Feather headdresses among the offerings at Tenochtitlan’s Great Temple

Summary

The excavations conducted during the seventh field season of the Templo Mayor Project have uncovered a large quantity of organic matter, thus the conservation team has dedicated a large part of their efforts to the treatment of these rare materials. During the cleaning of these materials, feathers associated with heron bones were identified. In a level below them were found more remains of feathers belonging to the headdresses of Tlaloc masks. The degree of their deterioration required us to clean and examine them under a stereoscopic microscope, which revealed two different types of feathers: white and iridescent green. This coincides with some iconographic representations where the headdresses of rain gods are decorated with heron and quetzal feathers. This kind of discovery allows us to answer some of the questions about the meaning of Mexica offerings.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Seventh Field Season of the Proyecto Templo Mayor: Recent Investigations on the Sacred Precinct of Tenochtitlan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage