What a Relief:How to Display an Idol in the Early Colonial Atlixco Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Disentangling Puebla/Tlaxcala: Recent Advances in Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Visual Culture" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This talk examines the preservation of contentious objects during moments of regime change. Focusing on a pre-Hispanic god image embedded in the wall of a monastic church in early colonial Mexico, I argue that Nahuas selectively preserved idols in plain sight to craft new lithic narratives of resilience. The destruction of potent images was crucial to ritual power transfer for Central Mexicans and Europeans alike. Scholarship on iconoclasm has tended to focus on the intentions of the colonizers. However, situating remnants of potent images in more extensive histories of Indigenous territorial struggles offers a foil to colonial histories of epistemic and cultural violence. A striking example from the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley shows that Nahuas preserved carvings that indexed histories of territorial occupation and forced dispossession, later displaying the objects in provocative places to incite ritual violence. In so doing, Nahuas mobilized overlapping Catholic and Mesoamerican traditions of spoliation to subvert the control of oppressive foreign regimes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Disentangling Puebla/Tlaxcala: Recent Advances in Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Visual Culture   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51654