Copal Offering Objects: Manufactured in Tenochtitlan

Summary

In our days, is a general known the amazing offering ritual made by the mexica people in the late Posclassic period. The studies show a high diversity of organic and inorganic material, some local, some brought from foreign lands, like the resin of copal case, as was verified by historical documents and ethnographic studies, so, the copal resin was imported as crude feedstock.

The resin was brought to Tenochtitlan where it was transformed into different objects like bars, spheres, conglomerates, knives bases of sacrifice, anthropomorphous figurines and diverse amorphous fragments, and these objects would be their gifts to their gods.

Thanks to the macroscopic and microscopic study of more than 300 objects of copal from the offerings of the Archaeological Zone the Great Temple ("Templo Mayor"), it was possible to establish a constant in the processes of manufacture of each formal group; that was corroborated by the Axial Computed Tomography (TAC), a non-invasive radiological technique.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Crafting the Tenochcan Imperial Identity and Style

Keywords

Spatial Coverage