed, cataloged, entered data, or supplied coffee to make getting here possible.

Now we just have to make sense out the boogers.  This will require more coffee.

Judith and Janeth classifying the very last lot

*Give or take a few dozen.  We still have to enter the last two weeks of classifications into the database and differences between the rough count at washing and the final classification can cause the numbers to bounce around a bit.

Cerro Toloche

 Two weeks ago, Julie and I visited the archaeological project at Cerro Toloche, just north of the center of Toluca. The project has finished a topographic mapping of the hill, surveyed the surface for artifacts, and are currently digging systematic test pits across the whole hill.  Daniel Granados, who is the field director for the project, took our survey methods into consideration when he was developing his own, so hopefully we will be able to compare the two datasets.  They plan start more extensive excavations this fall.

Toluca from the top of Cerro Toloche.  Note the location of the cathedral.

Cerro Toloche was the center of Tollocan, or prehispanic Toluca.  The site is only five or six kilometers from Calixtlahuaca and the relationship between the two prior to the Aztec conquest is unclear.  (For that matter, whether the Tollocan existed prior to the Aztec conquest of the region is open to question.) 

From the archaeological evidence so far, it looks like Cerro Toloche had at least two groups of monumental architecture and a primarily Postclassic occupation.  The artifacts the project has recovered so far look very similar to the ones from Calixtlahuaca, with a mix of Matlatzinca and Aztec sherds, plus a few figurines from earlier time periods. Hopefully the excavations will clear up whether there is a single, mixed Matlazinca/Aztec component or a primarily Matlatzinca component followed by a mixed one.

"Historia General Ilustrada del Estado de México"

The book series, Historia General Ilustrada del Estado de México has finally been published! The Presentación de Libro event will take place May 24, 2012, in the Colegio Mexiquense, Sede Casa Toluca, Aquiles Serdan #201, Col Centro, Toluca, at 17:00 hours. Dr. René García Castro will provide the comentary.

This series was assembled to celebrate the centenary of the state in 2010, but publication delays held up the publication.

This article has information about Calixtlahuaca:

Smith, Michael E.
    2012    Las ciudades prehispánicas: su traza y su dinámica social. In Nueva Historia General del Estado de México, tomo 2, periodo postclásico, edited by Rosaura Hernández Rodríguez and Raymundo César Martínez García. El Colegio Mexiquense, Toluca.  (Not sure about the precise citation; it looks like the volume names are different now. I haven't seen the volume yet).

2012 and the End of the World

Nice comic from Bizarro last week. It is incredibly ironic that the Mayas did NOT predict the end of the world (in 2012 or any other time) and they get all the publicity, while the Aztecs DID predict the end of the world and no one pays any attention! Well, maybe in 2027 we will get some mileage out of the Aztec prediction.

See my earlier post on Publishing Archaeology about the bogus 2012 predictions.

And this is another good one, widely reproduced by now:

For the ancient residents of Calixtlahuaca, the end of the world came in the 16th century. Once Tenochtitlan fell to Cortés, it wasn't long before smallpox and other diseases, coupled with forced evacuation to Toluca, brought the city of Calixtlahuaca to a halt.

I thought that was a WHAT? Inter-analyst variability and yet more ceramic seriation

One of those little problems that archaeologists politely ignore most of the time is the issue of inter-analyst or inter-annual classification variability. A couple weeks ago, I was skimming Ian Robertson’s dissertation and realized that many of the issues he describes for the Teotihuacan mapping project ceramic data could well apply to most archaeological projects fifty years after the fact.

For the Calixtlahuaca project, our excavated ceramics have been classified by a whole bunch of different people over the last five years. In an effort at standardization, our lab procedures have always required that a second person check the classification of a bag of sherds before it is finalized, and all previously classified examples of a type are reclassified if we make a major change in the sorting rules. Despite this, I know from personal experience that our sorting rules have drifted a bit over the years. (This also means that our classification manual doesn’t quite match the way things actually work, much to the frustration of anyone new trying to learn the system.)

Because of this cluster of potential issues, I (with lots of help from Judith and Janeth) did a quick classification check/ reclassification of all the lots that I was pulling attribute samples from last year, since the bags were out anyways. We went through probably two thirds of the domestic context sample this way, which should cut down quite a bit on any inter-observer variability within the DCS as a whole. My gut impression was that we made quite a few changes to lots classified during the 2007 and 2008 seasons, with things stabilizing after that. During the first time period we were still apparently working out some of the basic dividing lines (like how to tell the difference between a plain olla body and a plain bowl body) for this particular ceramic assemblage. For lots classified in later seasons, my impression was that the reclassification accounted for some subtle variation due to gradually shifting dividing lines between types, with most changes being from one sub-variant to another within a single decorative family.

As of earlier this week, this semester’s undergraduate volunteers here at ASU finished entering all of the reclassification changes into the ceramic database, which allowed me to do a final ceramic seriation run to see if all the reclassification had effected the dating of particular contexts. (At least, I hope it’s the last run!) The run seems to have produced the usual handful of changes in the phase assignment of particular stratigraphic capas, so if you are analyzing any sort of material from the project by phase, you should probably check in for the updated list in about another week.

Now, while I’m thinking about it, I really ought to go update our ceramic classification manual/type description book, so that it does match how we actually sort sherds…