The Man Who Invented Aztec Crystal Skulls. Jane MacLaren Walsh
be used by twentieth-century Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov to finally decipher Maya glyphs.
In the early years of the Conquest countless carved monoliths in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City, were broken up for use in building Spanish churches and palaces, or simply buried facedown and hidden away from the populace. Aztec pyramids and temples were covered over and employed as foundations for colonial buildings. Spanish clergy and secular administrators apparently believed in the adage “out of sight out of mind,” and continued to bury clues to pre-Columbian Mexican history until the turn of the nineteenth century. Their principal fear was that the pagan images would continue to be venerated by native peoples, who, in fact, did find ways to keep their ancient beliefs and customs alive.
The destructive animosity towards the country’s pre-Hispanic past began to fade in the last third of the seventeenth century, according to archeologist and historian Ignacio Bernal’s influential History of Mexican Archaeology. At that point Mexican scholars such as Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora first became interested in the country’s archeology and history. A Jesuit scientist, historian, and cartographer, Sigüenza carried out some of the first archeological excavations at the ruins of Teotihuacan, attempting to determine whether the great pyramid contained a tomb within its purported hollow core. He also collected manuscripts and books about the Indians of New Spain.
Part of Sigüenza’s library came from his friend and colleague Juan de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, the son of Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl. Father and son were direct descendants of the ruling family of Texcoco, one of the states closely allied with the Aztecs. Juan inherited his father’s writings and invaluable collection of early painted codices that depicted the lives, customs, and beliefs of Mexico’s indigenous cultures. These and other painted manuscripts became the focus of increasing interest among European scholars in the succeeding centuries (Bernal 1980: 51).
Sigüenza’s library and archive first inspired and later entrapped the Italian nobleman Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci, who arrived in Mexico in 1736 hoping to research the history of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac, north of Mexico City. When he learned of Sigüenza’s incomparable collection, he decided to acquire or copy as many painted manuscripts as he could. Unfortunately, he ran afoul of the viceroy in Mexico City, who disapproved of his Virgin of Guadalupe project and of his study of pre-Hispanic Mexican texts. Boturini was accused of entering the country without permission, jailed, and deported to Spain eight years after his arrival in Mexico. The viceroy confiscated and ultimately dispersed Boturini’s library and manuscripts—the Ixtlilxóchitl documents as well as many others—but the knowledge of their existence continued to entice scholars of Mexico’s pre-Columbian past.
As the eighteenth century progressed, scholarly pursuits opened up to a broader segment of the populace. Previously most who made their names in the study of antiquity came from the nobility or the clergy. Ironically, as Adam Sellen has pointed out, some of the earliest collectors of pre-Columbian objects were priests, who had been previously tasked with destroying them (2015: 40–41).
However, with the advent of the egalitarian principles associated with the Enlightenment, the ranks of those researching the ancient world began to expand, soon opening up to tradesmen’s sons, like the art historian Pierre-François Hugues (self-styled Baron d’Hancarville) and the influential archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The careers of these scholars and others like them underscore the power that the thirst for knowledge would hold during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Intellectual brilliance such as theirs, combined with a lust for social self-improvement, was to be a driving force of Enlightenment culture” (Jenkins 2003: 168).
Although access to knowledge was more egalitarian during the eighteenth century, European opinions and views of other cultures often reflected hierarchical, patronizing, and decidedly ethnocentric thinking. The pronouncements made by Europeans about pre-Columbian Mexican history in particular were demeaning and antagonistic, prompting Mexican scholars to react with anger and defensiveness. Jesuit scholars were particularly active in defending Mexico’s indigenous heritage, even after 1767, when they were expelled from the country by order of King Charles III. Writing from Bologna, Italy, Francisco Javier Clavigero “indignantly denied the charge of Indian inferiority” presented by Enlightenment writers in Europe (Keen 1971: 300). Another indication that Mexican scholars had begun to reframe the narrative of their country’s precontact history is the work of the Jesuit Pedro José Márquez. In 1804 he wrote about the recent archeological finds by José Antonio Alzate, who had excavated at the sites of El Tajín in Veracruz and Xochicalco in Morelos. This was the first extensive treatise on Mexican archeology to be published in Europe.
In 1790 workers discovered an eleven-foot sculpture of the Aztec mother goddess Coatlicue in Mexico City’s central plaza, the Zócalo, which they were re-grading and paving with cobblestones. A few months later they uncovered the twenty-four-ton Aztec Calendar Stone, also called the Sun Stone, lying face down sixteen inches below the plaza’s surface (León y Gama 1792; López Luján 2009). The chronicler Fray Diego Durán described the Calendar Stone as being located, early in the sixteenth century, on the southeast corner of the central plaza, where the daily market was held. Then, Fray Alonso de Montúfar, archbishop of Mexico from 1551 until 1572, ordered the stone buried because he believed it caused violent criminal activity in the area (Durán 1994: 100).
The Spaniards had so successfully obliterated the remnants of precontact cultures over more than 250 years that the grandeur and craftsmanship of the Calendar Stone and Coatlicue carvings were a complete revelation. The discovery offered a surprising window into Mexican antiquity, causing scholars to worry that the enormous works would meet the same fate that other pagan monuments had before them—destruction or burial.
The Calendar Stone was soon mounted on the western wall of the cathedral, piquing the curiosity of scientists and interested bystanders. The Coatlicue monolith was moved to the patio of the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México (Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico), where it prompted a greater range of responses. The figure incorporates many of the features of Aztec iconography and ritual that the Spaniards found so repellant. Her face is composed of two serpent heads. She is dressed in a skirt of intertwined snakes and wears a necklace of human hands and hearts, from which hangs a skull. However, the image of the mother of all Aztec deities was so powerfully evocative to the Indians of Mexico City, even after nearly three centuries, that they laid flowers in front of her. The Catholic Church began to suspect that pagan rituals were being carried out around the monolith, so very soon after the statue’s discovery the administrators of the Pontifical University ordered that the goddess be reinterred.
Hard on the heels of the discovery of the monoliths in the Zócalo of Mexico City came attempts to illustrate the newly rediscovered Mexican archeological monuments and artifacts. Of particular note is the work of Guillermo Dupaix, a native of the duchy of Luxembourg, who was a captain in the dragoon regiment of Mexico. He began a journey of discovery and documentation in 1791, shortly after landing at Veracruz. He examined ruined archeological monuments around Mexico City, describing them and depicting them in pen-and-ink drawings, continuing over a period of more than a dozen years. Initially concentrating on pre-Hispanic monuments located mostly around the city, he eventually ventured much further afield. Later descriptions and drawings recorded the largest and most important pyramidal structures of Teotihuacan: the elaborate bas reliefs of the Feathered Serpent pyramid (Quetzalcoatl) at Xochicalco, about 75 miles southwest of Mexico City; the ancient monuments of Mitla and Tlacolula in Oaxaca; and the amazingly intricate pyramid of El Tajín in Veracruz (López Luján 2015: 45).
Figure 3.1 Coatlicue monolith just behind the Tizoc stone in the patio of the Museo Nacional de México. Photo by William Henry Jackson (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives).
His accomplishments brought him considerable renown, later eliciting an invitation from the King of Spain to lead the first Royal Antiquary Expedition. In the first decade of the nineteenth century Charles IV of Spain commissioned Dupaix and artist José Luciano Castañeda to “investigate the ancient monuments of the realm” (Kingsborough 1831: