Reads parts 1 and 2 of this story here and here.
IV.
Fermín Reygadas Dahl is a man of science. You can tell by his job title: a tenured professor of archaeology at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in La Paz, where he’s been teaching for over 30 years. You can tell by his graying beard, by the massive hardcover texts in the wall-length bookcase that act as his backdrop on Skype. And you can tell by how he tells his stories: a flurry of hand gestures and dramatic inflections, heavy with skepticism.
“Years ago, I went to the beach of Puerto Angel, and there came a hurricane,” Dahl begins a tale. “We were in the middle of nowhere, and the people gave us shelter at a school. We were there three days, and while we were there, an Indian woman came up to me and told me how the hurricane started.”
A smile comes across his face as he tells me about the Mesoamerican tradition of a nahual, a kind of spirit animal which each person forges a connection with as a newborn. It used to be that new parents would find their child’s nahual in a book, but because all the books have been lost, they now take the baby outside and wait for the first animal to cross the baby’s path. Recently, the woman told Dahl as they waited out the hurricane, the town had lost one of their residents, an old man. His nahual had been a snake.
“She told me that the snake caused the hurricane,” he tells me. “A big snake dies in the ocean, and a big storm comes after.” He pauses to stress the importance of his next statement. “This was forty years ago, here in Mexico. This belief is not Catholic, not capitalist. It’s a myth, it’s a magic life.”
Despite not believing in the myths themselves, this magical thinking has been tremendously important to Dahl’s professional life. Over the years, he’s grown tired of visiting state-sanctioned archeological digs that have morphed into tourist outposts, where large buses idle in parking lots waiting to take foreign visitors back to their plush hotels, where the pathways to the sites are lined with merchants hawking knock-off indigenous knick-knacks. “It’s the same thing as going to the Bahamas,” he says. “Italian restaurant, fast food, drinks exactly the same. Why do you even travel?” For Dahl, this atmosphere isn’t just offensive from an aesthetic standpoint; it’s also not conducive to true archeological discovery.
“Very few archaeologists live the site anymore. It’s one month of excavation, then back to the city,” he says. “But you need to live the land. If it rains, you need to feel it. When you’re in a house with air conditioning and telephone, you are disconnected.”
It’s not romantic, he says, it’s actual field science. Amenities like electricity and paved roads can prevent the archaeologist from properly understanding how earlier civilizations lived. Distance is an entirely different concept if you don’t have a car, as is food when you don’t have to grow your own. Such considerations are vitally important when trying to figure out where towns might have been built, what areas might have been used for cultivating crops, where the priests might have performed their star-gazing.
“Oscar has the magic influence of shamans, the people that still live in that Mesoamerican mind,” Dahl says.
Dahl first visited Lachatao in 2011, and it wasn’t long before he met Oscar, who showed off the ancient wall he believed to be the Hill of the Jaguar. The two became fast friends, and Dahl returned five times over the next six years to examine the wall, the surrounding crops, and other evidence of how humans had changed the landscape long ago. His trips have resulted in a few conclusions about Oscar’s discovery.
“It was a natural observatory, an investigation spot for priests to learn about the clouds, the weather, to watch the sky, to better understand the cycles, and to start the new fire,” he says, describing the convergence of the two calendars that took place every 52 years. “To me, this is the spot where they made the new fire.”
Dahl estimates that the temple is at least 300 meters high, likely more, including the two terraces that had been carved into the mountain, both of which he also suspects contain temples. The design would have allowed for the delivery of running water and the cultivation of plants, enough to sustain a small community between 1,000 and 5,000 people, who would’ve acted as support staff to the 10 to 20 “elite” Zapotec priests. It would have been a pretty tiny group, he says, and that’s where the importance of the discovery lies.
In the field of archaeology, the finds that get most exhaustively researched are the valley cities like Monte Albán and Mitla, which had greater agricultural space and could sustain more expansive populations. A site like Oscar’s, comparatively, is small potatoes, and treated as such. “When you ask for money, they want some big thing,” Dahl says. “You need to make a project, and that project must go to a committee. It’s, as you call, a pain in the ass.” And so, even now, archaeologists and anthropologists have only inspected a small sliver of Mesoamerican life; it’d be like aliens visiting New York and believing that all humans lived in similar cities.
The Mexican government’s disinterest in examining far-flung, specific-use sites is frustrating from an archaeologist’s perspective, but not without some ancillary benefit. Due to its low profile, the community of Lachatao hasn’t been overtaken by armies of inspectors, who often function as shock troops for the tourism industry. Once sites are uncovered and unleashed to the paying public, so come with them the boutique stores and boutique hotels, the added infrastructure and capital investment, pushing the locals out of whatever their lives once were.
So, Oscar’s find stays what it has been for years upon years: largely unearthed and unexamined, hidden in the mountainous landscape. The terraces still offer their spectacular views, and the chunk of ancient wall still peers out from the ground, offering a tiny glimpse into the past. And if Oscar’s up there, he’ll surely tell you the story of how he found it, and what it all means.
“Oscar is very sure of his ideas, but that doesn’t mean I agree with him,” Dahl says. “This is an astronomical place, probably the most important in the area. But is this the Hill of the Jaguar in the codex?” he asks with a shrug. “It needs more work.”
V.
They come from all over — mostly nearby villages, but also the cities, some from abroad. Every year, there seem to be more. They’re told to leave their phones and cameras behind. They won’t need them; they’re traveling into the past.
Before, in the village, they talk about history, the future, and the stories that link the two. Some participate in a temazcal, a sweat-lodge ritual to purify their bodies, after which eggs are rubbed on their skin for further cleansing. They change into white clothes, gather in a circle, and hug a tree to show respect before asking permission from the mountain itself. When it’s granted, they hike up the same pathway that the Zapotec priests climbed centuries ago, on their path to consult the gods.
On the hilltop, they burn copal, drink mezcal, and salute the sun with horns made of seashells. They form concentric circles that symbolize fire, water, wind, and earth, and place a pan of water in each direction. They split up by age — children to the east, teenagers to the south, adults to the west, elders to the north. They fly kites and wait for the sun to hide again behind the mountain range, and when it does, they play music and build a bonfire to mimic the old world’s original flame. It’s a hell of a party.
Some of them spend the night up there and wait for the sunrise of the equinox. When it comes, their guide will point to a specific spot in the ridge and urge them to see what he sees.
It’s there, he tells them, the jaguar. The shape that gives this place its power, the image that the guide first saw decades ago, that eventually brought him here, led him to leave his past behind.
There, right there in the mountain, he prods. Don’t you see it?
