Remarkable Zapotec Tomb found in Mexico

Mexican archaeologists announce the discovery of a Zapotec tomb dating to around 600 AD.

Wonderful sculpture over the entrance. The owl was a sacred bird to the Zapotec, representing night and death. Nobody seems to know what it means to show a human lord, perhaps the man buried here, subsumed within that owl mask.

Interior view.

There seems to be lots of sculpture. The announcement mentions "murals," but I haven't seen any pictures, so maybe these are poorly preserved and need both protection and conservation.

Aztec Art

The Aztecs were in many ways monstrous, but they certainly had style. Above, famous chest ornament.

Statue of a spider monkey wearing the regalia of the wind god.

Fragment of wall painting from Cacaxtla, showing a frog and a maize plant.

Feathered Serpent pendant, carved from a conch shell. Now in the Met.

Facial ornament in the shape of an eagle's head.

Bell in the shape of a human head.

The Coyolxauhqui Stone, which depicts the dismemberment of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother, the sun/war god Huitzilopochtli. Supposedly a sort of threat by the Aztecs to potential enemies, since Huitzilopochtli was their particular patron.

Eagle Warrior, ceramic statue found in Mexico City

The massive hunk of carved basalt called the Tizoc Stone.

Fernanda Melchor, "Hurricane Season"

The amazing thing about Hurricane Season (2017, English translation 2020) is its frantic energy, an electrical storm of words, images and emotions. In a poor part of rural Mexico, a strange character known only as The Witch is murdered. The story is told from the perspectives of four characters, two male and two female, all with their own passions and their own hatreds, their own vocabularies of abuse that they direct at the world around them. In particularly they despise and abuse the opposite sex. The crimes here are all sex crimes, in a broad sense: they are about gender relations, male attempts to control women, female attempts to get something from men, straight scorn for homosexuality, and the rage of men whose machismo is threatened. In one sense it is an indictment of male misdeeds, but it is not preachy; it just turns its electric gaze on awful things, lighting up the horror and the pain of those acts like it lights up everything about its characters' worlds.

I don't recommend it for everyone. It is obscene, profane, confusing, and sometimes grim, but it is the least boring book I have listened to in years.

The Toltec Problem

Tula, Mexico

When Spanish friars asked the Aztecs about their history, they heard a lot about people called the Toltecs. The Aztecs considered the Toltecs to be their predecessors as overlords of Mexico and the source of much of their culture. Indeed their word for "master craftsman" was toltec. Archaeologists date the Toltec culture to between 900 and 1200 AD.

The So-Called "Atlantean" Warrior Statues at Tula

Aztec lore masters told many stories about Toltec history. Which are, some colonial Spaniards had already noticed, suspiciously similar to stories told across central America about gods like Quetzacoatl. These similarities have spawned a debate that still rages between scholars who think there is real history in these stories and those who think they're just myths that somehow got attached to a list of Toltec kings. If the names were Toltec kings. If there ever were any Toltec kings. Or any Toltecs.

Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl, from the Florentine Codex

One example: the Aztecs said that the founder of the Toltec empire was a king named Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl, which means something like Quetzalcoatl Prince of Reeds. Quetzalcoatl was of course one of the great gods, and the Aztec myths were full of cities named Reedtown or the like. The son of a god, Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl led the Toltecs on a long trek around central America before founding the city of Tollan (Reedville). There he established their civilization and made Tollan into a paradise of a city where all crops yielded double. But he was undone by his evil nemesis, the god Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca got Cē Ācatl Topiltzin Quetzalcōātl drunk and induced him to commit incest with his sister, which so shamed him that he wandered off alone into the east to die; according to one version, he burned himself alive in a canoe.

Toltec Style Vase, likely from Tula

The rivalry between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca was one of the great themes of  Aztec myth, so, yeah. The god Quetzalcoatl also traveled east to die; according to the history recorded by the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, many Aztecs believed that Quetzalcoatl had passed across the sea to the east and would one day return.

Coyote, jaguar, and two eagles, all feasting on human hearts

Besides the stories of the Toltec kings, there are many questions about their capital, Tollan. Most archaeologists identify Tollan with a site called Tula; to archaeologists "Toltec" basically refers to the culture of Tula and its surroundings. But Tula was no paradise; in fact it was much smaller and less wealthy than the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, although the storytellers insisted on the opposite. It may be that the Aztecs had confused Tula with Teotihuacan, was was indeed huge and splendid. But Teotihuacan had been abandoned centuries before the Toltecs appeared in central Mexico.

The "Burned Palace" at Tula

Indeed Tula is so unimpressive that many archaeologists refuse to believe its rulers were overlords of the Valley of Mexico. There are three or four other sites of the period at least as big. So, some archaeologists think the Aztecs invented the business of Toltecs ruling essentially the same territory the Aztecs did, and think that the valley was divided into several small states.

Tula

So if you try to read about the Toltecs at any level beyond "look at these cool stones", as I did this week, you wind up hardly reading about the Toltecs at all. The Toltecs are buried under a Talmudic density of argument, and every sentence references what Smith and Montiel wrote what about what Diehl wrote about what Brinton wrote about what Manuel Orozco y Berra published in 1880. (Some people you run into online have opted out of the whole debate by only citing stuff published before 1890.)

Toltec eagle relief

It's a lesson in why it's so hard to write about archaeology for the public. It's easy to write about the thrill of finding treasure in the ground, but geting from that to any understanding of what people were like in the past is just hard. Trying to write a popular account of the Toltecs you could either retell the Aztec legends, which would almost certainly be wrong, or you could try to explain what might really have happened, which would be complex, uncertain, and probably tedious as hell.

So let's just look at some cool pictures of stuff archaeologists call Toltec and leave the wrangling about their history to people whose job that is.

The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

Three new Aztec codices have been discovered! They were kept by a family who considered themselves the stewards of traditional knowledge in Culhuacan and Iztapalapa, formerly a distinct region that is now within the Mexico City megalopolis. They have now been donated to National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. The whole press conference at which this was announced is on YouTube; English summary here.

The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco, as well as lists of toponyms to be found within Culhuacan, Tetepilco, Tepanohuayan, Cohuatlinchan, Xaltocan and Azcapotzalco. The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco, is unique, as Oudijk remarks, since it is a pictographic inventory of the church of San Andrés Tetepilco, comprising two pages. Sadly, it is very damaged.

Finally, the third document, now baptised as the Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history in the vein of the Boturini and the Aubin codices, comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603. 

I think the above is the map; all of these are screen caps from the press conference.

And this is the inventory. All of the images below come from the chronicle. More on these documents here.

Angels from Colonial Latin America

St. Michael, Cuzco School, c. 1700

Master of Calamarca, Archangel with Gun, c. 1700. 

Two more angels by the Master of Calamarca, a Bolivian artist who may have been José López de los Ríos, but if so we still know little of de los Rios beyond his name. All of these angels are in the church of Calamarca and date to around 1700.

Juan Correa, Virgin of the Apocalypse, c 1689. Incidentally there is no Virgin in the Apocalypse of John, just a "Woman of the Sun" who is pursued by a dragon that wants to eat her child. In medieval and early modern Europe it was widely believed that this was Mary, and the story became a common subject for paintings. So not exactly an angel, although usually painted like one; an orthodox Mary doesn't have wings any more than Jesus would. The imagery of the Virgin of Guadalupe as it developed in Mexico owes much to earlier paintings of the Woman of the Sun/Virgin of the Apocalypse.

Here is another version, by Miguel Cabrera, c. 1760. You can see from a painting like this that the wealthier centers in Latin America, like Mexico City, developed painters who worked in a strongly European style and were just as good at it as Europeans. Working out from there you encounter work that is less and less like the polished European Baroque and more like folk art; but there is not a sharp break, just a wide gradation.

Here is another angel from the Cuzco School of colonial Peru. This is one kind of painting that is very much alive, and there are still painters in Peru who identify as part of the Cuzco School. Or at least whose dealers use the term in selling to Americans.

And another. What I like about these is the cultural blending, the Mestizo-ness I wrote about in a book review recently. There is a vast discourse about these paintings that focuses on to what extent they represent Native artists adopting European themes and styles and to what extent they represent some kind of defiance or appropriation. You can certainly see a strong strain of "God is ours as much as yours" in many works. I find them fascinating, another way people have taken a tradition passed on to them and made it their own.

Hangin' with the Nayarit Indians

The Nayarit culture of western Mexico is usually dated to around 200 BC to 500 AD. Their art has the quality, rare in the ancient world, of making their lives seem pleasant and relaxed. Consider this dance scene. This may be some kind of religoius ritual, but the feeling one gets from it is that the people are mainly enjoying each other's company.

This famous, badly worn piece is known as the Circle of Friends, and is the model for the logos of several Mexican associations.

Here's a better preserved example of the same design.

A couple of Nayarit gentlemen. There are few depictions of Nayarit men fighting, but plenty of them all dressed up and sitting around.

Even more common are depictions of couples. These all come from tombs, so these were the sort of people who imagined spending eternity together.

Archaeologists love Nayarit art because of the delightful depictions of houses. Dozens of these are known. 

Some people in the houses seem to be working, but more look like they're just hanging out.

One interpretation of the multilevel houses is that the ground floor represents the underworld where the dead ancestors reside. And what did they imagine dead ancestors doing?

Another house.

Village scenes. Love the hats.

Village with someone who seems to be flying overhead.

Ball court.

Funeral.

When European art historians steeped in the classical tradition first encountered these works, they thought the figuruines were dwarfs, trolls, or some other kind of grotesque. But, no, this was just the way Nayarit artists depicted themselves.

Just looking at these puts me in a better mood. This is my favorite, the character known as the Storyteller. Imagine him with one of those circles of friends and neighbors, leaning in close to hear him recount his tale of ancient gods and heroes; one of the funny ones, most likely, so everyone could laugh about it together.