Events

Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, California State University, Los Angeles

Presentation: Ulama: Evolution of the Mesoamerican ballgame from the past into the present in West Mexico.

Abstract: Ulamaliztli, the distinctively Mesoamerican ballgame, has a history dating back 3500 years.  The game was such an integral part of the society, that nearly 3000 ballcourts have been reported in the territory extending from the American Southwest to El Salvador.  The institution was complex and carried diverse meanings and functions, such as: portal to the Underworld, the setting for reenactments of cosmic battles between celestial bodies, fertility rituals, warfare ceremonies, political affirmation of kingship, setting for human sacrifices, etc.  The central importance of the ballgame is attested to by the fact that is clearly portrayed in the art of the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya, Toltec and Aztec and was an important element in a pan-Mesoamerican cosmovision.

           The Spanish immediately recognized that the ballgame was a great deal more significant than merely recreation and so vigorously suppressed its playing.  Interestingly, a modern form of the ancient game, known as Ulama, has survived in a number of remote communities in the surroundings of the city of Mazatlan in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico.

Between 2003 and 2015, I led a multi-disciplinary investigation about Ulama that involved 8 Cal State L.A. students.  The study focused on the history, folklore, the social significance, the cultural context, and the rules and practices of the game.  This lecture presents some of the results of our research project.

Christian De Brer, Head of Conservation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.  

Presentation: Provenance and Characterization of Ancient West Mexican Ceramic Figures held at the Fowler Museum at UCLA

Abstract: Ancient West Mexican ceramic figures (300BCE-600CE) from shaft tomb contexts are some of the most severely looted and prolific artifacts in the collections of Southern Californian institutions.  The demand for the ancient West Mexican figures by Los Angeles collectors and Hollywood elite reached fever pitch from the 1940s-1960s, driven in part by L.A.-based gallerists such as Earl Stendahl, with items then donated to local museums.  This presentation discusses efforts to advance the provenance histories of West Mexican vessels from the Fowler Museum at UCLA (hereafter referred to as FM-UCLA), and attempts to reconnect many to sites and areas of origin in Nayarit using non-invasive characterization techniques.  79 well-provenanced figures from excavated sites in Nayarit held at the Museo Regional de Nayarit (MRN) and another 17 entirely from a well-provenanced tomb in Jalisco held at the Natural History Museum Los Angeles (NHMLA) were examined and analyzed to create a baseline of information to compare with 142 figures at the FM-UCLA and NHMLA. The research utilized non-invasive portable X-ray fluorescence to determine elemental compositions of the clays, slips, decorative features and modern additions in the form of restorations by looters, collectors and gallerists.  The correlation of elemental data to predetermined styles and typologies is also considered.   Finally, the collaborative and transparent environment between FM-UCLA and the MRN is discussed, which led to shared decision-making over the directives and future of the collections housed in the U.S.

Johannes Neurath, Museo Nacional de Antropología, INAH, México

Presentation: Becoming peyote or just consuming it?

Abstract: Peyote is much more than a plant that exists in nature and contains a substance called mezcaline. Wixárika initiates become peyote. As such they are “hikuri-people” (hikuritamete, peyoteros) and learn to perceive the world as peyotes. Due to this “perspectivist transformation”, they can envision the first sunrise at the Mountain of Dawn. Neither hikuri nor the sunrise exist independently of ritual action but are made through it. In this context, peyote-pilgrims also practice time reversal and become their own ancestors.

Transforming into ancestral deities can be quite dangerous. This is why initiates must be careful not to take the ritual too far. Some peyote seekers are unable to endure the physical hardships involved in participating in peyote rituals, others face difficulties during their reintegration into the community they had to leave behind during initiation. Coming back, they are perceived as dangerous to the non-initiated. ad ancestral deities are also pathogenic agents, even hunters of people.

For all those reasons, non-indigenous participants, like anthropologists, tourists or “psychonauts”, are not always welcomed in Wixarika rituals. On the other hand, learning about topics like transformation and the ambiguity of the ancestral deities, it is easier to understand why Wixarika people are often against the legalization of the recreational use of hikuri. Neither do they like certain ecological discourses that characterize peyote as an “endangered species”, because pointing out the scarcity of peyote implies criticizing the Huichols’ effort to produce it ritually. 

John M.D. Pohl, Ph.D., California State University, Los Angeles

Presentation: Our Mother the Sea: The Pacific Coast Network of Western Mesoamerica 900-1600 CE 

Abstract: Recent research reveals that the Aztec Empire was only part of the story of civilizational development during the Postclassic era. The period between 900-1450 C.E. will be examined as a time of major societal transformation that preceded the Aztec Empire, resisted its hegemony, and resurrect itself on a new colonial foundation to dominate Indigenous western Mesoamerica through the present day. In 1945, the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología officially recognized "Mixteca-Puebla" as the fourth and last major cultural horizon of ancient Mesoamerica following Lumholtz, Seler, Saville, Sauer, Vaillant and Ekholm among other visionaries. However, by 1960, this cultural horizon had been reduced to an Aztec provincial phenomena that has always created more problems than it solved by grossly simplifying the critical role played by the peoples of the Pacific Coast extending from Oaxaca, through West Mexico to northern Mexico in building the transregional network that the Aztec empire was actually predicated on.

José Luis Punzo Díaz ,INAH – Mexico

Presentation: Llegaron del norte. What can DNA and archaeological materials tell us about migrations and connections in western Mesoamerica?

Abstract: It is said that history is always written by the victors. In the case of the Florentine Codex, also known as the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, the text was primarily written by native scribes with Spanish oversight. Book 12 of the manuscript relates the events that culminated in the collapse of the Mexica Empire. Numerous publications highlight the complexity of the collapse by emphasizing the resistance of the Mexica and the crucial alliances between other indigenous groups and Spaniards. Despite the availability of information about the conquest of Mexico, in Mexico’s primary education system the narrative of conquest describes the Mexica and other native groups as helpless and vanquished by the Spaniards. The Mexican education system projects a victim mentality and fuels hatred toward Spaniards in contemporary youth. 

This paper presents different perspectives and reflections of young students in the Nahua community of Chicontepec, Veracruz, in respect to the conquest of Mexico. I begin by asking the youth to share their knowledge and perspective about the conquest. Subsequently, students are presented with key passages from Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, summarized in their modern variant of Nahuatl from the Huasteca Veracruzana. Finally, I ask them to reflect upon their initial conceptions of the historical events after learning about the conquest from Nahua scholars. This paper exemplifies the importance of providing access to historical Nahuatl documents, such as the Florentine Codex, to contemporary Nahua speaking communities, along with corresponding translations of their Nahuatl variant.

Khristaan D. Villela, Associate Director, Getty Research Institute

Presentation: Ancient West Mexico and the Stendahl Art Galleries: From Archive to Exhibition

Abstract: In 2026 the Getty Research Institute will present an exhibition on the Stendahl Art Galleries, based on the archive the Institute acquired in 2019. The archive entails both business and personal records spanning a century of art dealing in Los Angeles by Earl Stendahl and his family. While Stendahl began selling California landscape paintings around World War I, he soon moved into Modern Art, and by the late 1930s, he began selling ancient American art, mostly illegally excavated in Mexico and exported to southern California. Stendahl and his family sold major works to both private collectors and museums, in both the US and Europe, including murals from Teotihuacan, Maya stelas from Piedras Negras, and Aztec sculptures. But amid the flashy and expensive works were literally thousands of ancient West Mexican ceramics, which comprised the foundation of Stendahl’s business model. This paper will describe how Stendahl Art Galleries staged ancient West Mexican ceramics in the gallery and in exhibitions, and how these efforts led to the appearance of these works in the broader US cultural landscape, from films to print advertisement. We will also take up the question of how to create an exhibition from an archive. 

Mary Miller, Director of the Getty Research Institute

Presentation:From Shaft Tomb to Hollywood

Abstract: The shaft tombs of the Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima preserved the secrets of the dead for two millennia before falling prey to the looter’s shovel and the art dealer’s promotion. Professor Miller will look at the commerce and the limited archaeology that has yielded myriad objects and multiple theories of meaning across both geography and time.

 

Michael D. Mathiowetz, Getty Research Institute

Presentation: The Mesoamerican Ballgame in the Aztatlán and Casas Grandes Regions of Northwest Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Northwest: History, Cosmology, and Connectivity

Abstract: This presentation focuses on the origin, distribution, and nature of the Mesoamerican ballgame in the Aztatlán coastal core zone of southern Sinaloa, Nayarit, and northern Jalisco and adjoining regions. This discussion is situated within current understandings of political-religious organization, ritual, and cosmology including the dual aspects of the sun and Venus (Morning/Evening Star) that characterized polities in the core zone after AD 850/900. Assessments of the ballgame in the Aztatlán region during the Postclassic period provide an archaeological foundation from which to contextualize the legacy of ballgame ritualism in far west Mexico as documented in pioneering research by Manuel Aguilar-Moreno and his students. John Pohl’s analyses of the ballgame in highland and southern Mexico further provides a comparative perspective of the game in broader Postclassic Mesoamerica. The Aztatlán core zone was the probable source of the Mesoamerican ballgame that appeared in the Casas Grandes region in Chihuahua after AD 1200.

Susana Ramírez Urrea, INAH-Jalisco, Mexico

Presentation: From the Epiclassic to the Postclassic: Sociopolitical, Economic, and Ideological Transformations in Western and Northwestern México

Abstract: The Epiclassic period (600-900 CE) in Western and Northwestern Mexico represents a stage in which regional social systems developed with a highly complex social, political, and economic organization. During this period, there was a dynamic interaction network that suggests significant integration among different regions. So far, it has been proposed that these centers were equipollent, as no single region appears to have dominated another, but rather a degree of economic, political, and ideological integration is observed.

However, around 800 CE, a series of significant changes in the social structures of these groups were recorded, such as social organization and the incorporation of technological innovations. These innovations are reflected in the optimization of strategic resource production, such as salt or the manufacture of cotton garments, as well as the introduction of metallurgy. Additionally, a restructuring of exchange networks occurred, in which some of the most important Epiclassic centers lost their role as major centers and ceased to be relevant actors in these networks, while new centers emerged, becoming key players in the exchange networking.

Moreover, a transformation in economic patterns and an ideological shift characterized by the introduction of an iconographic language with strong symbolic and religious content can be observed. Likewise, the incorporation of rituals practices.  Both ritual and iconography - similar to that found in Postclassic codices -, had not been previously recorded in this cultural area and reflects a distinct worldview. These changes are closely linked to what is known as the Aztatlán system.

This study presents an analysis of these changes, as well as the sociopolitical organization and exchange networks during the Early and Middle Postclassic, from the perspective of the Sayula and Chapala Basin in Jalisco.

Diana Magaloni Kerpel, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Presentation: The Comala Style in West Mexico Shaft Tombs and its Technical and Symbolic Connections to Mesoamerica

Abstract: West Mexican ceramic traditions seem to belong to a world that had no substantial influences from other contemporary Mesoamerican traditions. The lively and naturalistic style of the sculpted ceramic figurines contrasts with the highly symbolic and hieratic manners of the art from other traditions. Moreover, the shaft tombs where these ceramics have been found are also unique to this cultural region and distinct from other funerary traditions in Mesoamerica. The shaft tombs and the styles of some ceramics show instead clear connections with shaft tombs cultures in the western coastal regions of Colombia and Ecuador. This presentation explores the Comala style of West Mexican ceramics in one particular context that has not been taken into account when compare with the art from other contemporary cultures such as Monte Alban and Teotihuacan: the purposeful use of different shades of red. It contends that the subtle use of different shades of red in the Comala style may be a particular way to response to cosmological concepts that proof that West Mexican societies were participant of a shared Mesoamerican conception of life, death and myths of creation.

Thank you for your interest and participation in our 7th Mesoamerican Symposium!