The Templo Mayor Project

The Templo Mayor Project exists because of an accident. In February 1978 workers from the Compania de Luz y Fuerza, laying cable behind the Metropolitan Cathedral, hit the Coyolxauhqui monolith. The location of the great temple had been argued over for a century; the disc ended the argument. The Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia constituted the Proyecto Templo Mayor within weeks, under Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, and it has run ever since.

The decision that shaped everything afterwards was to excavate the whole precinct rather than to lift the monolith and close the trench. That meant demolishing buildings in the most valuable square of the country, and it meant accepting that the earlier construction stages, which the Spanish demolition had left largely intact underground, were the point rather than an obstacle.

The method that came out of it is the reason the project is cited here. Each offering is excavated as a unit, its stratigraphic position recorded, its contents catalogued object by object, and the whole published individually. That is slow, and after nearly five decades the project has published more than two hundred of them. It also means that any claim built on this material can be taken back to a record and checked, which is a thing that cannot be done with a sentence in a sixteenth-century chronicle. Leonardo Lopez Lujan, who has directed the project since the 1990s, wrote the standing analytical treatment of the offerings themselves.

The value of a stratified deposit in this particular argument is that it was not written by anybody.

Almost everything Europe learned about Mexica ritual came through people with a stake in the answer. Andres de Tapia rode with Cortes. Bartolome de las Casas was arguing, against Juan Gines de Sepulveda, about whether the conquest was lawful at all, and accounts of sacrifice were the material of that argument on both sides. Bernardino de Sahagun assembled the Florentine Codex from Nahua informants, in Nahuatl, decades after the city fell, under the eye of a Church that had reasons to want the old religion to look a particular way. None of these are worthless. All of them need to be read as arguments.

An offering cache is not an argument. It contains what it contains, at a depth that can be dated, and the person who buried it was not addressing posterity. When the project finds a decapitated cranium in a sealed deposit under a known construction stage, that is a fact about Mexica practice with no European hand between the reader and the evidence.

The limit is equally worth stating. Deposits establish that a thing was done and roughly when. They do not establish how often, and they cannot on their own tell you what the participants understood themselves to be doing. For that the colonial texts remain necessary, which is why the honest position is neither to take them at their word nor to throw them away, but to say for each claim which kind of evidence is carrying it.