Aztec Whistles of Death

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.If death had a sound, this
was it.Roberto Velazquez believes the Aztecs played this mournful wail from the so-called Whistles of Death before they were sacrificed to the gods.The 66-year-old mechanical engineer has devoted his career to recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, producing hundreds of replicas of whistles, flutes and wind instruments unearthed in Mexico's ruins.For years, many archaeologists who uncovered ancient noisemakers dismissed them as toys. Museums relegated them to warehouses. But while most studies and exhibits of ancient cultures focus on how they looked, Velazquez said the noisemakers provide a rare glimpse into how they sounded.

Read the full article here.

Sacrificed Inca Children were not Children of Privilege

The following comes from an essay on Relativism by Timothy Taylor, archaeologist, University of Bradford:

"My colleague Andy Wilson and our team have recently examined the hair of sacrificed children found on some of the high peaks of the Andes. Contrary to historic chronicles that claim that being ritually killed to join the mountain gods was an honour that the Incan rulers accorded only to their own privileged offspring, diachronic isotopic analyses along the scalp hairs of victims indicate that it was peasant children, who, twelve months before death, were given the outward trappings of high status and a much improved diet to make them acceptable offerings. Thus we see past the self-serving accounts of those of the indigenous elite who survived on into Spanish rule. We now understand that the central command in Cuzco engineered the high-visibility sacrifice of children drawn from newly subject populations. And we can guess that this was a means to social control during the massive, 'shock & awe' style imperial expansion southwards into what became Argentina."

In his essay, Taylor discusses how he has changed his mind about how he viewed such incongrously violent acts as child sacrifice. He writes:

"Where once I would have striven to see Incan child sacrifice 'in their terms', I am increasingly committed to seeing it in ours. Where once I would have directed attention to understanding a past cosmology of equal validity to my own, I now feel the urgency to go beyond a culturally-attuned explanation and reveal cold sadism, deployed as a means of social control by a burgeoning imperial power."

Finally, he realigns his original opinion on the value of relativism as a tool to "understand the internal logic and value system of a past culture" and arrives at the following insight:

"We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behaviour as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as 'the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.' By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of 'the Other', relativism steps away from logic into incoherence."

There's a lot in this essay for modern day Reconstructionists to think about. It certainly has impacted my own views on how ancient practices should be viewed, evaluated, and adopted, modified, or rejected.

Aztec Civilization Older Than Previously Thought

The Aztec Civilization timeline may need to be revised to at least one century earlier than previously believed according to archaeologist Patricia Ledesma, speaking from the Tlatelolco site of a newly discovered ancient pyramid. According to yesterday's Reuters news article:

Since the discovery of another pyramid at the site 15 years ago, historians have thought Tlatelolco was founded by the Aztecs in 1325, the same year as the twin city of Tenochtitlan nearby, the capital of the Aztec empire, which the Spanish razed in 1521 to found Mexico City, conquering the Aztecs.

The pyramid, found last month as part of an investigation begun in August, could have been built in 1100 or 1200, signaling the Aztecs began to develop their civilization in the mountains of central Mexico earlier than believed.

"We have found the stairs of this, much older pyramid. The (Aztec) timeline is going to need to be revised," archaeologist Patricia Ledesma said at the site on Thursday.

Chac: The Rain God (the movie)

I found this movie review on FAMSI's Aztlan mailing list. The IMDB listing is here.

A Visually striking, Suspenseful, Hypnotic film! I found this DVD film at my Library in Sacramento, Ca., The caption reads: A cult film from the 1970s, lost for years and now newly restored, Chac: The Rain God is based on the ritual and legends from the Popul Vuh, as well as Tzeltal and Mayan stories. This gorgeous film, shot in the Chiapas region of Mexico by Chilean director Rolando Klein, focuses on a small Tzeltal village during a terrible drought. Desperate for relief, thirteen men set out on a quest to save their people from starvation. They seek a solitary Diviner who lives in the mountains and knows the ways of the Ancients; they hope that he can summon Chac, the Rain God. The Diviner takes them far from their own land on a strange journey - a trek that challenges their beliefs and even their own sanity.

The Mayan god Chac was known to the Mexica people as Tlaloc.

Top Ten Archeaological Discoveries of 2007

Mike Ruggeri points out in FAMSI's mail list AZTLAN that these discoveries include:

... the ancient solar observatory
at Chankillo, Peru dating to 300 BCE, the new dating of Clovis sites
across the Americas with advanced radio-carbon dating which changes
the perspective on the Peopling of the Americas, the discovery of
8000 BCE domesticated squash seeds in Peru, and of course, the
discovery of Polynesian chickens in Peru that were brought before the
Spanish arrived thus establishing that the Polynesians arrived in the
Americas before the Europeans.

Archaeology Magazine's Top 10 Discoveries of 2007

Free Texts on Mesoamerican History

Many thanks for David Hixson of Tulane University who provided the following information on free books:

"Ancient Chalcatzingo" by David Grove

At Dumbarton Oaks, these titles are available for free download:

-Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks (PDF, 8.3 MB)
-Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia
-Archaeology of Formative Ecuador
-Gender in Pre-Hispanic America
-Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec
-The Cult of the Feline (PDF, 6.3 MB)
-Ecology and the Arts in Ancient Panama: On the Development of Social Rank and Symbolism in the Central Province (PDF, 14.3 MB)
-The Burial Theme in Moche Iconography (PDF, 4.3 MB)
-Social Patterns in Pre-Classic Mesoamerica
-Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture
-Andean Art at Dumbarton Oaks
-Native Traditions in the Postconquest World
-Intercambio, política y sociedad en el siglo XVI

Also, 88 publications of the New World Archaeological Foundation (a great resource for site reports and Formative period Mesoamerica, among other topics) are available for free browsing and printing at:

http://www.lib.byu.edu/dlib/spc/nwaf/

Mexico Wolf Boom Raises Hopes

There's a great video over at National Geographic News that shows the success the Mexican Wolf recovery program has been having in Northern Mexico.