Dressed to Kill: Richly Adorned Animals in the Offerings of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the course of four decades, the Templo Mayor Project (1978–2018) of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has excavated more than two hundred offerings in the area corresponding to Tenochtitlan’s sacred precinct. These rich Mexica deposits from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries contained an unusual diversity of mineral, floral, faunal, and human remains in addition to large quantities of cultural objects. Prominent among the offerings are the vestiges of tens of thousands of animals representing more than five hundred species, including a particularly interesting set of carnivorous mammals and birds of prey that were sacrificed in ritual ceremonies and buried inside temples and under plaza floors. The corpses of these animals were adorned with all sorts of insignia and ornaments (e.g., earpieces, nosepieces, necklaces, pectorals, anklets) made of gold, copper, wood, turquoise, greenstone, shell, and other precious materials. This presentation will analyze the archaeological contexts of such offerings and will study the symbolism of the animals in light of native pictography and sixteenth-century descriptions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23019