Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology in Latin America

Cristóbal Gnecco, Patricia Ayala, Cristóbal Gnecco, Patricia Ayala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315426631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Archeologia

This book is the first to describe indigenous archaeology in Latin America for an English speaking audience. Eighteen chapters primarily by Latin American scholars describe relations between indigenous peoples and archaeology in the frame of national histories and examine the emergence of the native interest in their heritage. Relationships between archaeology and native communities are ambivalent: sometimes an escalating battleground, sometimes a promising site of intercultural encounters. The global trend of indigenous empowerment today has renewed interest in history, making it a tool of cultural meaning and political legitimacy. This book deals with the topic with a raw forthrightness not often demonstrated in writings about archaeology and indigenous peoples. Rather than being 'politically correct, ' it attempts to transform rather than simply describe.

PART I

WHEN MATERIAL CULTURE MATTERS: THE STATE, INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS

CHAPTER 1

RUINS AND THE STATE: ARCHAEOLOGY OF A MEXICAN SYMBIOSIS

Federico Navarrete

In 1978, an enormous monolith of the Aztec¹ goddess Coyolxauhqui was found in downtown Mexico City, a few yards from the main square. This accidental finding made it possible to determine, without a shadow of a doubt, the exact location of the old Templo Mayor—the main pyramid of the Aztec capital of Mexico, over whose ruins the modern Mexican capital was built. Given this extraordinary opportunity, Mexican president José López Portillo made the decision to acquire two blocks of buildings in the area by compulsory purchase and ordered their demolition, with the aim of excavating the old sacred site. That marked the birth of the Templo Mayor Archaeological Project, one of the greatest in Mexican history. A few years later, López Portillo himself defined his actions in a commemorative book:

On that 28th of February, 1978, I felt power to its full extent: I could, at my own will, transform the reality that masked the fundamental roots of my Mexico, that lay at the very core of its history, mystical sphere, and of its still unresolved dialectic tragedy. This came as a fleeting opportunity to bring about its integration, at least symbolically. To open a square “akin” to the colonial square, the Zócalo of our independence, for all of us Mexicans to understand that we come from the Omeyocan—Place of Duality—which we must accept so as to walk steadily through the paths of our destiny, recognizing our mixture as a condition and a force of our origin and our destination … And I had the power to rescue the space and redeem our times … Perhaps there would not be another chance. To discover, to bring to the light: to give new dimension to the central proportions of our origin. To open the space of our consciousness as an exceptional Nation. And I was able to do so, solely by saying, “Let us acquire the buildings. Let them be torn down. And let the Aztecs’ Templo Mayor be unveiled to the day and the night.” (López Portillo et al. 1981:25–27)

This act of authoritarianism for the service of archaeology, and the subsequent use of archaeology for the service of authoritarianism, illustrates, rather eloquently and spectacularly, the symbiosis that has existed throughout the twentieth century between Mexican archaeology and state power. Such symbiosis has entailed the almost exclusive institutionalization of Mexican archaeology into an agency of the Mexican federal government, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) (National Anthropology and History Institute), which enjoys a legal and political monopoly on the exploration, preservation, and use of the country’s archaeological remains. Given that the main duty of the INAH is managing and preserving such heritage, Mexican archaeologists have been forced to do salvage, reconstruction, and preservation activities, many times to the detriment of their research work. Moreover, state funding for archaeology has privileged the search and reconstruction of spectacular monuments, especially state architecture and artwork associated with pre-Hispanic elites, over problem-centered research and, in general, over a more holistic analysis of indigenous societies. In this paper I will endeavor to reconstruct the origin of this symbiosis between ruins, archaeologists, and the state in order to explain how it has managed to prevent other sectors in Mexican society, particularly indigenous groups, from having a meaningful relationship with the archaeological legacy of the pre-Hispanic past. To assess the importance of this monopoly, one must remember the fact that, beyond their marked regional, linguistic, religious, cultural, and political distinctions, almost all Mexicans deem pre-Hispanic ruins an essential symbol of their identity and roots. This is the result of the nationalistic vision of Mexican history, which I will call “monolithic,” both because of its love of large stone monuments (which in Mexico we like to call monoliths) and because of an equally monolithic identification between the pre-Hispanic indigenous peoples and modern mestizo Mexicans, from which contemporary indigenous groups are paradoxically excluded (Navarrete 2004). This vision has undoubtedly reigned supreme in Mexico and has underpinned the laws regulating Mexican archaeological heritage, the institutions managing it, and archaeologists’ practices and discourses.

THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE INDIGENOUS PAST

The oldest roots of the monolithic vision of Mexican history is found in the patriotism conceived by groups of Creoles, that is persons of Spanish descent born in the Americas, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In their quest to invent an identity of their own to distinguish themselves from the Spaniards and to lay the foundations of their nation, these groups glorified the Aztec empire destroyed by the conquistadors in the sixteenth century and turned it into the direct antecedent of the future independent Mexican state (Lafaye 1977).

In the eighteenth century, the discovery of two impressive Aztec sculptures under Mexico City buildings, the famous statue of the goddess Coatlicue and the equally celebrated “Aztec Calendar,” created even further interest in the pre-Hispanic past and pride in its magnificence, providing a specific physical reference to the Creoles’ ideological construction. Authors such as Antonio de León y Gama, Antonio Alzate, and Francisco Clavijero compare these monuments to those from classical times, creating a valuable analogy between pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures and the classic Mediterranean cultures, and between themselves, as explorers and heirs of that past, and European archaeologists and antiquarians. Contemporary indigenous peoples were excluded from that ideological construction. Clavijero proposed that the archaeological heritage be transferred to a museum, where it would foster Creole pride and study. However, when scholars found out that the indigenous people of the city had begun worshipping Coatlicue’s image, they decided to bury it again. Bishop Benito Marín Moxo y Francoly explained this decision as follows:

The indians, who look at all the monuments of the European arts with such stupid indifference, came to contemplate their famous statue with restless curiosity. At first, it was believed that they did not do so for a reason other than national love, present among savage peoples and civilized ones, and for the pleasure of contemplating one of the most remarkable pieces of work of their ancestors, appreciated even by well-read Spaniards. However, it was later suspected that their frequent visits had some secret religious reason. It became essential to forbid entrance altogether, but their fanatic enthusiasm and their incredible craftiness circumvented this restriction … This fact, corroborated by persons of seriousness and learning … forced us to take, as we have said, the decision to rebury the aforementioned statue. (cited by Matos 2005:11–12)

This episode marks the beginning of a clash between two different ways of relating to the archaeological heritage, a clash that still prevails: the indigenous religious cult is condemned from the intolerant perspective of learned Western thought, which defends the nationalistic admiration of a magnificent past, a form of “aura” that, as Walter Benjamin correctly states, is nothing more than a late transformation of religious worship, a “secularized ritual” (Benjamin 1973:26).

This project that sought to expropriate the social memory of indigenous groups in the name of science and nationalism is exactly like the one that has characterized modern Mexican archaeology and, in general, Latin American national archaeologies. David Brading (1980:39–40) has suggested that this expropriation, and the resulting reverence of the pre-Hispanic past from the Creole perspective, was possible thanks to the fact that Mexico, unlike Peru, lacked an indigenous movement seeking to revitalize that past, despite the religious interest in the figure of the goddess Coatlicue. Indigenous communities in central Mexico claimed that their origin lay in lands granted by the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century, in the establishment of their colonial towns, and in the election of their patron saint, but only referred vaguely to their pre-Hispanic past (López 2003). Maya groups to the south of the country repeatedly rebelled against colonial domination, but always in the name of the Catholic religion, without making any reference to their postcolonial past (Reifler-Bricker 1993).

During the nineteenth century it was not possible to perform many excavations given the political turmoil initiated by the lengthy war of independence and perpetuated by continuous civil wars and foreign invasions until 1867. However, the monolithic vision of Mexican history and the monopoly of Creole and mestizo elites upon it developed and consolidated. Nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists built a grand, unified narrative—akin to the nationalist histories being elaborated at that time in Europe—from known archaeological remains and written sources on pre-Hispanic history from the colonial period (Anderson 1983). This narrative posited the unity and continuity of all pre-Hispanic cultures known until then, from Teotihuacán and the Toltecs to the Mexico-Tenochtitlán Aztecs, and turned the pre-Hispanic period into the initial chapter of this national history. Just like the Creole patriotism of previous centuries, this narrative exalted the Aztecs as the culmination of the indigenous past (Pérez 2000). In the political context of the nineteenth century, this glorification laid the foundations of the country’s territorial union and the centralization of political power in Mexico City.

Even though this historical elaboration was merely based on a few archaeological excavations, it proved to be deeply influential for the evolution of this discipline since the end of the nineteenth century, when excavations were resumed, for it defined two of its main features. Firstly, its dependency on historical sources produced at the start of the colonial period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), sources which, until today, have been fundamental for the identification, classification, and interpretation of archaeological cultures discovered in Mexico. Since then, one of the key debates in pre-Hispanic archaeology and history has been the identification of Toltec civilization, which according to the written sources was the epitome of indigenous civilization, with the archaeological remains of different cultures (López and López 1999). The second, equally defining, feature is archaeology’s connection to the nationalistic discourse and its need to build a global, unified history of all pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures that is a referent of identity and a source of pride to the modern Mexican nation and its Creole and mestizo sectors.

Porfirio Díaz’s administration, from 1876 to 1910, saw the birth of modern Mexican archaeology with Leopoldo Batres’s excavations in Teotihuacán, near Mexico City. Díaz’s regime also established the state monopoly on the administration of archaeological heritage and the control of archaeological exploration, although it also gave generous grants to foreign archaeologists, even allowing them to export their findings (Vázquez 2003:120–121).

There was also a sudden increase in the prestige and appeal of pre-Hispanic archaeological remains. Aztec, Maya, and Teotihuacán monuments and sculptures were displayed at art shows, international exhibitions, and museums as evidence of the existence of a Mexican “antiquity” that could be put on a level with classical times. That celebratory demonstration established Mexico’s place in the “concert of civilized nations,” on a par with European countries that, back then, strived to salvage an...