I.
The sun set behind the mountains and the valley went dark save a few bright pinholes in the indigo sky.
The wrinkled priest climbed the cold temple steps to examine the star group above. He squinted at the constellation and made a series of dots and dashes on the ground, calculations to be considered throughout the night, while an apprentice waited nearby for the signal. Halfway around the world, unbeknownst to the priest, astronomers had a name for these stars — the Pleiades. Over there the stars were used to aid sailing; here they foretold something.
This night had a special relevance to the priest, the apprentice, and the communities that surrounded the observatory. It was a night that occurred once every 52 years, when the civilization’s two calendars — the Long Count, or haab, with 360 days split into 18 months of 20, and five extra days for celebration; and the Calendar Round, or tzolkin, with 260 days in 13 months of 20 — came into synchronicity. In preparation for the rare convergence, all the nearby villages spent five nights without any torch lights. They were caliginous and ominous times, full of magic and portent, cleansing and fasting, bloodletting and sacrifices, actions to appease gods so that another 52 years of life would be granted.
The next day, when the brightness of the Pleiades was obliterated by the new sun, the priest announced to all that the gods had, indeed, looked favorably upon them. The new era could begin, the world’s new flame could be forged. The apprentice got to work.
The priest steadied himself with a hand against the temple wall and, from his hilltop vantage point, watched the procession of torches exit in the hands of representatives that had been sent from the villages. Those flames — spawn of the original, or maybe merely extensions, depending on one’s perspective — flickered on the dirt roads as they dispersed to the far reaches of the valley. From the priest’s view, they resembled the awkward trajectories of shooting stars dying in the atmosphere.
His most important job complete, the priest returned to his temple and slept for a long while.
II.
Before it burrowed into his mind and laid eggs there, the idea first bit Oscar Martínez Galindo at the library.
Oscar was born in 1960 in Tlacolula, Mexico, about twenty miles southeast of Oaxaca City and only a few miles up the road from Mitla — which had been, Oscar learned as a boy, the Zapotec civilization’s premier religious center, a remarkably well-preserved cluster of ancient temples and graves. Though Oscar studied anthropology in college, his heart wasn’t really in it then; he spent the first years of his postgraduate life writing and painting. It was his mysticism that led him back to anthropology in later years. At no point has he developed an appreciation for the bureaucratic nuts and bolts involved in obtaining funding and proper access for archaeological digs. Over time, though, reason and passion merged for Oscar, with the former sometimes subsidizing the latter. He painted and wrote, and he continued educating himself about his region’s past, delving into library books whenever he could. Eventually he came across one book that changed his life forever.
We should back up a bit.
Trying to study ancient Mesoamerican civilizations is like trying to solve a murder after a hurricane has blown through the crime scene. While those cultures flourished over centuries, their histories had been mostly passed forward through the spoken word; this was understandably hampered by centuries of Spanish occupation, colonization, slaughter, and disease. Many ruins are visible for all to see, while others are deep beneath mounds of earth. In any case, the context in which they were initially created can be hard to reconstruct. What the ruins once meant can be hard to relearn.
The few records that remain —“codex” in the singular, “codices” in the plural — are the foundation for we know more about ancient Mesoamerican civilization. These books used intricate, colorful drawings to represent royal lineages, city locations, and religious ceremonies. They were not meant to be read silently; they were more like storyboard notes, jogging an orator’s memory as they retold the codex’s tale.
Of the codices that survived, several landed in the hands of private collectors. One found its way to a British collector (Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche) in 1873; its previous owners included the British politician John Temple Leader and a Florentine monastery. At some point in the 16th century, somebody (probably Spanish based on their handwriting) jotted a few notes in the margins, clearly not an expert in Mesoamerican codices because they read it from left to right. Perhaps the codices were shipped across the Atlantic to Seville in 1519; an inventory of gifts which Hernán Cortés had received from the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II and then conveyed to Charles V included this entry: “Mas dos libros de los que aca tienen los indios” (two books such as the Indians have). The American archaeologist Zelia Nuttall, who examined Lord Zouche’s codex in 1898, believed it to be one of those two books, and she pinned its origins to the 14th century, near modern-day Oaxaca City. In certain circles, it’s known as the Codex Zouche-Nuttall.1
The original was composed of 47 sections, each hand-painted on deer skin; it tells two stories, one about the region’s important cities and the other about the area’s genealogy, marriages, and military battles. That version is currently in the collection at London’s British Museum, but it has been copied enough that there may well be a version of it in your local library. There was one in mine, in Berkeley. Oscar checked his copy out of the library in Mitla.2
He would return to it often, enraptured not just by the details and the bold colors, but also the feeling it gave him. I felt it, too. You can lose yourself in the pages, tracing the paths of warriors and priests, fantastic creatures and shapes bordering on the abstract. One day, while scanning a group of bell-like drawings in the codex, something clicked for Oscar.
Courtesy British Museum (Am1902,0308.1) .
This particular drawing depicted a temple called the Cerro del Jaguar, or Hill of the Jaguar. That temple was an important religious site, thought to be hidden somewhere in the old Zapotec capital of Monte Albán (the remains of which now overlook Oaxaca City). The belief that this temple was in this location came from a few different places, but Oscar believes Eduard Seler and Caecilie Seler-Sachs, a married duo of German anthropologists, did the most to advance the idea.
Between 1895 and 1910, the Selers visited Mexico six times to conduct field research. They hobnobbed with Oaxaca’s elite “club” of antiquarians and collectors (including a future member of Mexico’s Supreme Court), winning access that few others had. With that came the ability to frame future narratives about archeological discoveries. Eduard Seler was particularly captured by Monte Albán, which wasn’t fully excavated when the Selers visited, and was then mostly half-buried temples overlooking the burgeoning city, and made the assumption that this “Hill of the Jaguar” temple was located somewhere there. But despite plenty of excavations, no one could find it. Seler died before it was ever discovered.3
Oscar saw the picture in the Codex that depicted Cerro del Jaguar and thought it looked like someplace else, a spot he’d seen with his own two eyes.
“Seler thinks the Hill of the Jaguar is in Monte Albán,” Oscar says, arguing with a colleague who’d died a century before. “But I say no.”
Continued here.
The Selers (seated in the center) and Oaxaca’s local antiquarians on an expedition to Monte Albán. Plate VII in Caecilie Seler, Auf alten wegen in Mexiko und Guatemala: Reiseerinnerungen und Eindrücke aus den Jahren 1895–1897 (Berlin, Dietrich Reimer, 1900), between pages 32 and 33).
- Codex Nuttall: Facsimile of an Ancient Mexican Codex Belonging to Lord Zouche of Harynworth, England, intro. Zelia Nuttall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1902), 1–5, 8–11.
- The preeminent work on the codex is Robert Lloyd Williams, The Complete Codex Zouche-Nuttall: Mixtec Lineage Histories and Political Biographies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).
- On the Selers, see Adam T. Sellen, “Re-evaluation of the Early Archaeological Collections from Oaxaca: A Trip to the Seler Archives in Berlin,” report submitted to the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, 2006. On the Selers’ acquaintance Francisco Belmar, a Oaxacan linguist who later joined the Supreme Court, see Sellen, “Re-evaluation,” 10; Francie R. Cassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the South, Mexico, 1867–1911 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 418; and Roderic A. Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 1884–1935 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 238. Also see Caecilie Seler-Sachs’s discussion of “Jaguarberg” in Auf alten wegen in Mexiko und Guatemala: Reiseerinnerungen und Eindrücke aus den Jahren 1895–1897 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1900), 94.
