Layers of the Past - Mexico Day 3

Today was yet another free tour to the National Museum of Anthropology (Museo Nacional de Antropologia). Let me just give a little buzz for Mexbus, the company which runs all these tours for the hostel. The guides are knowledgeable, well-informed and speak good English. Although yours truly went and opened her mouth and supplemented the guide’s vocabulary at some points.

The National Museum of Anthropology is a real treasure trove of the cultural history of Mexico and the people who have lived in this area of Mesoamerica for 3,000 years prior to the arrival of the Spanish. It starts, literally, in the Stone Age when Early Man lived their hunter-gatherer lives. We saw a mammoth skull with the remainder of a stone weapon lodged in it, indicating that human beings had killed that animal. From these early beginnings, we saw how Man started to settle down and establish little farming communities, before moving on to the later rooms where the artefacts from Teotihuacan and the early Aztec world were on display. We saw how the early civilizations lived, and buried their dead (together with the utensils they used in life). Our guide (Leo again) showed us this mask which displayed how these early people perceived their world. Half the mask was a skull, the other half a living face (quite an ugly one), symbolizing again the duality of life and death.

There was a similar mask at the Teotihuacan room, where the skull is surronded by the rays of the sun (note the similarity of the sun's rays to those emitting from the Lady of Guadalupe, see previous post). I mentioned earlier that we only saw a selection of artifacts found in the Pyramid of the Moon at the Teotihuacan complex. Others were here in the Museum of Anthropology. The museum has re-created the pyramid façade of the temple of Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc and painted it to show the original colouring. There is also a display of skeletons – probably of sacrificial victims. They are arranged the way they were found, some with necklaces of jaws around their necks. The display’s alarm system is pretty sensitive, as we found whenever anyone leaned forward to take a closer look.

The largest and most impressive room we went in was the Aztec (Mexica) Room. The first thing we saw was the Aztec “calendar”, hanging high up against the wall. Apparently it was not really a calendar – it was meant for some other purpose but a huge crack at the back of the “calendar” resulted in it remaining unfinished. But the Calendar shows how exact Aztec astronomy was. There were 18 months of 20 days each, i.e. a total of 360 days. There were also 5 “extra” days, which were supposed to be “bad” days where people generally stayed home and didn’t do much.

There was one rather stark exhibit – this huge stone circle which was carved around the sides with scenes depicting how many peoples/territories that particular Aztec king had conquered. The circle has a hole scooped out in the middle – this, we were told, was where the hearts of sacrificed victims were put. See the stone and other photos from the museum here.

We also saw in the room a family tree of the line of kings, including Montechzuma and Cuauhtemoc, the last king who died fighting the Spanish (his name means "the eagle has fallen" in the Aztec language). The story of how a few hundred men under Hernando Cortes managed to defeat the Aztec Empire is sad and tragic. The story is that the Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl, who was thought to be white-skinned, had left his people but promised to be back in a certain year. That year (our 1531) came and so did the Spanish. The Aztec mistook them for the returning God and treated them as such. But that was not enough for the Spanish. In the end, the Aztec were defeated by three factors: (i) new weapons (firearms) and animals (the horse), (ii) new diseases like syphilis and smallpox and (iii) their own harsh treatment of their conquered peoples – the Spanish found it easy enough to turn the native peoples against their Aztec rulers. The Spanish then proceeded to thoroughly destroy Aztec civilization. They pulled down pyramids and build churches; they took the altars of temples and put crosses on them to convert them to Christian altars; they even took the circular stones with the holes in the middle and turned them into baptismal fonts for use in the conversion of the natives! Some examples were in the museum. I also found on-line a rather nice little flash presentation on the conquest - click here.

The museum has also interesting "live" exhibits. We saw a performance by the flyers of Papantla, or the Voladores de Papantla. Four men are tied to a maypole, they gradually lower themselves down whilst rotating from the pole. There is a fifth man standing on top of the maypole playing flute music. See video link of the flyers at my Multiply page (see link on left).

After the tour ended, we continued wandering around the museum on our own. There are other interesting rooms there – the room of the Oaxaca people, and the huge Maya room where there is a re-creation of a temple and the tomb of a Mayan king (Pacal) with the king himself interred there. I wish we had time to go to Chichen Itza! (But apparently whilst the pyramids there are shorter than those at Teotihuacan, they are steeper so the climb would have been even more painful).

All in all, it was fascinating. As I said before, the quality of the museums in Mexico City is excellent. In this museum, there are even some English language posters up and this really helped me to understand the exhibits, even without a guide. More than that, I thought that it really showed the layer upon layer of history which each group of people laid down in this area of Mesoamerica. From the early Pleioscene to the Teotihuacan people, and the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, each group has left its mark in the area. But they were not the only ones – the Mayans, and the Oaxacan people, and the people along the Gulf of Mexico also had their own separate cultures and traditions. These people traded with each other, and traveled from place to place – creating a whole rich and separate civilization which is truly very different from any other I have encountered on my travels.