Notes from the Field: Aztecs

Event Details

Time: November 12, 2009 from 6:30pm to 7:30pm
Location: ASU Tempe Campus, Business Administration C Wing, Room 316
Website or Map: http://www.asu.edu/uts/m_ba...
Event Type: lecture
Organized By: Almira Poudrier
Latest Activity: Nov 10

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Event Description

New and Old Excavations at Calixtlahuaca, an Aztec Regional Capital
Speaker: Michael E. Smith

In 2006 and 2007 the Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project (sponsored by ASU) conducted fieldwork at this central Mexican capital city. Although first excavated by José García Payón in the 1930s, his work was never published and the site had not been excavated since that time. This talk emphasizes the ASU fieldwork, which focused on excavations of terraces and houses and the reconstruction of social and economic organization at the household level. The combination of early excavation of temples and palaces with new excavations of houses provides a rich perspective on urban life—and its political and economic contexts—at a major Aztec city.

Michael E. Smith is a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU. A Mesoamericanist archaeologist with topical interests in ancient urbanism and the economic and political organization of agrarian state societies, he has directed several fieldwork projects focused on Aztec society near Cuernavaca and Toluca in central Mexico. These projects, funded by the National Science Foundation and other agencies, have used the methods of residential excavations to illuminate the nature of local society and its changes under the Aztec empire. This research has addressed a number of topics under the general rubric of archaeological political economy, including urbanism, peasant society, agricultural intensification, craft specialization, trade and imperialism. Smith has published extensively on ancient urbanism and is also interested in issues of archaeological publishing, including open access and new uses of the internet for scholarly communication; he blogs about archaeological publishing and the Calixtlahuaca project.

Reassembling the Calixtlahuaca Sculptural Corpus
Speaker: Emily Umberger

Although García Payón found a number of stone sculptures at Calixtlahuaca during his excavations of the 1930s, he produced only short publications of these in which he included other sculptures that he knew of from the area, mostly without illustrations. Thus, the reconstruction of the artistic corpus of the site requires the analysis of sculptures now located in at least five museums and collections and accompanied by inadequate records. There appear to be two groups of Aztec-style sculptures dating from after the Aztec conquest of the area in 1476: sculptures made by artists trained in the imperial workshops of Tenochtitlan and sculptures made by and for the colonists (mostly agriculturalists) who emigrated from the Valley of Mexico to the area. There are also sculptures that were made for the inhabitants who controlled the site before Aztec arrival, the administrators of the Matlatzinca state. From the beginning the site was important in central Mexico as a focus of the worship of the wind. Most interesting among the sculptures are fine, contrasting examples of Aztec and Matlatzinca winds gods.

Dr. Emily Umberger is Professor of Art in ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, where she teaches courses in the art of Precolumbian Mesoamerica and South America as well as Spain and its New World colonies during the Renaissance and Baroque, and seminars on Spanish and Mexican art before 1800. She holds an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is the author of several articles on Aztec art, including "Notions of Aztec History: The Case of the 1487 Great Temple Dedication," (2003) and a co-author of Aztec Imperial Strategies (1997)