More than 500 archaeological pieces about Mexican society and culture, often mistakenly called Aztec within the European imagination, make up an unprecedented exhibition in Europe that opens tomorrow, Wednesday, at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.
‘Mexica. Offerings and gods in the Templo Mayor’, which will remain open until next September 8, is the result of the Templo Mayor archaeological project – founded in 1978 by Eduardo Matos and taken up again by Leonardo López Luján in 1996 -, in which the treasures are rescued that the Mexica buried in Tenochtitlán during the 15th and 16th centuries.
According to López Luján, the exhibition portrays how duality (night-day, for example) is “a true obsession” for what was one of the dominant empires in Mesoamerica.
Cipactli, a mythological being half crocodile and half fish portrayed in the exhibition, embodies that duality.
The relationship between humanity and deities occurred above all in the Great Temple, a central place for sacrifices and offerings, “objects made to impress,” according to another of the curators, Fabienne de Pierrebourg.
They had the firm belief that the universe “works thanks to the sacrifice of the gods,” De Pierrebourg noted.
Jewelry, musical instruments and animal and human skeletons served as offerings and were placed, in addition to the houses and the temple, in very specific places in the urban architecture where both worlds – the earthly and the celestial – converged, such as the crossroads or around water sources.
The more than 500 pieces, among which the Bourbon Codex stands out, try to clarify that the Mexica and the Aztec people were not the same, as the European colonizers believed. The Mexicas had emancipated themselves from the Aztecs to settle in the Gulf of Mexico between the 13th century and 1521 and create their own metropolis.
“They are not Paris, Rome, or New York, but they are advanced people for their time,” López Luján stressed.
The impact of Spanish colonization
The arrival of the Spanish in 1492 had “catastrophic effects,” according to De Pierrebourg, since it not only impacted the demographics with the outbreak of epidemics but also a large part of the rituals, as the panels point out during the tour, are considered “demonized.” .
However, the Mexica civilization tried to maintain its tradition despite the restrictions imposed by the Spanish.
Hence, for example, instead of representing anthropomorphized figures of crops with amate plant fiber paper – prohibited by the colonizers for competing with that brought from Spain – they used alternative materials.
This methodology was, along with intergenerational transmission, what has allowed the continuity of traditions, so deeply rooted in Mexican identity and which is currently reflected, under the criteria of López Luján, in “the practices of indigenous groups.” .
Archaeological research continues to rescue, after 46 years of uninterrupted activity, objects of interest such as the recent discovery of offerings that contained the remains of large predators (cougars, jaguars, wolves, falcons, eagles).
These remains, before being buried, were dressed as warriors because “due to their fierceness they were equated with the most important military orders,” explained the director of the Templo Mayor project.
‘Mexica. Offerings and gods in the main temple’ is a collaborative project between the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico and has contributions from the Ethnographic Museum of Basel (Switzerland).
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2024-04-10 07:13:07