This month's museum pick...

National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

The Aztec warriors who faced Cortez’s musket-armed soldiers in 1519 must have created contrary impressions in their foes’ minds. Since landing at Vera Cruz and beginning their march inland to the Valley of Mexico, the Spanish had heard the Aztecs’ many rivals and vassals incessantly spinning tales of Aztec cruelty and arrogance. But whatever the Aztecs’ failures as polite people, it was obvious to the Spanish that they were brave and efficient soldiers, quite adept at subduing enemy armies with a minimum of killing – all the better to commit their prisoners of war to the bloody sacrifices at the great temple in Tenochtitlan.

On the other hand, the native troops that the Spanish faced were stone-age soldiers using stone-age weapons. Although they had mastered the production of copper, they were unable to smelt large quantities of metal and were totally ignorant of iron. The Aztecs relied principally on wood-and-stone implements, such as fire-hardened wooden spears tipped with stone points, bows and arrows, and cudgel-like macanas, flat wooden boards spiked with rows of sharpened obsidian blades.

Their armor, thick, quilt-like cotton tunics, was sufficient to ward off most blows from other stone-age weapons, but offered no resistance to Spanish swords or firearms. The Spanish knew that aside from spears and arrows, the Aztecs lacked any effective means of attack from a distance. Their forte was close-in fighting, where slings and macanas could be used to render valuable potential sacrificial victims unconscious.

So the Spanish, while respecting the bravery of the Aztecs, also knew that their limitations would be their undoing. Once the Aztecs closed in, Spanish guns and iron would control the pace of slaughter.*

____________________________________

Almost 500 years after the Aztecs fell to Cortez, the successor state of Mexico can contemplate a treasure house of stone-age structures and artifacts – the great pyramids at Teotihuacan (“City of the Gods”), the Mayan ruins at Uxmal and Chichen Itza, the Olmec statues of Vera Cruz and Tabasco, and the remnants of Aztec Tenochtitlan, exposed by subway builders beneath modern Mexico City.  

As a result, Mexican anthropology and archaeology work in one of the richest fields on earth. Despite the rigorous efforts of the Spanish to destroy Aztec culture, such as the destruction of the main temple complex in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, there was simply too much left over from it and its predecessor cultures. The Spanish had better things to do than to dismantle the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, or knock over Olmec statuary. (The decline of the Maya before the arrival of Cortez allowed the rainforest to hide their cities from Spanish eyes.) 

Even the gold-crazed Spaniards counted scientists and artists among them. Slowly and sporadically, the Spanish began systematically collecting and studying Aztec, Olmec, Toltec and other Meso-American artifacts in the 18^th century. When Mexico achieved formal independence in 1821, it already had several formally organized collections and a growing body of commentary to build on. 

By 1968, Mexico decided to bring its vast and diverse collection of pre-Columbian together under one, literally, giant roof. The National Museum of Anthropology houses 26 exhibit halls grouped in a rectangle with a huge patio at its center. The patio is partially sheltered under a great canopy that rises from a single sculpted supporting shaft. Water falls from the shaft’s broad capital, an architectural tour de force. The museum’s location in Chapultepec Park puts it at the very center of Mexico’s greatest collection of cultural institutions, including the National Museum of History, the Modern Art Museum, the Natural History Museum, the National Auditorium and the Rufino Tamayo Museum. 

This place is the Mecca of Meso-American history. Its collections, which cannot be covered in one visit, include halls dedicated to Olmec, Aztec, Toltec and Mayan cultures, as well as their predecessors and lesser cultures that orbited the greater ones. The museum makes extensive use of dioramas and models to depict the appearance of ancient Meso-American cities at their height, including Tenochtitlan, a city of bridges and canals that astonished the Spanish when they first saw it. There are thousands of objects on display, most of them in stunningly good condition, including ceramics, sculptures, architectural decorations, toys, tapestries, and frescoes.  

Many of them are masterworks that would be appreciated in any culture. A little Olmec statue called “The Wrestler” depicts a man, sitting cross-legged and flexing his arms in front of him like a pugilist getting ready to put his dukes up. The detail of the musculature and the deft creation of a personality in the statue’s face show great artistic sophistication. Here is a phlegmatic man who knows his craft and who has been around the block.  

Whimsical toy Chihuahuas, mounted on wheels, are little bittersweet reminders of how Meso-Americans never invented the wheel. Even as they put wheels on toys, they did not make the conceptual leap to putting them on carts, (It was an understandable failure: Native Americans had hunted the horse and camel, both indigenous to North America, to extinction by 5,000 B.C. There simply were no potential beast of burden – or cart pulling – left.)

Mayan frescoes are drenched in bright colors, using an appealing palette that jars both with its beauty and with its alien conventions. They present a glimpse into an artistic tradition that arose entirely apart from Europe, Asia and Africa.

Or did it?

Sculptural hints of a different past

One of the most intriguing things about Meso-American art is that it points toward the possibility that the conventional theory of how the Americas were populated may be wildly off the mark. Current theory holds that about 12,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, Asian peoples closely related to today’s Mongolians and Han Chinese crossed the Bering land strait into Alaska, and then points south. These are the people who the reddish skin and straight black hair that most Europeans and non-aboriginal Americans associate with Native Americans.

However, many people have noted that Olmec statues found throughout Mexico all bear facial features, such as full lips and broad noses, that seem more like the features of the Negritos and Melanesians of Southeast Asia, or the sub-Saharan peoples of Africa. Although some people have attempted to make a case for a direct connection between black Africans and the Olmecs, more scientists think that there was more than one migration to the Americas from Asia.

Sometime long before red-skinned immigrants from northern Asia made their way into North America, a group of people closely related to the Negritos of Malaysia began migrating north through present-day China and Manchuria into Siberia. From there, they crossed into Alaska and eventually made their way to Mexico. These were the ancestors of the Olmecs and the source of the facial features that seemed so incongruous to later scientists and observers.

(Besides the Olmecs, there is another possible blow to the theory that only one race of people, albeit with many ethnic variations, settled the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans, Africans and East Asians. In 1996, the 9,000-year-old remains of a man were found in a park in Kennewick, WA. Subsequent DNA analysis of the man shocked scientists – the man was genetically far closer to Caucasians than he was to present-day Native Americans. No amount of genetic drift [9,000 years is a very short time in the evolutionary scheme of things] would have allowed “Kennewick Man’s”  people to have morphed into the Indians of today.)

(Scientists theorized that Kennewick Man was the member of a tribe (or tribes) related to the Ainu of Japan, a very old proto-Caucasian race, and possibly even more distantly to the Aborigines of Australia [which some anthropologists think may also be a very old proto-Caucasoid people]. Obviously his descendents were wiped out. Nobody knows if their demise was catastrophic – a plague or a natural disaster that caught a small population unawares – or the result of assimilation by larger, ethnically unrelated tribes.)

(In any case, Kennewick Man left behind no tantalizing statues, but did manage to bring an old theory into grave doubt. It’s now possible to make a plausible case that not one, but three, separate great overland migrations took place from Asia to the Americas.)

* We recommend reading Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, a 1997 book by Jared Diamond that won a Pulitzer prize the next year and has been compared in its impact to Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations as one of the perspective-altering books of the 1990s. Diamond asserts persuasively that geography, not native intelligence or ability, was the key to Europe and Asia’s ability to develop cultures that technologically out-stripped anything that ancient Africans, Americans and Australians were able to create.

By Patrick Totty