Etching the Earth: Emplacing Aztec-Style Living Rock Carvings

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Emplacement and Relational Approaches to the Ancient Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Across Postclassic Central Mexico and beyond, sculptors etched Aztec-style imagery and writing into the faces of living rock. Such images, ranging from scenes of deity veneration and cosmogonic genesis to symbolic representations of conquest, spark inquiry into the hegemonic nature of the Aztec Empire. Etching, literally branding, the landscape could be interpreted as an imperial place-making strategy, one attesting to the expansionist goals of the Culhua-Mexica rulers of Tenochtitlan. However, this paper directs focus to the material quality, environmental specificity, and ontological framing of these living rock carvings in order to postulate why sculptors selected these surfaces and sites for marking. While considering how visual styles and subject matters were mobilized to traverse across vast distances, this paper argues that the emplacement of such visual programs within an animate landscape activates these images, and therefore their meanings, in ways that are external to visual description of style or iconographic translation. Thinking through the relationality of surface, material, context, image, and maker demonstrates that, while these living rock carvings texture the concept of Aztec hegemony outside Tenochtitlan, their meaning was instrumental to local place-making practices as much as it was to forging bonds between the center and periphery of empire.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Emplacement and Relational Approaches to the Ancient Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51478