Graphic documentation of the mural painting in the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan

Summary

From historical sources we know that the religious buildings of Tenochtitlan (1325–1521 CE) were richly polychromed. Architectural remains of the sacred precinct corroborate this information, as they still contain important remnants of the mural painting on their façades and interiors. Unfortunately, their state of conservation is quite poor, owing, on the one hand, to the particular pictorial materials and techniques utilized by the Mexica during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and, on the other, to the aggressive deteriorating agents that currently characterize the archaeological contexts of the Historic Center of Mexico City. In this paper, we propose a methodology of digital graphic documentation specifically developed to recover and store the most information possible about the Great Temple archaeological zone’s mural paintings, whose long-term conservation is seriously threatened. This methodology is based on the combined application of topographic surveying with total station and GPS, the imaging and digitization of the mural paintings, computer-generated chromatic reconstruction, digital photography, vector modeling, and virtual reality. The result is the generation of three-dimensional reconstructive models of the most important religious buildings of Tenochtitlan and an exhaustive catalogue of their mural paintings.

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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