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Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-2-347

1527-1900

Rex Koontz,

Latin American history and culture

Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage consists of 16 essays that examine the place of Teotihuacan in prehispanic Mesoamerican history. This is no small task, for the metropolis of Teotihuacan played a crucial role in Mesoamerican history in the first six centuries of our era, and echoes of its importance may be detected throughout the culture area from the city’s apogee in the third century to the arrival of the Spanish 1,300 years later. This volume is the most important treatment of the subject to date, mainly for three reasons: the wealth of new archaeological data synthesized here; the profoundly interdisciplinary exchange engaged in by the contributors to this volume; and the exchange between Mayanists and their Mexicanist colleagues. The latter two groups have rarely explored common questions of Mesoamerican history with such success. It comes as no surprise that senior editor Davíd Carrasco, a historian of Mesoamerican religions, was instrumental in similar fundamental studies of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. In this volume, however, the historical depth of Teotihuacan raises questions about the nature of prehispanic Mesoamerican history only touched upon in the Tenochtitlan studies.The volume may be divided between essays that treat mainly of Teotihuacan and its Mesoamerican contemporaries and those that explore the effect of Teotihuacan on later Mesoamerican polities and their symbolism. The latter essays point out the paradigmatic nature of Teotihuacan for later Mesoamerican polities. The layout, symbolism, architectural style, and numerous other aspects of Teotihuacan culture were invoked by those seeking legitimacy throughout post-Teotihuacan history, especially in the Valley of Mexico. One of the more detailed studies of this type of resonant archaism is undertaken by Leonardo López Luján and his colleagues, who describe the excavation of a Teotihuacan vase reused seven hundred years later as a cinerary urn in the central religious precinct of the Aztec empire. The urn depicts an elite Teotihuacano who likely inhabited an office analogous to that of the later Aztec individual buried in the urn, suggesting that the Aztec had a rather detailed knowledge of some aspects of Teotihuacan symbolism.Karl Taube also investigates the relation between Aztec and Teotihuacan ideologies in “The Turquoise Hearth: Fire, Self-Sacrifice, and the Central Mexican Cult of War.” In a virtuosic iconographic investigation, the author links representations of warriors, warfare implements, supernatural patrons of war, the meanings of meteors, and depictions of the life cycle of butterflies into a coherent belief system founded at Teotihuacan and still functioning over a millennium later at Tenochtitlan. These specific, detailed continuities again point up the prodigious Aztec knowledge of the symbolic world of their forebears.In “Venerable Place of Beginnings: The Aztec Understanding of Teotihuacan,” Elizabeth Hill Boone supplies us with a synthesis of the Late Postclassic understanding of the physical site of Teotihuacan as seen through the native documents. She notes that the Aztecs believed that the ruined city was the birthplace of the current sun and the place where lords are made. They viewed the city thus as the paradigmatic place of legitimacy, both cosmic and political. Thus the legitimating Teotihuacan ancestry of the Aztec warrior cult was framed by larger understandings of the meaning of the great ruined city. Mesoamericans from Teotihuacan times forward called such a place of legitimacy Tollan (“Place of the Cattails”). David Stuart shows elsewhere in this volume that the Maya specifically named Teotihuacan as Tollan, and suggests that it was the original city with that title. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma limits the Teotihuacan-Tenochtitlan comparison to the “Great Temple” at each site, teasing out continuities in form and function. Linda Manzanilla describes the physical creation of the underworld at Central Mexican sites throughout history, placing the numerous modified and fully man-made caves at Teotihuacan in their historic context. Manzanilla draws on a plethora of new archaeological information from projects across Mexico in this invaluable synthesis. Doris Heyden investigates the symbolism of Teotihuacan as paradigmatic urban space from the point of view of both Teotihuacan imagery and the ethnohistorical record. It is highly gratifying to see this author synthesize over 20 years of work on the subject, for it is to her that we owe several of the early, foundational essays on the meaning of Teotihuacan’s central area.Geoffrey McCafferty, in his “Tollan Chollan and the Legacy of Legitimacy During the Classic-Postclassic Transition,” introduces the language of difference into a volume which largely seeks continuities. Here Cholula, the “other” great Classic center, is seen to engage in a dialog of differentiation with Teotihuacan. Only later, after the fall of Teotihuacan, did Cholula adopt some of the more overt Teotihuacan imagery and architectural style. To support this reconstruction, McCafferty provides us with much new and reanalyzed archaeological data from one of the more enigmatic sites in Mesoamerica.Essays by Saburo Sugiyama and H. B. Nicholson treat the genealogy of the Feathered Serpent, an icon associated closely with Teotihuacan and vitally impor tant to later Mesoamerican peoples. Both of these essays feature valuable compendia of feathered serpent imagery along with careful reconstructions of the iconographic context. No two authors are better equipped to give us this overview: Sugiyama was instrumental in excavating the building at Teotihuacan with the most extensive array of feathered serpent imagery, while Nicholson has amassed an extensive archive of Aztec imagery and four decades of experience in its analysis.A group of essays explore the rich archaeoastronomical researches carried on at Teotihuacan and elsewhere in Mesoamerica over the last two decades. Contributions by Cabrera Castro and Broda contain information on a series of underground observatories at Teotihuacan, Xochicalco, and Monte Albán. Cabrera Castro also documents his discovery of a fascinating glyphic patio at Teotihuacan, a site renowned for its lack of writing. Broda, along with Anthony Aveni, investigate the “pecked cross,” a symbol found from Teotihuacan to the Maya area, associated with the 260-day calendar and astronomical phenomena, and seemingly indicative of the Teotihuacan-Maya interaction discussed below.Two key essays examine the relationship of Teotihuacan and the Maya, which has traditionally been a thorny issue in Mesoamerican studies. Unlike the nostalgic relationship carried on by the later peoples of the Central Valley of Mexico, the relationship of Teotihuacan with the Maya area on the other side of Mesoamerica was geographically distant but contemporary in time. Here Teotihuacanos were not ancestors, but rivals as well as sources of long-distance trade and power. The long-noted abundance of Teotihuacan-inspired cultural materials found throughout the Maya area during the Classic period begs the question of the meaning and function of these materials. Did the great city initiate developments in the Maya area through a real political presence, as some earlier researchers believed, or did the Maya borrow prestige elements from the Teotihuacanos for their own purposes, as several more recent studies have argued? Interestingly, there is much new epigraphic and archaeological evidence presented here that points to the earlier conclusion: Teotihuacan is here seen to play a crucial, although still not entirely clear role in Maya history. The new information comes largely from two important Classic Maya centers, namely, Copán and Tikal.David Stuart, one of the most important epigraphers working in the field, reexamines the glyphic record of the events of 16 January 378 at Tikal and associated Classic Maya cities. On that day a stranger with strong Teotihuacan associations arrived in the area, while on the same day the reigning king of Tikal died. These two events initiate a one-year hiatus in the rule of Tikal that is ended by the accession of a king who proclaims, through his imagery as well as his grave goods, close ties with Teotihuacan. William and Barbara Fash find much the same pattern of arrival, followed by an important political accession and an influx of Teotihuacan material culture and imagery, 50 years later at the site of Copán. In addition, the body of this later intrusive, Teotihuacan-related king was shown through strontium analysis not to have been from Copán, while the same analysis of his wife proves she was from the region. Thus at both Tikal and Copán, the Early Classic Teotihuacan-Maya interaction may be summarized as follows: a charismatic individual with clear ties to Teotihuacan gains paramount power, marries into the local elite, and the resulting royal lineage is subsumed into Maya elite culture within a few generations. These “arrivals of strangers” are deemed so decisive by later Maya rulers that they are cited and emulated in many cities throughout the remainder of the Classic period and beyond. By the time of the fall of Teotihuacan, these and other analogous events had become part of the foundation of Mesoamerican intellectual and political culture, appearing throughout the next period to legitimate new rulers and polities that rose in the wake of Teotihuacan’s demise.It is this transitional period after the fall of the great city that occupies Alfredo López Austin and Leonardo López Luján in the most synthetic and provocative essay of the volume, “The Myth and Reality of Zuyuá.” For some time, two problems have loomed large in any account of this transitional period: the nature of the intensive, multiethnic elite interaction across Mesoamerica as evidenced by the monumental art of the period, and the relationship of these new elites to the immediately preceding Classic traditions. Here the authors identify an overarching, pan-Mesoamerican symbolic system (the “Zuyuan system”) at work in this period that serves to legitimate the new, post-Teotihuacan elites. Importantly, this is an “emic” reconstruction, for the authors are working largely from later native texts that describe this process. The deft handling of these extremely opaque sources from several different Mesoamerican traditions and the application of the results to the largely archaeological problems of the period are exemplary. In the context of the volume, this essay forms an important bridge between the Teotihuacan reality and the Late Postclassic Aztec cultivation of the Teotihuacan mythos.Missing in this volume is any extended treatment of southern Veracruz, a key area in the history of Teotihuacan’s interaction with the rest of Mesoamerica. This area was, at the Conquest, a cosmopolitan transition zone between the Maya area and the Mexican highlands, and there is some archaeological evidence to assume that this was the case earlier. In addition, the rhetoric of Teotihuacan as foundational to Mesoamerican civilization, while obviously productive, may obscure older genealogies that would broaden our understanding of Teotihuacan itself. Apart from Manzanilla’s exploration of caves and their symbolism, there is no significant discussion of Formative period legacies. This said, the innovations of the volume far outweigh any lacunae. Perhaps most importantly, every contributor takes very seriously the idea of a Mesoamerican history as detailed and variegated as that of the ancient Old World. Born of a combination of advances in epigraphy, improved archaeological techniques, and detailed iconographic analyses—all on display here—this Mesoamerican “new history” is the single most important intellectual event in the field in recent times.The importance of this volume to Mesoamerican studies is fundamental: not only does it provide a wealth of groundbreaking analyses on this most important pre-Hispanic city and its place in Mesoamerican history, but it also gives historians and other scholars of the region deep chronological perspectives on processes still in motion. Teotihuacan marked the seating of Mesoamerican power in and around the Valley of Mexico, with Mexico City being just the last in a line of heirs. In addition, by interrogating the roots of indigenous Mesoamerican cultural unity and diversity, the authors have given us new insight into the structure and history of indigenous identities. Finally, the gathering of scholars from archaeology, anthropology, art history, archaeoastronomy, and other disciplines to productively debate specific aspects of Mesoamerican history is exemplary.