Tamale Pots

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

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

Working on ceramics in Toluca

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.

Sherd Digitizing

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

 

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

Rosario and Edgar drawing in the lab at the Colegio Mexiquense

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

Kea digitizing in the office at ASU

Imported Ceramics, or the Lack Thereof

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

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

 

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

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