What first inspired you to study ancient Mexico/Mesoamerica? (2)

Davíd Carrasco
’When I was 13 years old I went to live in Mexico City as my father was invited by the Confederación Deportiva Mexicana to help train Mexican coaches in preparation for upcoming international competitions. My tía Milena Soforo took me to the National Museum of Anthropology on Moneda Street on the edge of the Zócalo and the visit changed the direction of my life. In that museum I had what I call my first “Aztec Moment”. Not a “senior moment” where you forget something. But an Aztec Moment where I became aware of an personal connection to Mexican people and the layers of history in that part of Mexico City.
’I saw the giant statue of Coatlicue, the Aztec Calendar Stone, monumental serpents, the penacho of Montezuma, Aztec jewelry, beguiling masks, Maya jades, and images of painted books. Strong and conflicting emotions welled up in me. I felt both a cutting shame competing with an intense pride at my Mexican ancestry. I remembered how I had been taught in U.S. schools, TV, and films to feel shame about Mexico and to think of Mexicans as not on par with the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, the real makers of civilization in world history. I recalled the pervasive U.S. images of Mexico with its thirst for blood, its weakness before Cortés and the Spaniards, its “Montezuma’s revenge,” and its “halls of Montezuna” where U.S. Marines always fought victorious battles against Mexicans. I had been taught that Mexico was a country valued only for its defeats, food and folklore but not for its civilization.

Pic 1: The Aztec Calendar Stone on display in Mexico’s old National Museum (from El Universal)

Barbara Mundy
’In college, I went to the University of Veracruz in Xalapa to improve my Spanish. When the course was finished, I got in a friend’s truck and we started to travel - along the Veracruz coast, eventually to Mérida and the Peninsula. When darkness fell in the Yucatán, the whole place came alive - the stars pressed on your face and the rainforest hummed. I felt like I had arrived home.’

Pic 3: Barbara Mundy at Chichén Itzá as a student, looking out from El Castillo to the Temple of the Warriors

‘That long journey brought me finally to the answer to that question from my early life. That pain-vibration was like a silent voice that was telling me that there was a connection between those two places, one Pre-Columbian (Teotihuacan) and the other Colonial (Acolman). It was because the two sites were constructed by indigenous people although with many years apart. After realizing that fact, I could never see again the separation between the Mesoamerican Pre-Columbian sites and the 16th Century monasteries because the native soul was imprinted on both of them. I was witnessing the beginning of a transculturation process that eventually produced the Mexican people and their identity!
’Besides Teotihuacan, another place of great inspiration for me was descending to the tomb of King Pakal in the Maya site of Palenque to the point that I fell on my knees, overwhelmed by the impact of the supernatural vision of the site. What a mystical and mysterious place that kept so many secrets and at the same time formed an impressive and harmonic hymn of stone.
’My passion continues and I plan to do teaching and researching until the end of my life. I have been working in education since the age of 17; that equals 42 years to the present and I have taught about 6,000 students.’

Pic 5: Manuel Aguilar-Moreno with students at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City

‘This jade axe is one of the major pieces of Olmec works that have survived, dating from 1200 to 400 B.C.E. Its meaning, like other Olmec objects, has puzzled scholars since their rediscovery. The snarling mouth, paws and cleft head are also on Olmec images of jaguars, often regarded in Mesoamerica as connecting humans with the underworld while the flaring eyebrows on figures suggest caimans, often associated with the earth. And on other Olmec images, the cleft is shown sprouting plants. These symbols suggest this axe may represent the splitting open of the earth to the underworld from which life grows. It is part of a very ancient civilization that had enormous influence on later Mesoamerican cultures.
’This Olmec jade axe was the real beginning for me of a love and deep interest in Mesoamerican cultures and people both in the ancient past and of today. I now live in Canada, but when I go back to London, and visit the Mexican Gallery I go first to see this piece and it feels like visiting a dear if inanimate friend.’

Pic 7: Olmec jade axe; © Trustees of the British Museum

‘I visited Teotihuacan for the first time at the age of 19 and was totally mesmerized. Standing atop the Pyramid of the Sun, gazing around the amazing city in ruins, I wanted to know more about the people responsible for building that metropolis. On that trip I also started dating a Mexican agronomist, an engineer, who taught me about Mexico’s history of land reform, de jure and de facto, and the many struggles that remained to address the serious inequities in Mexican society. Emiliano Zapata, one of my friend’s heroes, had issued a manifesto in Nahuatl. That totally resonated!
’About that time, someone suggested I could study Mexican history in college, which turned out to be a brilliant recommendation. In one of my classes at UC Santa Cruz, Dr. Miguel León-Portilla was invited to lead a week-long seminar. I was thrilled to learn more about the Nahuas and the Nahuatl language. My professor also put me in touch with a prominent historian of Mexico, William B. Taylor, who kindly lent me citations for the Mexican archives, so that I could study the landholding struggles of Mexican indigenous communities in the Spanish colonial period. I ended up writing a senior thesis about the efforts to defend the altepetl of colonial Metepec, valley of Toluca. That led to a suggestion that I might go study with James Lockhart for a doctorate at UCLA, given that he was studying Nahuatl and the history of central Mexican indigenous communities; he had worked quite a bit on the valley of Toluca. That put me on the trajectory I continue to follow to this day.’

Pic 9: Stephanie Wood climbing the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in 2005

‘The photos: I was a graduate student at the University of the Americas, and I had begged one of my professors, Gareth Lowe, to let me work for him in Chiapas. I kept asking archaeologists to give me the opportunity to get some experience, but everyone insisted that I needed to get some experience first. (I think it might have had something to do with my being a woman, but we won’t go there).
’Anyway, Gareth agreed to give me a chance, and I joined a couple of other students working with Pierre Agrinier at Mirador, near Cintalapa, Chiapas. It was a wonderful experience, hard work, hot and dusty, fording a river every morning with Pierre driving was a bit scary, but I could finally say that I’d been on a dig.’

Pic 11: Jane Walsh on her first archaeology field trip to Mirador, Chiapas, 1968

Kitty Emery
’Well the honest truth is that it was entirely accidental. In my first year of university, I signed up for an ethnographic field school in Ecuador ... I thought ... but it seems I had accidentally signed up for an archaeology field school in Belize instead! I wasn’t at all upset, Belize sounded lovely ... and the first week of the field season had me well and truly hooked. I had always hoped for a career studying animals (with a zoologist as a father) and was thrilled when some of our first artifacts were adorned with images of tropical fauna ... only topped in excitement by our first recoveries of animal bones! I was fascinated by the idea that I could match the bones of the animals, markings on the bones indicating their use, the context or the location in which they had been deposited, and images that depicted the roles those animals had played and how the ancients had thought about them. This combined the worlds of zoology, ecology, and anthropology into one complicated and intriguing puzzle - a puzzle that I continue to work on to this day in the countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Mexico.’

Pic 13: Kitty Emery with fellow archaeology students at the field school in Belize, 1984

Claudia Brittenham
’What first inspired me to study ancient Mesoamerica was a class on Mesoamerican art with Mary Miller at Yale University. I’d come home after every class and tell my roommates about all the new things I was learning and how they challenged my existing ideas about what art could be and do. But at the time, I didn’t think the class was so significant: I was quite sure I wanted to study African art, and had only drifted into the Mesoamerican art history class because there were no courses on African art offered that semester. I kept on thinking that I really wanted to study African art through a summer traveling in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras; a senior thesis on Tikal’s Central Acropolis; and several years working in the Eastern Hemisphere collections department at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. But when it came time to think about going back to grad school, I found myself thinking about how much the kinds of evidence and questions that one could study in Mesoamerica interested me, and I haven’t regretted my choice for a moment.’

Pic 15: Claudia Brittenham sitting on top of Structure II at Calakmul in 2003 (photo by Elizabeth Terese Newman)