Templo Mayor and Representations of the Flower World: agriculture, fire, sacrifice, death, rebirth, and imperialistic agendas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

One of our primary sources of descriptive information about the Flower World comes from Central Mexican colonial historical documents. While ethnohistorical accounts have portrayed this world with shared beliefs of the floral paradise, this paper provides a complementary scenario, by explaining nature and representation of the Flower World in the hearth of the capital through an analysis of the many material culture products from archaeological explorations in and around the Main Temple of Tenochtitlan. This paper seeks to explore the idea of the Flower World from the Mexica angle, by focusing on the one hand of articulation with the solar war cult, with militaristic ideology and with fire as a transformative element to access to this realm. On the other hand, this narrative is linked with agricultural behavior promoted by the Mexica state as part of an imperialistic agenda. This paper focuses on iconographic information and contextual analysis of 56 sculptures from the Main Temple area and historical sources to show to what degree and how the Flower World was interpreted and understood by the head of the Aztec empire, especially with a tendency towards state violence and exploitation using stone images as relevant media.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24943