Postcards in the Landscape: Considering Lower Pecos Pictographs as Nahua Pilgrimage Destinations

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Chicomoztoc, the place of seven caves, from which the Nahua ancestors emerged, appears in many central Mexican pictorial manuscripts as a place of origin and one of pilgrimage. Like the mythical Aztlan, its location has not been confirmed; perhaps several such places served different groups of people. However, recent research on the Lower Pecos pictographic tradition (2000 BCE – 400 CE), which spans a section of the US-Mexico border, has linked it iconographically with Huichol and Nahua pictorial and religious traditions. This paper explores two aspects of movement: the journeys depicted in Lower Pecos imagery and the possibility that Nahua groups made spiritually-motivated journeys to the northern frontier of Mesoamerica at times of stress.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23607