The Offerings of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan

"Probably the most important archaeological find on the Aztecs is the remains of the central temple of Tenochtitlan. It’s called the Templo Mayor. It was a huge temple. It had lots of offerings and sacrifices. It was a major part of the religion and the empire of the Aztecs. Scholars always knew where it was. It wasn’t lost. It was just buried under colonial buildings in the centre of Mexico City. Then, in 1978, some workers were digging a trench to put in some electrical cables, and they found a fancy carved relief, an Aztec relief, and they stopped what they were doing and exposed it. That set off an excavation, directed by Eduardo Matos, lasting decades. It turned out that the early stages of the Templo Mayor were much better preserved than anyone had thought. A lot of the interesting finds were not just around what the temple looked like. Aztec priests had constructed small buried chambers where they placed rich offerings full of goods. There were animal bones, coral, jade, pottery and stone sculptures—all kinds of stuff that was of value. As the excavators explored the Templo Mayor, they found hundreds of these offerings. Leonardo López Luján was involved in that project, and this book really describes the archaeology of the highest level of Aztec society. They had lots of gods, but as I tell students, these weren’t anthropomorphic gods like Greek gods. The Aztec gods were more nebulous. They were forces or spirits. Lots of different gods were worshiped at different kinds of temples in different contexts. A lot of what we know of Aztec religion was what was written down by people like Diego Duran, the friars after the conquest, because they were very interested in ritual and myth and so on. Getting at Aztec religion is really difficult, because no Aztec priest ever sat down with a Spaniard or a native literate person after the conquest and explained the details of Aztec religion. Everything we know about it is filtered through Christian friars or through indigenous people who had been Christianized. It’s difficult to discover what was really there, as opposed to interpretations blended with ideas from Christianity. So it’s a really tough topic."