Templo Mayor’s Gold

Summary

Mexico is a not a country rich in native gold deposits, especially compared to Colombia, Peru, or Bolivia. This would explain why the precious metal was always used rather sparingly in Mesoamerican civilizations. A good example is Tenochtitlan (1325–1521 AD): after thirty-seven years of archaeological exploration in the city’s sacred precinct, the Templo Mayor Project (1978-2015) has recovered only a meager set of gold artifacts, in contrast to the tens of thousands of metamorphic greenstone, copper, flint, travertine, obsidian, and ceramic objects contained in the same offerings. This paper will analyze the entire collection of gold pieces from the Templo Mayor Project in light of various historical, archaeological, and chemical data, and offer new insights about the chronology, typology, function, meaning, manufacturing tradition, and "geographical area of use" of gold in Late Postclassic Central Mexico.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Aztecs and their World: Initerdisciplinary Contributions of Frances Berdan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage