Technological Analysis of the Calcite Beads from the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan
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Technological Analysis of the Calcite Beads from the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan Emiliano R. Melgar Tísoc1 and José Luis Ruvalcaba2 1
Museo del Templo Mayor, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Seminario 8, Centro histórico, México D.F., C.P. 06060, Mexico. e-mail: [email protected] 2 Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Circuito de la Investigación Científica s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, México DF 04510, Mexico. ABSTRACT In the Great Temple at Tenochtitlan, the archaeologists found more than 150 offerings with thousands of pieces, most of them made on foreign raw materials to the Basin of Mexico. Among these votive contexts, the Chamber III of stage IVa (AD 1440-1469), buried during the government of Moctezuma I, is one of the most richness offerings of the temple. Inside this context, the quantity of greenstone beads is huge, and among them, there is a group of translucent appearance that resembles the green calcite objects from the Huastec region. The purpose of this research is to confirm or discard this probable cultural origin and technological manufacture of these beads. To do that, we perform different analysis with neither nondestructive nor invasive techniques like X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), Raman, Optic Microscopy (OM), and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). By this way we could confirm the similarities among Huastec pieces and these beads, both at mineralogical and technological levels. Based on that, and supported with some written sources from the Colonial period, we propose that these pieces could be war prizes and looted objects by pillage during the Aztec campaigns against Huastec sites; furthermore some of these goods were deposited as victory´s gifts to the gods at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. INTRODUCTION One of the main goals of archaeology is the classification of the cultural remains based on diagnostic or key attributes with the purpose of tracing or tracking its geographical, cultural, ethnical or temporal origins [1-4]. Unfortunately, the morphology and aesthetics of the pieces were employed as the main attributes to assign stylistic characteristics [5-6]. As we will show in this paper, this perspective of classification is not enough, because it overestimates the visual or optical similarities of the shapes and appearance of the objects from different sites and periods, and subordinated or discarded the technological differences of the tools and raw materials employed on their production. Also, this view is related with the abuse of the employment of the style to classify the objects, because its identification by this way implies specific info about its cultural provenance and supposed sites and periods of origin. In the case of the lapidary objects, this type of classification is common among the main Mesoamerican styles, like the Olmec, Mezcala, Teotihuacan, Mayan, Mixtec and Aztec styles. Because of that, it is not strange that the lapidary pieces found in the offerings of the Great Temple were c
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