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
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).
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.”
III.
Around 250 people live in Santa Catarina Lachatao, an old mining hacienda in the Sierra Juarez mountain range. It is one of eight villages called the Pueblos Mancomunados, each connected to the next by a winding trail, a two-hour drive northeast from Oaxaca City and the historic Monte Albán. More than 2000 meters above sea level, the “cloud forest” climate is home to a wide diversity of plant species, including the hallucinogenic hongos magicos. The Pueblos Mancomunados are prized as a place where traditional indigenous life persists; the mountain range itself was named after Benito Juárez, Mexico’s only indigenous president, born in 1806 in one of the villages.
An 1858 map of Oaxaca, from Antonio García Cubas’s Atlas mexicano. Lachatao is not marked on the map, but it is three miles southeast of “Chicumezuchil,” or San Juan Chicomezúchil; roughly halfway between “Oajaca” (Oaxaca City) and Villa Alta. Courtesy David Rumsey Map Collection, Cartography Associates (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Oscar’s travels occasionally took him to these Sierra Juarez villages, where he’d hike the trails, examine the flora and fauna, and savor the relative quiet compared to his life in the city. “Their rivers are so clean. They farm, they plant organically,” Oscar told me over Skype, through a translator. “It’s such a contrast with the outside world.” Over time, he learned the town’s history and the significance in its name. Lach means four; tao means sacred.
“In the sacred calendar of the Zapotecs, on the fourth day,” Oscar explains, “there is a mountain with stairs.”
This mountain with stairs, Oscar believes, is the famed and undiscovered Hill of the Jaguar, Cerro del Jaguar — the site Eduard Seler was searching for, the image depicted in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. Moreover, Oscar believes this site exists in a specific part of the range near Lachatao.
You can see it if you know where to look. Protruding from one part of the range are three flat forest-covered terraces that really do — whether carved out by nature or by human hands — look like stairs, albeit ones built for a giant and only if you squint at them in just the right way. (Honestly, when I visited years ago, I didn’t quite see it.) This landscape is what flashed through Oscar’s mind while he was in that Mitla library examining the Nuttall codex. In that moment, this location became the only possible place where the Hill of the Jaguar temple could be located. That flash of insight has informed the rest of Oscar’s life.
He became obsessed with it. He observed satellite maps of the location and enlisted the aid of drone pilots to snap videos of the landscape. He revisited the mountain during various positions of the sun, due to the importance that equinoxes had in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architecture — on the equinox, an enormous “feathered serpent” god slithers down the side of El Castillo at Chichen Itza; at Dzibilchaltun in the Yucatan, the rising sun lines up perfectly through the portal of the Temple of the Seven Dolls. Oscar wanted to see what this Sierra Juarez mountain looked like on that particular day of the year, so he made a pilgrimage.
And: “When the sun shines over the mountain on the equinox,” he says, “it shows the jaguar.”
After a decade of sporadic trips, Oscar decided to move to Lachatao for good in 2008. Around this time, Oscar’s wife divorced him.
“She was a doctor,” he says, and the two of them had three daughters. He was 56 years old when I interviewed him, and by then his children had moved away from home, gotten places of their own in various North American cities. “I see them when they’re on vacation,” he tells me. “When they have time to visit me, because I don’t get out of Lachatao too often.” When I press him about his relationship with them all — his ex-wife and his daughters — he shies away from the topic with a shake of his head. Or maybe it was just a buffering glitch in the Skype feed; anyway, I leave it alone.
As you might expect whenever a strange single man from the city moves into a tight-knit mountain village, the residents of Lachatao were initially skeptical of Oscar and his intentions. “They didn’t want me there,” he says. “They didn’t want me to change them.” The region has had a strong history of fighting outside interests — in 2007, a Vancouver-based mining operation was kicked out after it was discovered they were contaminating the nearby river with arsenic and lead; the Pueblos Mancomunados took that a step further in 2012, instituting a 100-year ban on all mining. But Oscar stuck it out.
Time passed, trust was earned. Over the next few years, his enthusiasm for the town became evident, as was his respect for its role as keeper of the old culture. He began to assist with the region’s growing ecotourism industry, helped design a new museum, developed lessons for teaching traditional Zapotec painting, and started a program to re-introduce the Zapotec language. “We’re trying to teach the kids native dialects,” he says. “We don’t want them to forget.” It all won them over.
Meanwhile, Cerro del Jaguar never left Oscar’s mind.
He led expeditions on the winding trails that connect the old villages, a way to educate visitors while also continuing his own investigation. “I do hikes, take photographs, and that is the way I’ve found clues,” he says. Back at his home, he’d examine these photos, looking for patterns and shapes; but without funds or connections, Oscar couldn’t excavate further. One person can only do so much without the equipment and the paperwork. More years went by, and he continued to find ways to shoehorn surveys into his life.
One year, Oscar decided to lead a “ritual hike” to the hill during the next spring equinox. He was hoping it would be an opportunity for cross-pollination, with the community teaching him traditional Zapotec rituals — known as usos y costumbres — while he’d share with them what he had learned took place on that hilltop centuries ago. They didn’t entirely trust his historical account, but it didn’t matter. It was a good excuse to practice the old traditions, and the hill sure had a hell of a view.
The event went well: Oscar and the elders and the other visitors danced, swayed, communed with the spirits, watched the sunrise. It was successful enough that Oscar decided to do it again the following year. This time he and a few workers visited the spot ahead of the equinox, so they could prepare the hilltop for the dance and celebration. But when they did, they discovered something extraordinary.
“We were in one of the yards making a figure of colored soil, and I needed help to fill in the drawing,” Oscar tells me. During an attempt to gather more dirt for the image, one of the workers pried a rock from the dirt with a crowbar. Underneath, he found a hole in the ground. The group all peered inside and found that, hidden in the mountain, there was an ancient wall. It was three meters wide, one meter high, and designed with the same decorative patterns that had been discovered in the ruins over in Mitla. “Well,” one of Oscar’s helpers told him, “you’re not so crazy after all.”
Oscar had finally found proof that his Hill of the Jaguar was, indeed, where he had long thought.
Maybe.
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?
- 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.
