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Did Mesoamericans use fat and earth ovens for cooking?

ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Antoine Thibaut: Did Mesoamericans use fat for cooking, and earth ovens? (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore).

Excellent questions! We’ve actually found it hard to find definitive information - and images - to answer your points.
Jacques Soustelle (Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest) wrote ‘As the ancient Mexicans had neither fat nor oil, they could not fry...’
Ana M. de Benitez (Pre-Hispanic Cooking), however, wrote the opposite: ‘Beyond a doubt, the ancient inhabitants of Mexico knew how to cook with fats and vegetable oils. They used the fats of the wild boar, the turkey and the armadillo...’
One for, one against!
Maybe the ‘decider’ on this should be the eminent food historian Sophie D. Coe - in her classic America’s First Cuisines she points to ‘the lack of any pre-Columbian pottery shapes suitable for frying’ and goes on:-
’There was no technology available in the New World for grinding great heaps of peanuts or any other oily seeds, or for pressing them to extract oil. The only way vegetable oil was obtained on the American continent was by crushing or grinding some oil-bearing seeds and putting them into a vessel with boiling water. Any available oil would then rise to the surface, ready to be skimmed off, but oil so laboriously obtained was more likely to be used as a medicine, a skin salve, or a hair dressing than as a culinary ingredient.’

On the subject of earth ovens (sometimes called ‘pit-hearths’), there is more unanimity. Coe starts by positing a gender difference, suggesting that women cooked inside the house, whilst ‘it certainly seems likely that men dug the holes for the pit ovens and lined them with maguey leaves, [just] as it seems likely that males did the barbecuing of meat on the barbacoa, the framework of sticks over the open fire... For the larger versions especially, there was the pib, the oven that was a hole excavated in the ground with a fire built in it to heat the earth and the stones. After the fire had burned down, this oven was loaded with food to be cooked and then sealed with leaves and earth, to be left until the fragrance signalled that it was time for the food to be unearthed.’
This appears to be much more of a Maya tradition - still very popular today - than one from Central Mexico. In either case, iconographic or ethnographic evidence is VERY hard to come by!

Heriberto García Rivas (Cocina prehispánica mexicana) suggests that the shallow underground oven would be lined first with embers, on top of which a bed of stones (see pic 3) would be laid. The pre-heated stones would (slow) cook the meat at high temperature. On top would be placed a covering of maguey leaves and a blanket to prevent the loss of heat, steam... and flavour.
Today cochinita pibil (earth-oven cooked pork) is hugely popular in the Yucatán peninsula - and known in other parts of the country too.

Aztecs

Maya

Did Mesoamericans use fat and earth ovens for cooking?

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