Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project

Public Zoom Lecture: "At Home with the Aztecs", March 10

2022-02-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

I will be giving a public lecture on zoom, focused on my book, At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life.

This lecture is sponsored by the Aztlander magazine:

https://m.facebook.com/Aztlander-102441125533414/

Time: Thursday, March 10

6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89217088066?pwd=RGNSeFZ6bjlhSFFSSHo2UHlZMmpJQT09

Here is a blurb:

At Home with the Aztecs provides a fresh view of Aztec society, focusing on households and communities instead of kings, pyramids, and human sacrifice. This new approach offers an opportunity to humanize the Aztecs, moving past the popular stereotype of sacrificial maniacs to demonstrate that these were successful and prosperous communities. Michael Smith engagingly describes the scientific, logistic and personal dimensions of archaeological fieldwork, drawing on decades of excavating experience and considering how his research was affected by his interaction with contemporary Mexican communities. Through first-hand accounts of the ways archaeologists interpret sites and artifacts, the book illuminates how the archaeological process can bring ancient families and communities to light. Smith’s research also redefines success, prosperity and resilience in ancient societies. Michael’s zoom will be suitable not only for those interested in the Aztecs but in the examination of resilient households and communities across space and time.

This book won the award, "Best Archaeology Book, General Audience Category", from the Society for American Archaeology, 2017.

Publication Updates

2019-12-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

Angela Huster

Despite the number of other things many members of the project are juggling, we're continuing to publish about Calixtlahuaca. This is our semi-annual summary of publications about the project. As always, if I've forgotten something, or you want a copy of one of these, let me know.

Borejsza, Aleksander

2018 Las nueve reencarnaciones de Matlatzinco: comentarios acerca de la estructura del altepetl y un intento más de acomodar el rompecabezas terminológico matlatzinca. Anales de Antropología 52(2):71-93.

A look at prehispanic political structure of the Toluca Valley, based on early Colonial records. It includes a very useful clarification of the multiple things “Matlatzinco/a” has been used to describe. It also argues that Calixtlahuaca/Tollacan may have been a double altepetl, something that would help explain the linguistic confusion between the two.

Huster, Angela C.

2019 Maguey use at Postclassic Calixtlahuaca. Mexicon 41(1 - February):20-27.

A summary of the evidence for relatively intensive maguey cultivation and use at Calixtlahuaca, including its use in terracing, house construction, and textile production.

Huster, Angela C.

2019 Looming Deficits: Textile Production Specialization in Postclassic Mesoamerica. Latin American Antiquity 30(4):780-797.

A paper on broad regional trends in textile production during the Postclassic, with a focus on how Calixtlahuaca compares to other contemporaneous sites. Calixtlahuaca shows the same general pattern of increasing textile production over time, but a higher emphasis on maguey textiles (as opposed to cotton) results in a modestly lower total level of textile production than is seen at many other sites in the Central Mexican highlands.

Huster, Angela C. and Daniel E. Pierce

2020 A Geochemical Baseline for Clays of the Toluca Valley, Mexico. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 39:online preview.

The results of INAA of 28 clay samples from the Toluca Valley, showing both regional trends and a degree of overlap with portions of the Basin of Mexico.

Ossa, Alanna, Michael E Smith and José Lobo

2017 The size of plazas in Mesoamerican cities and towns: a quantitative analysis. Latin American Antiquity 28(4):457-475.

A comparative study of plaza size and population at in three Mesoamerica settlement systems. Calixtlahuaca is one of the cases in the Postclassic dataset. Despite not having a clear primary plaza, the total plaza area at Calixtlahuaca is consistent with the population/plaza size relationship seen at other Mesoamerican sites.

While some of our publication is behind schedule, we're not this behind schedule...

Bezotes (Lip Plugs or Labrets)

2019-05-15T14:34:00.000-06:00

By Angela Huster

One form of Aztec jewelry were decorative objects worn through a piercing in a person’s lower lip, known as bezotes in Spanish and lip plugs or labrets in English. They can be made out of different materials – bone, clay, obsidian, or other stones – and come in various shapes. While there are a few very fancy examples in museums, with gold and turquoise inlays, most examples are much simpler. In Central Mexico, “T-shaped” lip plugs are traditionally associated with the Otomi ethnic group, based on historic documents. In her excavations at Xaltocan, Lisa Overholtzer (2015) showed that T-shaped lip plugs were used during the Middle Postclassic, and and wider, flatter "Button-shaped" ones were used during the Late Postclassic. However, people seem to have switched forms before the Aztec conquest of the site, suggesting that they may have actively manipulated their ethnic identity in anticipation of shifts in regional power.

The rock crystal and obsidian lip plugs from Calixtlahuaca (plus a copper earspool on the left)

At Calixtlahuaca, we recovered two T-shaped lip plugs (one made out of obsidian and one of rock crystal), and two button-shaped ones (both made out of clay). Both T-shaped pieces come from Ninupi phase contexts. One of the button-shaped ones comes from a Ninupi phase context and the other from a Yata phase context. The fact that we recovered so few examples of lip plugs is interesting, since the Otomi were one of the ethnic groups who lived in the Toluca Valley. The phasing of the few lip plugs we did find parallels the findings from Xaltocan; T-shaped lip plugs are earlier and from prior to the Aztec conquest of the site, and button-shaped ones are more likely to be later, from the period under Aztec rule, but there’s some fuzziness. However, because Calixtlahuaca was conquered by the Aztecs later than Xaltocan was, the transition in forms occurs later in calendar time; instead of a change between the Middle and Late Postclassic, the switch in forms occurs between the two halves of the Late Postclassic.

The ceramic lip plugs from Calixtlahuaca

Because lip plugs are low frequency objects (even at sites where they are more common than at Calixtlahuaca!), it can be hard for any one project to find enough to identify meaningful patterns. As a result, it is important for projects to publish good descriptions of their rare finds and their proveniences, so that a larger regional sample can eventually be put together. We are currently writing the informe chapter on miscellaneous ceramic objects at Calixtlahuaca – which includes, but certainly isn’t limited to, lip plugs.

Works Cited:

Overholtzer, Lisa M.

2015 Agency, practice, and chronological context: A Bayesian approach to household chronologies. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 37:37-47.

Grinding Stones

2019-01-17T11:34:00.001-07:00

Angela Huster

Stone tools for grinding corn – manos and metates – are a fundamental hallmark of Mesoamerican culture. Prior to the introduction of modern electric mills, Mexican women would spend several hours every day grinding corn with a mano and metate. A mano and metate were traditional wedding gifts, because they were so fundamental to setting up your own household. At Calixtlahuaca, they are one more line of evidence for how the site is subtly different from many contemporaneous Aztec sites.

A woman instructing her daughter how to grind corn in Codex Mendoza

In Central Mexico, grinding stones go through two major changes. First, early in Mesoamerican prehistory, there is a change from mostly basin metates (with walls around the edges) and smaller handstones, to mostly flat metates with longer handstones. Archaeologists generally assume that this change is related to a shift toward grinding pre-soaked corn (a soft food that doesn’t bounce around when it’s being ground), rather than small, hard seeds or dry corn. In the US Southwest, the introduction of corn produces the opposite pattern in metate forms, because people there grind their corn dry (Adams 1999). There is a second change in grinding stone tools in the Postclassic, when metates with legs and thin manos with handles on the ends become more common. These changes would have made fine-grinding corn more efficient, perhaps as a way to reduce the fuel needed for cooking or to make it easier to digest (Biskowski 2000).

Mano fragments from Calixtlahuaca

At Calixtlahuaca, this second change didn’t really happen. We get some metates with legs, but they aren’t the only type in use. More noticeably, the shift from “Classic style” relatively thick manos without distinct handle grips on the ends, to thinner “Aztec style” manos with handle grips is missing. When I classified the ground stone from the site, I planned on using the same coding categories from Mike’s previous projects in Morelos. This classification basically has five categories for manos, ranging from one for a thick mano without differentiated handles, to five for a thin mano with pronounced handles. At sites in Morelos, most manos are 4s or 5s on this scale. At Calixtlahuaca, there were only a couple of cases that even scored as 3s; most were 1s or 2s.

Ways of classifying the shapes of manos

This “conservatism” in grinding technology fits into two larger patterns at Calixtlahuaca. First, it is likely related to differences in how maize was eaten in the Toluca Valley, relative to many other parts of Central Mexico (see previous posts on maize cooking HERE). If people at Calixtlahuaca didn’t eat as many tortillas (which require finer-than-average grinding), they may not have needed the increased efficiency provided by handled manos. Second, the continued use of an older style of grinding stones is part of a broader set of traits that people in the Toluca Valley maintained long after their neighbors in the Basin of Mexico, including the use of red-on-natural pottery, particular styles of censers, and lots of obsidian from the Ucareo source.

Works Cited:

Adams, Jenny L.

1999 Refocusing the Role of Food-Grinding Tools as Correlates for Subsistence Strategies in the U.S. Southwest. American Antiquity 64(3):475-498.

Biskowski, Martin

2000 Maize Preparation and the Aztec Subsistence Economy. Ancient Mesoamerica 11:293-306.

House Abandonment and Destruction

2018-10-12T12:37:00.000-06:00

We’ve previously talked about the amount of burned daub we found at Calixtlahuaca, and how it was probably related to the intentional destruction of houses there. Based on experimental work, it’s unlikely to get that much of a house burning at a high enough temperature to fire the clay of the walls without an intentional effort (Karabowicz 2009). However, that still leaves several different options for why the houses at Calixtlahuaca burned, and who did the burning.

Our first thought was that the houses had been burned during the Aztec conquest of the site. The standard Mesoamerican glyph for the conquest of a town is a drawing of a burning temple. Later, when we realized that some of the burned structures were from excavations that also included Colonial period figurines, I thought that they might have been burned when the residents of Calixtlahuaca were moved into Toluca as part of the process of congregación. People were sometimes required to burn their houses behind them when they were moved, to prevent them from going back to their old village. Another option is that people regularly burned their own houses, either through accidental kitchen fires, or intentionally, as a way to control insects and rodents.


The depiction of the Aztec conquest of Toluca in the Codex Mendoza, showing the burning-temple glyph

A couple of ways of separating these hypotheses are to look at the timing of the burning, and the degree of primary refuse left behind (Cameron and Tomka 1993; Inomata and Webb 2003). First, do all of the burned structures date to a single phase? If they do, this would suggest that they were burned as part of an event affecting the whole site, such as the Aztec conquest or the Spanish congregación policy. In fact, the three most severely burned structures at the site (in Units 315, 316, and 317) each dates to a different phase, which means that house burning was an ongoing activity throughout the site’s history. Second, how cleaned out were the houses before they burned? If burning is a planned, scheduled activity (such as for pest control, or congregación), people have time to remove all of their things from the house beforehand and there won’t be many artifacts left on the floor. In contrast, if the burning is unexpected (such as for conquest, or an accidental fire), the contents of the house are likely to burn with it and many of them may not be salvageable after the fire. One of the things we noticed during excavation at Calixtlahuaca was how few artifacts were found on floors, or in other primary contexts. Compared to many other projects, we found few whole or reconstructable pots (only 32), and only one of those, Vessel 2, was found on a floor, rather than in a burial or broken in a trash pit. Taken together, these two lines of evidence would suggest intentional, regular, planning burning, likely by the occupants of the houses themselves.

Vessel 2, a locally-produced version of Aztec Orangeware, found on the floor of the house in Unit 309

References:

Cameron, Catherine M. and Steve A. Tomka (editors)

1993 Abandonment of Settlement and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Inomata, Takeshi and Ronald W. Webb

2003 Archaeological Studies of Abandonment in Middle America. . In The Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Middle America, edited by T. Inomata and R. W. Webb, pp. 1-12. Foundations in Archaeological Inquiry, J. M. Skibo, general editor. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Karabowicz, Amy

2009 Wattle and Daub Architecture at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico: Experimental Analyses and a Comparative Study with Europe. Senior Honors Thesis, Barrett Honor's College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

Obsidian Sourcing

2018-05-17T14:37:00.002-06:00

by Angela Huster

While we have posted here about exporting obsidian samples for chemical sourcing – in order to determine which volcano the obsidian came from – I realized that we never posted anything about the results.

Chemical sourcing techniques measure the amount of different elements in a sample. Since different volcanoes (or even different eruptions from the same volcano) have difference “fingerprints” of rarer elements, archaeological samples can then be matched to their source area this way. We used two different techniques, XRF (by Adrian Burke) and INAA (by the MURR lab), which agreed pretty well for the subset of samples which were analyzed both ways.

Getting from the results of the sourcing analyses to the actual frequencies of obsidian from different sources at the Calixtlahuaca ended up being a multi-step process due to how we selected samples. First, the obsidian that we found included both grey and green pieces. Since green obsidian in Central Mexico is almost always from the Pachuca source in Hidalgo and is easy to visually identify, we only selected a few pieces from each household for analysis, just to confirm that that it came from Pachuca – and it did! This means that the actual percentage of Pachuca obsidian at the site is what we identified visually, not the much lower number in the sourcing results. Second, when we picked the grey obsidian samples, we tried to get pieces representing different production techniques and artifact types for each household, but the resulting samples weren’t necessarily representative of the different artifact types in the parent assemblage. When we got out results back, we realized that most of our grey obsidian blades were from Ucareo in Michoacan, while most our grey obsidian bifaces and flakes were from Otumba, in the Basin of Mexico. As a result, we also had to correct our frequencies to account for the types of lithic technologies in our sourcing samples (using Brad Andrew’s typological lithic analysis data). This is why you should think very carefully about your sampling strategy before you select artifacts; your results are only as representative as your samples were!

Once we did all that, our results showed that most of the obsidian at Calixtlahuaca came from three sources; Ucareo in the Tarascan Empire, and Otumba and Pachuca in the Aztec Empire. We also had occasional pieces from seven other sources, including four pieces from minor Toluca Valley sources. The proportions of the three major sources change over time, with increasing percentages of material from the Aztec Pachuca and Otumba sources over time (Figure 1). However, for all phases, the percentages of Ucareo obsidian at Calixtlahuaca are much higher than at other sites in Central Mexico (Golitko and Feinman 2015). This might be related to the presence of intrusive sites with Matlatzinca style ceramics near the Ucareo source (Hernandez and Healan 2008).

Figure 1. The percentages of obsidian from difference sources at Calixtlahuaca over time, after various correction factors were applied.

Another way to think about obsidian source frequencies is whether the volume of obsidian at a site is changing over time. One way to do this is to calculate the ratio of obsidian artifacts to ceramic sherds. At Calixtlahuaca, the volume of obsidian reaching the site during the Yata (LPC-B) phase drops, meaning that even though there is a higher percentage of obsidian from Aztec sources, this is because there is less Ucareo obsidian reaching the site, not because there is actually more Aztec obsidian (Figure 2). This is interesting because it suggests that the near-total Aztec monopoly on obsidian at other sites might have been due to cutting off access to other sources, rather than flooding the market with increased supply.

Figure 2. The frequencies of obsidian from difference sources per 1000 sherds over time at Calixtlahuaca

Works Cited:

Golitko, Mark and Gary M. Feinman

2015 Procurement and Distribution of Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican Obsidian 900 BC-AD 1520: a Social Network Analysis. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 2015(22):206-247.

Hernández, Christine L. and Dan M. Healan

2008 The Role of Late Pre-Contact Colonial Enclaves in the Development of the Postclassic Ucareo Valley, Michoacan, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 19(2):265-282.

Publication Round-Up

2018-03-19T17:13:00.001-06:00

Angela Huster

The past two years have seen the publication of several articles, book chapters, and a dissertation related to the project. If you would like a copy, please contact me or the authors. (If you've written something on the project and I missed it, please let me know!)

Huster, Angela C.

2018 Regional-Level Exchange in Postclassic Central Mexico. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 50: 40-53.

This article summarizes Middle and Late Postclassic trade patterns in ceramics in the Basin of Mexico, Morelos, and Toluca Valley, using data from Calixtlahuaca and several other published projects. It evaluates three hypotheses for the origins of the Postclassic market system and finds both bottom-up and top-down processes played roles, but that that the market system was not a product of the Aztec Empire.

Huster, Angela C.

2016 The Effects of Aztec Conquest on Provincial Commoner Households at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico. Doctoral Dissertation, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

An evaluation of Aztec rulership strategies, using Calixtlahuaca as a case study. Includes trade, craft production, household wealth, and identity based on domestic ritual and food preparation.

Manin, Aurélie, Raphaël Cornette and Christine Lefèvre

2016 Sexual dimorphism among Mesoamerican turkeys: a key for understanding past husbandry. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 10:526-533.

This paper is an analysis of turkey bones from multiple Classic and Postclassic sites in Western Mesoamerica, including Calixtlahuaca. It shows that Mesoamerican turkey flocks were heavily skewed toward female birds, which is consistent with flocks managed for a mix of egg and meat production.

Manin, Aurélie and Christine Lefèvre

2016 The use of animals in Northern Mesoamerica, between the Classic and the Conquest (200-1521 AD). An attempt at regional synthesis on central Mexico. Anthropozoologica 51(2):127-147.

This paper is an analysis of faunal material from multiple Classic and Postclassic sites in Western Mesoamerica, including Calixtlahuaca. Calixtlahuaca shows a relatively heavy reliance on dog, and somewhat less on hunted on garden-hunted species.

Sergheraert, Maëlle

2016 Aztec Provinces of the Central Highlands. In The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs, edited by D. L. Nichols and E. Rodríguez-Alegría, pp. 463-472. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

An overview of the archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence for Aztec rule in Central Mexico, using Calixtlahuaca as a case study.

Smith, Michael E.

2016 Aztec Urbanism: Cities and Towns. In The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs, edited by D. L. Nichols and E. Rodríguez-Alegría, pp. 201-218. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

An overview of organization, form, population, and common features of Aztec cities, including Calixtlahuaca.

Umberger, Emily and Casandra Hernández Fahan

2017 Matlatzinco Before the Aztecs: José García Payón and the Sculptural Corpus of Calixtlahuaca. Ancient Mesoamerica 28(1):1-19.

This work summarizes Emily, Casandra and Maëlle’s work on the stone sculptures from the Garcia Payón excavations at Calixtlahuaca. While the best-known sculptures from the site are Aztec-style pieces, there are also a large number of pieces in a local Matlatzinca style, which are described for the first time in this article.

But what were they doing...

2018-02-07T11:14:00.000-07:00

One of the ongoing questions at Calixtlahuaca has been the degree of specialized production at the site. This could either take the form of particular households that focused on producing high quantities of a particular type of good, or the entire site specializing in producing something for trade on a regional scale. We know that specialization at both of these levels occurs at sites in both the Basin of Mexico and in Morelos. Among many other cases, the site of Otumba included specialized workshops to produce obsidian tools, and a neighborhood that made clay figurines and spindle whorls (Charlton, et al. 1991; Parry 1990). Cuexcomate and Capilco in Morelos has site-wide specialization in cotton production, and some households also made amate-bark paper (Fauman-Fichman 1999; Smith and Heath-Smith 1993).

Calixtlahuaca has been frustrating in this regard – most of the standard lines of evidence for craft production have come back negative (Huster 2016:Chap. 5). Neither the survey nor the excavation located areas of intensive obsidian working. The INAA and petrographic data for ceramics showed a wide range of variation within the broader local groups, a pattern consistent with many small producers. We only located a couple of molds for making figurines or other small clay objects, and there are very few duplicates among the finished molded items among our collections. There are a few spindle whorls for cotton spinning, but the frequencies are far lower than in other areas where it was too also too cold to grow cotton.

I’m currently evaluating whether maguey (agave) production might be sitewide or regional-scale specialty. I had previously discarded it a household-level specialization, because pretty much all of the households had some evidence for maguey textile production and none of them stood out as unusual when compared within the site. However, when compared on a regional scale, some lines of evidence suggest that the amount of maguey processing was similar to sites such as Cihuatecpan or Tepetitlan (Cobean and Mastache 1999; Evans 2005), which researchers have argued were sites specializing in maguey products. This would be an interesting finding, because the usual explanation is that people in Central Mexico focus on growing maguey (and other cacti) in areas where it is too dry to reliably grow corn (Parsons and Darling 2000), and the number of cornfields I flailed through while surveying Calixtlahuaca would suggest that this is not the case there. The Codex Mendoza tribute lists for the provide also include both maguey fiber textiles (a fairly uncommon item, limited to a single geographic cluster of provinces) and unusually high quantities of corn (2 bins, rather than the usual one), which would suggest that the two crops were both economically important in the region.

One of the 2006 survey crews trying to figure out how to lay out a surface collection in the middle of a modern cornfield at the site.

References:

Charlton, Thomas H., Deborah L. Nichols and Cynthia Otis Charlton

1991 Aztec craft production and specialization: archaeological evidence from the city-state of Otumba, Mexico. World Archaeology 23:p. 98-114.

Cobean, Robert H. and Alba Guadalupe Mastache

1999 Tepetitlán: A Rural Household in the Toltec Heartland / Tepetitlán: Un Espacio Doméstico Rural en el Area de Tula. Serie Arqueología de México. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.

Evans, Susan Toby

2005 Men, Women and Maguey: The Houshold Division of Labor Among Aztec Farmers. In Settlement, subsistence, and social complexity : essays honoring the legacy of Jeffrey R. Parsons, edited by R. E. Blanton. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Fauman-Fichman, Ruth

1999 Postclassic Craft Prodution in Morelos, Mexico: The Cotton Thread Industry in the Provinces. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.

Huster, Angela C.

2016 The Effects of Aztec Conquest on Provincial Commoner Households at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico. Doctoral Dissertation, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

Parry, William J.

1990 Analysis of Chipped Stone Artifacts from Otumba and Neighboring Rural Sites in the Eastern Teotihuacan Valley of Mexico. In Preliminary Report of Recent Research in the Otumba City-State, edited by T. H. Charlton and D. L. Nichols. vol. 3. University of Iowa, Department of Anthropology, Research Report, Iowa City.

Parsons, Jeffrey R and J Andrew Darling

2000 Maguey (Agave spp.) utilization in Mesoamerican civilization: a case for precolumbian" Pastoralism". Boletín de la Sociedad Botánica de México (66):81-91.

Smith, Michael E. and Cynthia Heath-Smith

1993 Rural Economy in Late Postclassic Morelos: An Archaeological Study. In Economies and Polities in the Aztec Realm, edited by M. G. Hodge and M. E. Smith, pp. 349-376. Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, Albany.

The Joy of Data Management, or Where’s the fourth miscellaneous censer sherd from lot 307-2-2

2018-01-07T16:36:00.001-07:00

By Angela Huster

One of my least favorite parts of the lab work at Calixtlahuaca was doing ceramic type changes. Not because I disliked redoing my own work – there’s actually something satisfying in knowing that it’s right now – but because every single change had to be recorded in at least two, and usually four places (the label on the sherd, the type collection datafile, the paper form for the lot, and the computer datafile for the lot). It just seemed like an awful bother for a single change. I regularly tried to pawn off making the changes on anyone else I could sucker into it. We even had a form to keep track of where a change had been entered!

However, as I move on to working on other projects, I have come appreciate exactly how comprehensively the Calixtlahuaca Project tracked their artifact data. As an example of this, a couple years ago, after we were finished with the ceramic classification, we decided that we needed to subdivide a type. (From Misc censers, to Misc censers and Cut-out censers, for anyone who cares.) At that point, a fair number of sherds had been removed from their original lots, either as examples for the type reference collection, or as samples for particular technical analyses. However, because of our data tracking, I could pull not only a list of lots with the type, but also lists of cases where the sherds in question were stored someone else, which made relocating the pieces for reanalysis far easier. For one of the legacy datasets that I’m currently working with from another project, this simply isn’t possible – we know pieces were removed from lots for various analyses, but what was pulled and when it was taken are unknown. (Kintigh 1981 is an interesting look at the same issue in museum collections, with a focus on the possible bias introduced by archaeologists disproportionately pulling high-interest decorated types out of a collection.)

Miscellaneous censer sherds in the the type collection, prior to splitting the type. Knowing that these particular pieces were in the type collection spared me having to fruitlessly look for them in their lot bags.

While I doubt I’m ever going to love double or triple-redundant data tracking systems, I can see the value, and on my current project, nothing comes out of a lot bag unless it’s recorded that it’s now stored somewhere else. I suppose I shall now proceed to torture another generation of students by making them record type changes in multiple places…

Worked Cited:

Kintigh, Keith W.

1981 An Outline for a Chronology of Zuni Runs, Revisited: Sixty-five Years of Repeated Analysis and Collection. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 376:467-489.

Tamale Pots

2017-11-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

By Angela Huster

In a few of our earlier posts, we've mentioned that there don't seem to be that many comales (tortilla griddles) at Calixtlahuaca. This suggests that the ancient inhabitants of the site were eating their corn in some way other than tortillas, such as hominy, atole (gruel), or tamales. Tamales are the most likely alternative to tortillas, and there is a great quote in the Florentine Codex about the diet of the the Quaquata (one of the groups in the Toluca Valley):

“Nothing grew in the land of these Quaquata; only maize, beans, amaranth; no chili, no salt. The principal foods of these were tamales, beans; also their principal drink was fruit atole. Popcorn was produced right there in their land” (Sahagún 1950-82:Book 10: The People. Pp 182-183).

Unfortunately, it's harder to identify pots for tamale steaming, since a large pot can be used for any number of other tasks. One possible candidate for tamale pots are the type that we call interior-incised ollas. This type of large olla has sloppy, deeply scored incision on the interior of the body below the neck. The incisions can't be seen unless the pot is broken, which means that they weren't there for decoration. The incisions are also problematic for most forms of food preparation, since any liquid food would get stuck in them and burn, but we don't see any evidence for scorched reside in the incisions. However, the incisions would have been helpful for keeping the lattice of sticks used to keep tamales out of the steaming liquid from sliding around, and the tamales themselves from sticking to the walls of the pot. This type is not found in Morelos or the Basin of Mexico, where there are much higher frequencies of comales.

Interior-incised olla sherds

The distribution of these pots among the different households at the site also supports the idea that they were used for steaming tamales. Once comales start to used in noticeable frequencies at the site (during the Yata phase), the frequency of interior-incised ollas varies inversely with the frequency of comales; households were picking one or the other!

Comal vs interior incised olla frequencies by household (Huster 2016: Chapter 8)

Works Cited:

Huster, Angela C.

2016 The Effects of Aztec Conquest on Provincial Commoner Households at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico. Doctoral Dissertation, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

Sahagún, Bernardino de

1950-82 Florentine Codex, General History of the Things of New Spain. 12 books. Translated and Edited by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. School of American Research, Santa Fe NM, and the University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, UT.

Regional Clay Sampling

2017-09-21T16:01:00.000-06:00

Angela Huster

This summer, I spent a week taking twenty-eight clay samples from across the Toluca Valley and immediately adjacent areas for INAA analysis. Don Cato, one of our local crew members from the excavation, helped by driving in incredibly convoluted loops around the area, and patiently explaining to bystanders about what I was doing.

I kept crossing the construction route of another major water line to supply Mexico City. Occasionally, it was useful, such as here, where I needed a sample from below substantial modern fill.

These samples should help us identify where our previously sourced archaeological ceramics were made. Because there are only three other sites in the region with sourced ceramics, we have several chemical clusters in our archaeological ceramics that probably represent particular subregions, but we don't know where on the physical landscape those subregions are. More specifically, the new clay samples should help with three specific questions:

What chemical elements are the most geographically variable across the Toluca Valley and therefore the most useful for identifying source areas within the region?

Are the areas immediately to the south and west of the Toluca Valley likely sources for several of our "probably non-local" groups?

Are clays from the west (Toluca Valley) side of the mountain range between the Basin of Mexico and the Toluca Valley similar enough to Basin clays that they could explain some of our groups of Aztec-style ceramics that don't quite match local the very large existing reference data set for the Basin of Mexico?

Soil color and texture recording

Calixtlahuaca’s Market Brought to Life!

2014-04-07T13:10:00.001-06:00

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.

What's new for Calixtlahuaca ??

2014-01-08T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's a new year -- 2014 -- and our analysis of the findings from our fieldwork at Calixtlahuaca continues.

We will try to get some new material posted soon. But in the meantime, check out some of our past posts. These cover several years, from our initial excavations in 2007 up to our current analyses at ASU:

The life and times of Burial 4 (written by anthropology major Kea Warren)

Sounds from the past: The bird-whistle from Calixtlahuaca (have you ever heard an Aztec musical instrument, 500 years old, played?)

Gambling, tortillas, and Spaniards in hats

Using an artistic touch to bring Calixtlahuaca back to life

The 1563 calendrical relief

Working on ceramics in Toluca

Subsets and Samples

2013-10-03T13:53:00.002-06:00

By Mike Smith, with comments from the peanut gallery by Angela Huster

After a rather involved set of phone conversations and emails among various project members trying to establish the frequency of green obsidian at the site during each phase, we realized that half our problem was the we were working with different samples. We had defined the Domestic Context Sample of lots strongly associated with dated houses several years ago, but any analyses that wanted to work with a larger sample were a free-for-all.

Based on Mike's previous projects in Morelos, we defined five samples based on their value for the analysis of domestic artifacts and conditions. These run from the Domestic Context Sample, (now called Domestic Sample 1, or DS-1), which consists only of well-dated midden deposits, to DS-5, which is the entire sample of all excavated contexts at the site. In addition there are other samples of lots that make sense for particular analyses or materials. Most of these samples are nested; e.g., all other samples include DS-1, and DS-5 includes all other samples. Samples DS-3 and DS-4 intersect in a non-nesting fashion, however.

DS-1 (the Domestic Context Sample). 178 lots.

This sample consists of well-dated midden deposits associated with houses. It can be subdivided into domestic components; that is, deposits from a single phase in a single unit. It was designed to provide a robust sample of materials from contexts with abundant artifacts for optimal quantification. This sample is used for:

Household comparisons of ceramic type frequencies.

· Ceramic type frequencies for the Aguas Celestiales chapter

It is also the source of sub-samples for particular technical analyses, including:

Ceramic attribute recording

· Obsidian source samples

· Ceramic petrographic samples

· Angela’s NAA samples

DS-2 (the Extended Domestic Context Sample). 340 lots.

This sample extends the domestic context sample to include other lots dating to the same phases at individual units. Units without representation in the domestic context sample are not included in DS-2. The advantage of a larger sample is offset by the inclusion of contexts such as fill and colluvial overburden whose association with the occupation of a house is less secure. This is used for:

· Interhousehold comparisons of rarer items in Angela’s dissertation analyses – ground stone, copper, jewelry, whorls, and molds

DS-3 (the all-Phased sample) 1,146 lots.

This sample consists of all lots phased to a particular period. It includes the transitional or uncertain phases (3, 5, and 44*) and phase 1 (pre-Postclassic). This is a much larger sample than DS-1 or DS-2, and its value lies in the fact that it includes the maximal number of lots that can be phased. Many of the lots have not had their ceramics classified; they are phased through stratigraphic position or associations with lots dated from their classified ceramics and/or radiocarbon dates. Its disdvantage is the inclusion of many lots whose direct association with the house occupation of each unit is more tenuous (fill, overburden, etc.). Its primary use is for comparing frequencies of rare artifacts. It is used for:

· Rare artifact types by phase for the general project

DS-4 (the Classified Sample) 664 lots.

This is the sample of lots whose ceramics have been classified. It has two related disadvantages compared to sample DS-2: many of the lots have not been phased; and many of the lots have only a few sherds. It is not used in any analyses.

DS-5 (all Excavated Lots). 1,668 lots.

This is the total number of lots that were excavated. It includes many tiny lots from Alex’s soil sampling, lots from architectural excavations, and other small lots whose value for artifact analysis is minimal. It’s primary use is to generate inventories of all excavated artifacts of a given type, irrespective of phasing or quality of context. This is useful for descriptive purposes (i.e., we want to describe all of the figurines, not just the ones that fall into a more restricted sample), but not for making comparisons among units or parts of the site.

The following diagram shows the relationship among these samples.

If anyone needs to know which samples their data fall into, please contact Angela.

Working on ceramics in Toluca

2013-07-02T19:41:00.003-06:00

Mr. Monkey-Helmet

I'm in Toluca for a few weeks working in our lab at the Colegio Mexiquense. I am wrapping up a variety of final tasks with our ceramics. One thing I am doing is organizing the miscellaneous ceramic forms, checking catalogs, recording attributes, drawing the artifacts, and taking photos. Here are a few photos to show what I've been doing.

The first photo is a monkey face, someone I call Mr. Monkey-Helmet. This is classified as a ceramic appliqué, which means it was stuck on the side of some object. In the profile view you can see the projection where this attached to the wall of the vessel. The problem is, what kind of vessels had monkey faces sticking out their sides? I really don't know (let me know if you have a

Pipes

suggestion).

Next we have some tobacco pipes. These little pipes were most abundant in western Mexico, among the Tarascans and other cultures. We found more pipes than I did in my earlier excavations near Cuernavaca, but they are still pretty rare items. Not all the houses had pipes, but since they are rare it is tough to tell whether this is significant or not.

Stamps

Here are a few stamps. Ceramic stamps, like the one on the top left, are common at Aztec sites in the Valley of Mexico and in Morelos. These were regular household items at Yautepec and the other sites I excavated near Cuernavaca. But they are quite rare at Calixtlahuaca. In fact, the two on the left are the only Aztec-style stamps we excavated. The rarity of stamps at Calixtlahuaca is one of many indications that the site was not closely integrated with the styles, culture, and practices of the Aztec heartland in the Valley of Mexico. My Morelos sites, on the other hand, matched the materials and styles of the Aztec center much more closely. The object on the right is unusual. The design does not match Aztec stamps, and it lacks a tab on the back. If you have any suggestions about what this may be, please let me know. Maybe it is from an earlier time period.

Tlaloc vessels

When he excavated at Calixtlahuaca in the 1930s, José García Payón found a bunch of offerings of Tlaloc Vessels (tall, crude, ugly vessels with Tlaloc faces) in Temple 4, which then became known as the Tlaloc Temple. We found a few fragments of probable Tlaloc vessels in our excavations, but not very many. If you have seen the Tlaloc vessels from offerings at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, these crummy sherds look pretty pathetic. Ah, the curse of household archaeology. We excavate fragments of everyday items, and rarely fine a beautiful complete object worthy of a museum. Oh, well.

Imports from Morelos

And finally, a photo of sherds from vessels imported from the state of Morelos. Contemporary sites in Morelos have move imports from the Toluca Valley than the reverse. Aztec-period houses in Morelos have a much higher number of imports overall, and imports from a larger number of places, than the houses at Calixtlahuaca. One interesting thing is that these Morelos imports span the entire sequence. At the top right is Morelos-Puebla Black-on-Orange, an Early Aztec type, and the two bottom decorated sherds, Morelos Type I, are from the final half of the Late Aztec period in western Morelos.

Brad Andrews is down here too for a few days, checking the obsidian. Next week I return from the 70 degree weather of Toluca to the 115 degree heat of Phoenix.

The Life and Times of Burial 4

2013-04-24T12:14:00.001-06:00

This is the second post by this semester's student volunteers on bioarchaeological research at Calixtlahuaca.

This post includes photographs of human bone.

By Kea Warren

Bioarchaeologists work with the traditional archaeologists to try to understand the way a group of people lived based on the remains they leave behind. While working on the site of Calixtlahuaca in Mexico, Doctor Michael Smith and his team uncovered four full burials and the areas with broken bone rasps discussed in the previous post, all of which were later analyzed by Kristin Nado. Six burials is a relatively small sample size. While the site provides insight to the lives of a small group of people, archaeologists tend to prefer larger samples to understand trends and diversity among the population. From this smaller sample, bioarchaeologists can observe individuals and how those individuals lived, as will be discussed later, though the broader understanding of the group is limited.

Map of Burial Locations

Three burials are physically close together, which may imply some sort of familial relationship between burials 5, 4, and 3 (which contain two adult males and an adult whose sex is unknown). The two of these three bodies with preserved feet share a congenital condition known as non-osseous tarsal coalitions. This condition is also found in burial 2, which is from a different house excavation. According to Nado, tarsal coalitions are when two or more tarsal bones are connected by bone or cartilage. This union of bone can be painful, and can also affect the sufferer’s ability to walk. Further study of the inhabitants of Calixtlahuaca would provide a better understanding this condition in the region. If other remains were uncovered, it would allow bioarchaeologists like Nado to analyze if the condition is regional or possibly only specific to certain groups. DNA evidence of the relationship would strengthen the claim.

Beyond this potential familial relationship, the man in Burial Four has pathologies that are not found in the other burials.

Burial 4

Burial Four is a male, who was between 25 and 29 years old at the time of death. Based on the man’s bones, Nado could immediately identify several pathological problems that give insight into the life of this man. The tarsal coalitions are present, which would probably have caused pain. The lip of his acetabulum (colloquially known as the hip joint) appears to have extra articular surfaces. Nado has hypothesized that this may be due to a dislocation of the hip earlier in his life that was never realigned. This would have been extremely painful, if not completely crippling to individual in Burial Four. The injury was sustained long enough before death that the bone had time to repair itself and try to accommodate the new location of Burial Four’s femur. This would have taken years.

Cyst in Burial 4's femur

His left tibia is also of interest. It is unlike any other long bone found on site. Inside normal long bones is the medullary cavity, where the marrow is found. In Burial Four’s tibia, there seems to be a bubble of bone. The bioarchaeologists of SHESC remain puzzled as to what it could be, though it has been suggested that a cyst in the bone ossified, and that this is what remains.

More can be learned from his skeletal remains. The teeth on the left side of his mouth are significantly more worn than those on the right, which Nado has suggested may have been due to use of his teeth for things beyond chewing. Was this for some task he performed because he could not walk? Only Burial Five had a similar, albeit less prominent, wear pattern, also known as “bilateral asymmetry”. If more mandibles/maxilla can found at the site, more research into the presence of this wear could be performed. Was it specific to a group or family? What caused it? What does this tell us about social organization at the site and the relationship between Burial Four and others of his time?

While not everything that happened in life can be viewed in the skeletal remains of a person, bioarchaeology offers a glimpse into the lives of those long gone. Thanks to Dr. Michael Smith, Angela Huster, Juliana Novic, Kristin Nado and the Calixtlahuaca team for their efforts to discover more about how people lived long ago.

Bone Rasps at Calixtlahuaca

2013-04-16T16:23:00.000-06:00

Note: This post contains photos of human bone.

During the archaeological excavations at Calixtlahuaca, Dr. Michael Smith and his team uncovered two different burials of bone rasps sometimes called Omichicahuaztli by the Aztecs. These bone rasps have been examined and analyzed by Kristin Nado, PhD Student with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Her studies include details of both burials involved in the 2006-07 excavations as well as comparisons with burials found at the same site by Garcia Payon during his excavations in the 1930’s. She then makes a comparison of the burials found in Calixtlahuaca to bone rasps uncovered at a site in Zacapu Michoacán, Mexico.

Several secondary burials at Calixtlahuaca contain bone rasps. Some, discovered by Garcia Payon, are formal offerings near public architecture, including complete human femurs, tibias and crania. One secondary burial found by Dr. Smith and his team was found in a terrace deposit with fragmented arm and leg bones and partial crania. The fragmented bones show evidence of green bone breakage, meaning they were ritualistically killed or “broken” after just a few years of use. A second (and most interesting) burial was also discovered by Dr. Smith’s team and it was found in a colluvial deposit and consists of fragmented bones, possibly of a child, with green bone breakage and partial crania. What makes this burial different is that all the notched bones showed distinct signs of wear and were burned. In contrast the bone rasps discovered in Zacapu Michoacán were of adults and young adults and consists of humerus, ulnas, femurs and tibias with no mention of crania. The bones show clear signs of mass use as well as green bone breakage. Unfortunately, context is not well known.

Terrace Deposit Burial

Colluvial Deposit Burial

What was the purpose of the Omichicahuaztli to the Aztecs? That question is still under debate. Major consensus is that they were used in mortuary rituals and symbolized the myth of Quetzalcoatl’s gathering of the bones of past creations to recreate human beings. The examinations of the Omichicahuaztli burials at Calixtlahuaca are still in its infancy, as studies progress these enigmatic bones will surrender even more information. I would like to acknowledge Dr. Michael Smith, Ms. Angela Huster, Ms. Juliana Novic and the rest of the Calixtlahuaca excavation crew as well as a special thanks to Kristin Nado, whose power point presentation this information is based on, for without their dedication, expertise, and sense of curiosity the Calixtlahuaca project and this blog would not be possible.

Brenda Smalley

Undergrad Intern

Calixtlahuaca project

Arizona State University

Calixtlahuaca in Hawaii!

2013-04-01T16:24:00.005-06:00

The Calixtlahuaca Project is giving a symposium at the 78th Annual Society for American Archaeology meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii this coming week. The session will run from 9:30 to noon on Saturday, so if you want to hear even more nitty-gritty details of the project, talk to one of us in person, or grill us about one the blog posts, please join us.

The session schedule is:

Empire, Economy, and Urban Society at Aztec Period Calixtlahuaca, Mexico

Michael E. Smith

Archaeological Fieldwork at Calixtlahuaca

Maelle Sergheraert

Calixtlahuaca’s embedded carved stones: Symbols of religion, power and markers of cultural changes.

Adrian Burke and GillesGauthier

Geochemical Characterization of Obsidian from the Toluca Valley using XRF

Bradford W. Andrews, RPA

Calixtlahuaca Stone Tools: Technological Trends and Their Socioeconomic Implications

Julieta Lopez, Marina Vega-Gonzalez, Manuel Aguilar-Franco and Jose Luis Ruvalcaba-Sil

Stones that Speak. The Slate from Calixtlahuaca. Sources, Function and Distribution

Angela C. Huster

Of Comales, Cotton, and Aztec Orangeware: The effects of Aztec Conquest at Calixtlahuaca

Jennifer L. Meanwell

A Petrographic Analysis of Domestic Pottery Consumption at Calixtlahuaca

Juliana Novic

Social Mixing in the Neighborhoods of Aztec Period Calixtlahuaca, Mexico

Ryan Smigielski

Calixtlahuaca: A Comparative Analysis on Urban Features and Politics

Frances F. Berdan

Discussant

Aloha!

No calpollis in the Toluca Valley?

2013-03-18T22:05:00.000-06:00

Aztec calpolli temple

The calpolli was an important social institution in Aztec central Mexico. It was a group of households living in proximity who shared economic and other resources. In the countryside, calpollis were villages and in cities calpollis were neighborhoods. There were two sizes or levels of calpolli - a small calpolli (ca. 20 households), several of which were grouped together into a large calpolli (ca. 150 households). Calpollis typically had a temple and a market. They were made up of commoner households, who selected a council to made decisions and run the organization (e.g., to assign plots of land among the farming families).

In the State of Morelos, where I worked prior to Calixtlahuaca, there is abundant documentation of the presence and importance of calpollis. A series of detailed census lists (house-by-house interviews) were recorded in Nahuatl in six communities in Morelos, and these provide the most detailed accounts of calpolli organization from anywhere in central Mexico. The sites I excavated in Morelos matched up very closely to the size and structure of calpollis in these documents. In my current book, I identify the calpolli as a major source of the stability, success, and prosperity of the communities I excavated in Morelos.

Calpollis at Cuexcomate, in Morelos

When we started working at Calixtlahuaca, many of us assumed that calpollis were present in this area as well. Some historians talk about calpollis in the Toluca Valley, although there are no detailed descriptions of them. Last week I started wondering if perhaps the people of Calixtlahuaca and the Toluca Valley lacked calpolli organization, and that this fact (if true) might help explain some of our findings. I have now almost convinced myself that this was indeed the case. Here is my reasoning so far.

First I checked the major books and article on social organization in the Toluca Valley at the time of the Spanish conquest. If calpollis were present, these historians would mention it. But the only time calpollis were mentioned in these works was when authors were talking about general patterns of social organization in central Mexico, not about specific places in the Toluca Valley.

Then it occurred to me (this afternoon) that perhaps if we did not have the Morelos census data, it might be harder to identify calpollis in Morelos. If that were the case, then the missing calpollis in the Toluca histories might not mean very much. So I took a spin through the major works on 16th century social organization in Morelos. I found that these authors regularly talked about calpollis, even when they were not drawing on the census documents. I found a few quotes from documents that mentioned calpollis. So, unlike the Toluca Valley, many historical studies of Morelos had identified calpollis, independently of the census documents. This strengthens the argument that if calpollis had been present and important, there would be more discussion of them in the 16th century documents.

Then I realized that I needed to check the major literature on the Aztec calpolli in general. Sources like Lockhart and Carrasco had surprisingly little to say about specific calpolli apart from the Morelos census data. But a major paper by Luis Reyes García (1996) listed lots of examples of the use of the term calpolli. In fact, he has a whole list and discussion of mentions of the calpolli in central Mexico outside of Mexico City. The towns are scattered all over Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcalla, with a single occurrence in Toluca (in 1533). But it turns out that the lone Toluca calpolli reference describes communities of commoners who moved into the Toluca Valley from the Basin of Mexico after the Valley was conquered by the Mexica emperor Axayacatl. Not surprisingly, these migrants kept their native calpolli organization when they settled in Toluca. That leaves only one possible mention of a calpolli in the Toluca Valley, from a document from Zinacantepec in 1574, cited in an article by Megged. The context is not clear from his article, however.

On the basis of this quick review, it looks to me like the calpolli was not a regular unit of social organization in the Toluca Valley and Calixtlahuaca in Postclassic or early colonial times. This is by no means a firmly-established finding, and I will keep trying to test it; my next step is probably to talk to some of the historians who know the Toluca documents well.

But if this finding holds up, what does it mean? Right now I will only say that the lack of calpollis would suggest that local social organization at Calixtlahuaca was very different from the patterns I found in Morelos. And now it is time for all of us project members to think about the possible implications of this for our understanding of Calixtlahuaca.

Some sources on the calpolli

Carrasco, Pedro (1972) La casa y hacienda de un señor tlahuica. Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 10:235-244.

Hicks, Frederic (2010) Labor Squads, Noble Houses, and Other Things called "Barrios" in Aztec Mexico. Nahua Newsletter 49:13-21.

Lockhart, James (1992) The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Reyes García, Luis (1996) El término calpulli en documentos del siglo XVI. In Documentos nahas de la Ciudad de México del siglo XVI, edited by Luis Reyes García, Celestino Eustaquio Solís, Armando Valencia Ríos, Constantino Medina Lima and Gregorio Guerrero Días, pp. 21-68. CIESAS, Mexico City.

Smith, Michael E. (1993) Houses and the Settlement Hierarchy in Late Postclassic Morelos: A Comparison of Archaeology and Ethnohistory. In Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica: Studies of the Household, Compound, and Residence, edited by Robert S. Santley and Kenneth G. Hirth, pp. 191-206. CRC Press, Boca Raton.

Toluca, the travel destination

2013-02-17T11:05:00.001-07:00

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

2013-02-14T15:23:00.000-07:00

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

2012-12-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

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...

2012-07-04T19:52:00.000-06:00

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

2012-06-18T20:03:00.001-06:00

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"

2012-05-23T14:05:00.000-06:00

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).