Pre-Columbian Art - Summer 2020

1. The Maya Ruins at Uxmal Still Have More Stories to Tell The remains of a provinical capital on the Yucatan Peninsula attest to a people trying to fortify their place in the world The Pyramid of the MagicianThe Pyramid of the Magician stands over 100 feet tall and contains five different temples built in succession. (Elizabeth Landau)By Elizabeth Landau

SMITHSONIANMAG.COMJUNE 17, 20208124278 As the sun sets over the Yucatan jungle, its fading light falls on the western staircase of the Pyramid of the Magician, just as it has for more than a millennium. In pre-Hispanic times, on Maya religious holidays, a priest or ruler might ascend these stairs to pass through the gateway to a holy temple—or, as historian Jeff Kowalski writes in Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya, “a cave portal to a sacred creation mountain.” Watching from the plaza below, the commoners may have seen a leader emerging from this ornate doorway as a manifestation of the planet Venus, or as the sun itself.More than a four-hour drive from the spring break cliché of Cancun, the Maya ruins of Uxmal (pronounced oosh-mawl) preserve the grandeur of what was. The second-most visited archaeological park in Mexico (before the COVID-19 pandemic), Uxmal was a seat of power in the Puuc region, the low range of hills in the otherwise flat grasslands of the Yucatan. Its ruins contain ornate carvings, friezes and sculptures embedded in the architecture, but at some point in the 10th century, construction on this thriving city stopped, and before the Spanish came, the Maya left."At Uxmal the last buildings, such as the Nunnery Quadrangle, and House of the Governor, the House of the Turtles, and the later upper temples of the Pyramid of the Magician, all display a kind of superlative finished cut stonework that, I guess you would say, that is some of the finest architectural sculpture found in the ancient Maya world, particularly sculpture made from cut stone," Kowalski says.The dates of Uxmal’s eventual abandonment are unknown and controversial, although the Maya likely stayed there longer than in their southern cities, which fell beginning in the 9th century. Kowalski thinks Uxmal was no longer an active political capital in the region by about 950 A.D., though some scholars say a centralized government continued deeper into the 10th century or later.Modern archaeologists still study the site’s exquisite ruins, including the storied pyramid, the grand House of the Governor, and others to figure out how the Maya adapted to changing threats from enemies and the natural environment. Uxmal continues to surprise and to offer new hints about what life was like there more than a millennium ago.Since around 1000 B.C., people speaking variants or dialects of Mayan languages have been living in parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. The Maya created a distinctive system of hieroglyphic writing. Attuned to astronomy, they used the movements of the moon, sun and planets in the development of a calendar system based on cycles. (This included the famous Long Count cycle that concluded on December 21, 2012, and gave rise to the modern rumor that the world would end on that day. It did not.)No one knows when the Maya first settled in Uxmal. A legend tells of a magician-dwarf who built the Pyramid of the Magician overnight, but hard evidence from the earliest temple suggests construction began around the 6th century A.D. and continued expanding the city thereafter. The city would become the center of life for the Maya of the Puuc. Maya thrived in Uxmal for centuries because of favorable environmental conditions. In its heyday, the city enjoyed more rainfall and richer soil than in the rest of the northern Yucatan. It prospered in agriculture, allowing the people here to cultivate the raw materials for its signature buildings. “That also explains to us the presence of a very beautiful architecture,” says José Huchim, director of the Archaeological Zone of Uxmal and the Puuc Route. “It is a very rich region. That led to control, confrontation and also the construction of a wall that would protect it from the enemy.”That enemy came from the northeast. Defending the CityUxmal probably reached the height of its power in the 8th and 9th centuries under a ruler researchers call Lord Chac, known also as Chan Chak K’ak’nal Ajaw (his name reflects that of the Maya rain god, Chac). Ruling at the turn of the 10th century, Lord Chac appears to have commissioned construction on Uxmal buildings such as the House of the Governor, a titanic endeavor that would have required 1,200 workers laboring for 33 years to construct the palace and its large supporting platform. It has a two-headed jaguar throne on a platform in front, a carved lattice pattern symbolizing rulership and representations of Lord Chac’s rain god namesake. A sculpture of Lord Chac himself, surrounded by two-headed serpents, stands above the central doorway.In 2019, Huchim and archaeologist Lourdes Toscano, who together direct the Uxmal Project, focused on excavating the area under the large platform that supports the palace. In December 2019, they announced their team had found two arches, one about 21 feet high and another about 24 feet, demarcating an 82-foot-long passageway under the top part of the building. Austere and characterized by fine cuts in limestone, these arches could pre-date the grander palace structures by as much as 200 years .Their findings indicate the palace, likely used for residential or administrative purposes, or both, was originally built as three separate buildings. Later, the Maya built vaulted passageways to unite them at the basement level. The passageway united the three foundations now covered by a platform, with stairs on all four sides providing access to the upper part of the building. The Uxmal elite closed off the three staircases in the basement and the main stairway as a means of protection, giving invaders fewer access points. (The excavators are also restoring the city’s defensive wall built around this time.)Why go to this trouble? The team’s working hypothesis is that as the 9th century came to a close, so did mounting political pressure from Chichen Itzá, a Maya city known today for its photogenic step pyramid. The similarity in iconography and architecture found in some buildings at both sites suggest at least a brief alliance between the two kingdoms in the later ninth to early 10th century. But some historians believe the construction of buildings like the grand palaces stopped because Uxmal was conquered by the rulers of Chichen Itzá in the 10th century. Other Maya sites such as nearby Kabah show signs of rituals that involve “taking the soul out of the buildings” that will not be used anymore by destroying parts of them, Toscano notes. In Uxmal, the Maya may have similarly deliberately cut the heads off of sculptures when they were leaving, which may explain why Lord Chac’s head in a sculpture found at the House of the Governor is missing.Researchers have recently uncovered a passageway that was part of the substructure of the House of the Governor at Uxmal.Researchers have recently uncovered a passageway that was part of the substructure of the House of the Governor at Uxmal. (Mauricio Marat, INAH)

The Maya Are Still Here Water powered Uxmal’s rise, but lack of water caused its fall. With no natural bodies of water to tap, people of the Uxmal region made or modified basins called aguadas for collecting fresh rainwater to prepare for dry seasons, sometimes increasing their water capacity by digging bell-shaped pits under them called buktes, which were with stone. They also made bottle-shaped storage tanks called chultunes, allowing them to stock up with 2 to 5 million cubic meters of water from falling rain. Thanks in part to this aquatic prowess, Kowalski estimates that at its peak Uxmal may have had 15,000 to 18,000 inhabitants, but other sources put it as high as 25,000 people; Huchim says even up to 35,000. Smaller Mayan sites whose ruins have been discovered, like Kabah, Sayil and Labna, were under Uxmal’s control at its peak.However, most historians agree that drought ultimately prompted the Maya to leave Uxmal and other Puuc centers for good. Shortages of rain would have strained the drinking water supply for the people of Uxmal and made it difficult to grow crops like beans, corn and squash. Deforestation may have also played a role. The Maya felled trees to make crop fields and produce the lime for building materials, Huchim says, and they also modified the soil for use in construction. While the fall of Maya civilization has been a longstanding mystery, factors including climate changes and the transformation of their environment seem to have been important drivers of decline.Even so, the spirit of Uxmal runs deep in Huchim. His grandfather Nicolas was in charge of keeping the Uxmal site clean and helping archaeologists restore the monuments from 1940 to 1970. His father grew up at the site and also became its official guardian. As a child, Huchim watched the restoration of the Pyramid of the Magician every morning from 1969 to 1970. Since 1992, Huchim has been in charge of studying, maintaining and operating the archaeological site. He saved the pyramid after Hurricane Gilbert structurally damaged it in 1997.Although Uxmal is now closed to tourists and researchers because of COVID-19, Huchim is still there, keeping watch.He treasures being one of few people experiencing the revival of Uxmal’s “ancestral” flora and fauna. Huchim wrote recently in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada Maya that in the absence of tourists, a variety of indigenous animals have reclaimed their place at the archaeological site. He hears "a great concert" of birds singing and sees groups of dozens of iguanas congregating. Turkeys and deer, which his father had told him were once common, now populate the site and he can hear the sound of an anteater at nightfall. “One can perceive floating in the environment the spirit of the Mayan culture,” Huchim wrote.He’s been looking out for damage from a recent fire, carrying out maintenance and cleaning endeavors, and working on a report about the archaeological project. The civilization that built these structures is long gone, but Huchim is one of 7 million people of Maya descent living in places like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.“The Maya do not die, they do not end. We are alive. What’s more, we have a large population,” says Huchim, “I am Mayan, but we don’t build pyramids today.” About Elizabeth LandauElizabeth LandauElizabeth Landau is a science writer and editor who lives in Washington, D.C. She holds degrees from Princeton University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.Read more from this author | Follow @lizlandau2. TIKAL, GUATEMALA In the ninth century A.D., the Maya abandoned the great city of Tikal after hundreds of years of prosperity and expansion. Researchers have long sought to explain how and why the city collapsed, but despite extensive study of the site, unanswered questions remain.Commonly cited explanations for Tikal’s downfall center on a confluence of overpopulation, overexploitation of the surrounding landscape and a spate of withering megadroughts. Now, reports Kiona Smith for Ars Technica, a new study of the ancient city’s reservoirs outlines evidence that mercury and toxic algae may have poisoned Tikal’s drinking water at a time when it was already struggling to survive the dry season.Located in northern Guatemala, Tikal dates back to the third century B.C. Once among the most powerful city-states in the Americas, the rainforest metropolis boasted multiple stone temples standing more than 100 feet tall and, at its zenith in the mid-eighth century, supported upward of 60,000 inhabitants, according to David Roberts of Smithsonian magazine.Tikal’s residents built reservoirs to collect and store water after rainfall slowed to a trickle during multi-decade droughts in the ninth century. These reservoirs were essential during the dry season, as the city had no access to lakes or rivers, and the local water table, or level at which the ground reaches saturation, lies more than 600 feet underground.Per the study, published last month in the journal Scientific Reports, the Maya sought to collect as much water as possible during the region’s rainy season, developing huge, paved plazas that were sloped to send water sluicing into the reservoirs for storage. As the researchers argue, this system inadvertently contributed to the city’s undoing.A model of Tikal at the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography in Guatemala City shows the impressive palace and temple reservoirs that fronted the city. (Nicholas Dunning / University of Cincinnati)To assess the factors at play in Tikal’s demise, the team took samples of sediments at the bottom of four of Tikal’s reservoirs. Chemical and biological analyses of layers dated to the mid-800s revealed the grim history of the lakes’ contents: As Ruth Schuster reports for Haaretz, two of the largest reservoirs were not only dangerously polluted with the heavy metal mercury, but also carried traces of enormous toxic algal blooms.The researchers attribute the mercury pollution’s presence to the mineral cinnabar, or mercuric sulfide. Members of the Maya civilization mined this mercury-based ore and combined it with iron oxide to create a bloodred powder used as a versatile pigment and dye. The brilliant red—found coating the interiors of almost every high-status burial in Tikal—may have held special significance for the Maya. One grave unearthed by archaeologists contained roughly 20 pounds of powdered cinnabar.Tikal residents’ widespread use of cinnabar, especially in and around the city’s temples and main palace, likely resulted in dangerous quantities of the mercury-laden powder washing into the reservoirs during heavy rainfall.“The drinking and cooking water for the Tikal rulers and their elite entourage almost certainly came from the Palace and Temple Reservoirs,” the researchers write in the study. “As a result, the leading families of Tikal likely were fed foods laced with mercury at every meal.”Another factor in Tikal’s decline was an explosion of toxin-producing blue-green algae. The team found traces of DNA from two such algae species in the reservoirs’ sediments.“The bad thing about these is they’re resistant to boiling,” says lead author David Lentz, a paleobiologist at the University of Cincinnati, in a statement. “It made water in these reservoirs toxic to drink.”During the late 800s, sediments from Tikal’s two central reservoirs were loaded with phosphate, a nutrient that blue-green algae needs to proliferate. The study’s authors write that these high levels of phosphate accrued after centuries of “smoky cooking fires and ceramic plates washed in the reservoir added organic material to the waters.”One of Tikal's elaborate temples (Alison Ruth Hughes via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0)The researchers also note that a midden, or trash heap, filled with food waste was located close enough to one of the reservoirs that “during the rainy seasons, effluent from this trash pile would have washed directly into the reservoir.”When the city’s phosphate-filled reservoirs erupted in blooms of toxic blue-green algae, locals were probably able to tell that something major had gone wrong.“The water would have looked nasty,” says co-author Kenneth Tankersley, an anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati, in the statement. “It would have tasted nasty. Nobody would have wanted to drink that water.”Even without the poisoned drinking supply, losing the use of two huge water stores would have been devastating for Tikal. Prior research has identified a period of drought between 820 and 870—a timeframe that corresponds with the layers of sediment in which the blue-green algae and mercury were found.Taken together, the dry weather and befouled water supply may have led the Maya to suspect their rulers had failed to adequately appease the gods.“These events ... must have resulted in a demoralized populace who, in the face of dwindling water and food supplies, became more willing to abandon their homes,” the authors write.Poisoned water wasn’t the sole cause of Tikal’s downfall, but as the researchers conclude, “The conversion of Tikal’s central reservoirs from life-sustaining to sickness-inducing places would have both practically and symbolically helped to bring about the abandonment of this magnificent city.”According to Ars Technica, the researchers may pursue similar tests at other former Maya settlements to determine if the phenomena documented at Tikal influenced the decline of other cities across the empire.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/maya-abandoned-city-tikal-researchers-may-now-know-why-180975242/?utm_source=smithsonianhistandarch&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=202007-hist&spMailingID=42963571&spUserID=NzQwNDU3ODAxODcS1&spJobID=1801161798&spReportId=MTgwMTE2MTc5OAS23.

Aztec Palace and House Built by Hernán Cortés Unearthed in Mexico CityThe Spanish conquistador’s home stood on the site of the razed royal residenceArchaeologists excavating site of Aztec palace and conquistador homeAfter the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Spanish forced the Aztecs to tear down their buildings and use the leftover materials to construct a new city. (Raúl Barrera R. / PAU-INAH)By Claire BugosSMITHSONIANMAG.COMJULY 15, 20206126Archaeologists excavating a historic pawnshop in Mexico City have discovered the long-buried remains of an Aztec palace and a house built by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Per a statement from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the former—a royal residence constructed for Moctezuma II’s father, Axayácatl—dates to between 1469 and 1481, while the latter postdates the 1521 fall of Tenochtitlan.Workers spotted the centuries-old structures’ unusual basalt slab flooring while renovating the Nacional Monte de Piedad in September 2017. The building has stood in the capital’s central square since 1755, reports BBC News.Subsequent archaeological work revealed a 16- by 13-foot room, likely part of Cortés’ home, made of basalt and vesicular lava stones. Nearly ten feet below this structure, experts led by Raúl Barrera Rodríguez and José María García Guerrero discovered a second basalt slab floor dating to the pre-Hispanic period. They concluded that these stones once formed a courtyard or open space in the Palace of Axayácatl.The layered finds help tell the story of some of the most decisive moments in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. As Ed Whelan explains for Ancient Origins, Moctezuma, the Aztecs’ last independent ruler, allowed the conquistadors to stay in his father’s palace after arriving in the empire’s capital. The Spaniards returned this hospitality by massacring their hosts at a May 1520 religious festival. That same year, Moctezuma died on palace grounds under mysterious circumstances.Hernán Cortés built his home on the remains of the Palace of Axayácatl, incorporating materials from the razed royal residence in its construction. (Raúl Barrera R. / PAU-INAH)This series of events “undermined the relationship between Mexicans and Spaniards and triggered [an] open confrontation” that culminated in the conquistadors’ retreat from Tenochtitlan on June 30, according to the statement. One year later, the Spanish returned to the city, claiming victory after a three-month siege.After the fall of Tenochtitlan, Cortés and his men forced the surviving Aztecs to destroy their old temples and residences and use the remnants of these razed buildings to erect a new city. The stone flooring found beneath the National Monte de Piedad suggests the Palace of Axayácatl suffered this fate: Per Ryan W. Miller of USA Today, the materials used to construct the conquistador’s home match those of the 15th-century palace’s foundation.Barrera, a researcher at the INAH Directorate of Salvage Archaeology, says that such material findings speak to “the destruction that the main buildings of Tenochtitlan were subjected to, both for symbolic and practical purposes.”In addition to the basalt floors, archaeologists found two statues—one of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcóatl and another of the glyph that symbolizes “market”—in a corner of the building’s colonial room. These objects act as a reminder of the conquistador’s ransacking of Indigenous buildings and sacred spaces.Around 1525, Cortés’ residence was converted into the headquarters of New Spain’s first cabildo, or local governing council. In 1529, Spain granted the building to the Marquessate of the Valley of Oaxaca, a noble title held by Cortés and his descendants until the 19th century. The property remained under the conquistador’s family’s ownership until 1566; Sacro Monte de Piedad, a predecessor of the modern pawnshop, acquired it in 1836.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/aztec-palace-unearthed-180975319/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200715-daily-responsive&spMailingID=42965048&spUserID=NzQwNDU3ODAxODcS1&spJobID=1801168203&spReportId=MTgwMTE2ODIwMwS24.

MEXICO CITY (AFP).- The remains of an ancient Aztec palace, which later was the home of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes, were discovered under a landmark building in Mexico City, the government said Monday.Basalt slab floors were found under the stately building of the Nacional Monte de Piedad, a historic pawn shop in the middle of the capital's central square, during building renovations.The floors correspond to an open area in the palace of Aztec ruler Axayacatl, who was the father of Montezuma, one of the final rulers of the empire.Experts say that "it was part of an open space of the old Axayacatl Palace, probably a patio," the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said.During excavation, archeologists also found evidence of the home Cortes had at the site after the fall of the Aztec empire.Archeologists noted that the floor was likely made of materials reused from Axayacatl's palace, which, like other sacred Aztec buildings, were razed by the conquistadors.The discovery was made during reinforcement work on the Nacional Monte de Piedad building, which dates back to 1755.Cortes first arrived in modern-day Mexico in 1518 on a mission to explore the region's interior for Spanish colonization.He and his men laid siege to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1521 until it surrendered, whereupon they destroyed it, a key event in the fall of the empire.https://artdaily.cc/news/126557/Ancient-Aztec-palace-ruins-found-in-Mexico-City#.X2ezXmhKhsA