Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs (review)

Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage: Teotihuacan to the Aztecs. Edited by David Carrasco, Lindsay Jones, and Scott Sessions. (Boulder, University Press of Colorado, 2000. xvii + 559 pp., introduction, illustrations, index. $49.95 cloth.)

The purpose of this volume is to examine the cultural legacy of Teotihuacan for the multitude of civilizations in Mesoamerica that follow it. This is a lofty and admirable goal but difficult to achieve in a single volume. What the editors have done is put together a stimulating and in some cases highly provocative collection of articles that deal with the religious, astronomic, mythical, and artistic aspects of Teotihuacan’s classic heritage. Left out of the volume is a discussion of Teotihuacan’s broader economic, social, political, and material culture traditions. This not withstanding, the volume is an outstanding collection of high-quality scholarly works on Teotihuacan ideology, iconography, and symbolism.

The initial essay by López Austin and López Luján provides the general theoretical framework for the volume contents. The authors use contact period information to argue that feathered serpent mythology provided a framework for ordering groups and legitimizing paramount rulers within multiethnic settings. This was done within the context of origin myths that identify Quetzalcoatl as a creator of human beings. Since in these myths humans are created before their ethnicity is defined, Quetzalcoatl maintains the divine authority to preside over groups throughout Mesoamerica. Their argument accounts for the prominent use of feathered serpent imagery by rulers over a wide area of Mesoamerica during the postclassic. What the authors have identified is a fairly common mechanism found in stratified societies throughout the world, namely the creation of an abstract deity to integrate diverse state and nonstate societies in a single political domain. The only aspect of the model that should be rejected is the name they give it, Zuyuan, which is derived from a reference to a mythical Yucatecan group. While López and López refer to Zuyua as a form of political organization, other contributors to the volume confuse the issue by referring to the “Zuyuans” as both a form of political organization and an ethnic group. The last thing we need is to invent a new mythical group chasing across Mesoamerica.

The volume contains a number of high-quality comparative essays on Teotihuacan and the Aztec society. Excellent summaries of recent archaeological research at Teotihuacan are provided by Rubén Cabrera, Linda Manzanilla, Eduardo Matos, and Saburo Sugiyama, who present new information uncovered in Teotihuacan’s underground cave systems, the La Ventilla precinct, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid in the Ciudadela. In addition, two carefully reasoned works by Elizabeth Boone and Doris Heyden discuss the conceptual links between the societies and the Aztec society’s understanding of Teotihuacan. H. B. Nicholson provides a careful discussion of feathered serpent imagery among the Aztecs while López Luján et al. discuss the importance of Teotihuacan relics in ritual offerings in the Aztec Templo Mayor.

In several contributions that discuss symbolism and complex imagery, the reader must navigate the winding path between fact, opinion, and plain speculation. Anthony Aveni discusses the similarities in calendrics and the space-time imagery found between Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan. Johanna Broda amplifies on this theme with a comparative discussion of calendrics, archaeoastronomy, and the Teotihuacan ritual landscape. Karl Taube addresses the complex issue of the meaning of Teotihuacan imagery in his discussion of the war serpent motif, which, with its combination of feline, aviary, serpent, and butterfly traits, is anything but a simple serpent.

If there is a general weakness to the volume it is the very limited discussion of Teotihuacan impact on intermediary times and places in Mesoamerica. This volume is really about Teotihuacan and the Aztecs. With the exception of Geoffrey MaCafferty’s excellent essay on Cholula, every intermediary society in Central Mexico from Teotihuacan to the Aztecs is left out. Although every author mentions Tula and Tollan, there is not one single...