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The nine turquoise mosaics from Mexico are some the most striking pieces in the collections of the British Museum. Among the few surviving such artifacts, these exquisite objects include two masks, a shield, a knife, a helmet, a double-headed serpent, a mosaic on a human skull, a jaguar, and an animal head. They all originate from the Mixtec and Aztec civilizations first encountered by Europeans during the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century. The mosaics have long excited admiration for their masterful blend of technical skill and artistry and fascination regarding their association with ritual and ceremony. Only recently though, have scientific investigations undertaken by the British Museum dramatically advanced knowledge of the mosaics by characterizing, for the first time, the variety of natural materials that were used to create them. Illustrated with more than 160 color images, this book describes the recent scientific findings about the mosaics in detail, revealing them to be rich repositories of information about ancient Mexico. The materials used to construct the mosaics demonstrate their makers' deep knowledge of the natural world and its resources. The effort that would have been involved in procuring the materials testifies to the mosaics' value and significance in a society imbued with myths and religious beliefs. The British Museum's analyses have provided evidence of the way that the materials were prepared and assembled, the tools used, and the choices that were made by artisans. In addition, by drawing on historical accounts including early codices, as well as recent archaeological discoveries, specialists have learned more about the place of the mosaics in ancient Mexican culture. Filled with information about the religion, art, and natural and cultural history as well as the extraordinary ability of modern science to enable detailed insight into past eras, Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico offers an overview of the production, utilization, and eventual fate of these beautiful and mysterious objects.
Archaeology of Northern Mesoamerica comprises the tenth and eleventh volumes in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, published in cooperation with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University under the general editorship of Robert Wauchope (1909–1979). Volume editors of Archaeology of Northern Mesoamerica are Gordon F. Ekholm and Ignacio Bernal. Gordon F. Ekholm (1909–1987) was curator of anthropology at The American Museum of Natural History, New York, and a former president of the Society for American Archaeology. Ignacio Bernal (1910–1992), former director of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico, was director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico and also a past president of the Society for American Archaeology. Volumes 10 and 11 describe the pre-Aztec and Aztec cultures of Mexico, from central Veracruz and the Gulf Coast, through the Valley of Mexico, to western Mexico and the northern frontiers of these ancient American civilizations. The thirty-two articles, lavishly illustrated and accompanied by bibliography and index, were prepared by authorities on prehistoric settlement patterns, architecture, sculpture, mural painting, ceramics and minor arts and crafts, ancient writing and calendars, social and political organization, religion, philosophy, and literature. There are also special articles on the archaeology and ethnohistory of selected regions within northern Mesoamerica. The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.
This study is concerned with how the Postclassic Mexica people developed their unique perspective of history and environment in a dynamic cultural context. By focusing on the process of conceptualization of the Nahuatl word 'xihuitl', the author analyzes the way the Mexica expressed their cognition. Xihuitl covers a range of meanings: 'turquoise', 'grass', 'solar year', 'comet', 'preciousness', 'blue-green' and 'fire'. The correlations of the meanings of xihuitl can be explained from a structural point of view. However, structural analysis does not reveal the dynamic experiential processes that produced such correlations in the minds of the Mexica. In order to account for this dynamic aspect of the concept, the author employs a theory drawn from cognitive science. This theory argues that the meanings and representations of a concept are metaphoric extensions that derive from the central sense of the concept. Applying this theory, the author examines the metaphoric extension of each xihuitl representation from the central sense. The author also analyzes the four media of expression-linguistic, iconographic, material and ritual-in which representations of xihuitl occur. The representations of xihuitl in each medium embody a particular aspect of the concept. At the same time, the concept as a whole was affected by the Mexica conceptual system-the way the Mexica saw their world-rooted in the connections they believed existed between themselves and those who established earlier Central Mexican civilizations.