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<\/a>The National Archeological Museum of Mexico is primarily Meso-American in focus, and that almost is exclusively what is now Mexico.\u00a0 And what treasures it has! A 20 ton head from the Olmec period\u00a0 (bear in mind Meso-America awaited Europeans to introduce metal tools).<\/p>\r\nSouthern Mexico had gold, but most of the area used obsidian for all purposes, including knives to kill and extract hearts for sacrifices, huge pyramids and temples and tombs (we saw the excavations of one in Zocalo, the central historic district of Mexico City), and huge stone monoliths celebrating or pacifying the gods\u2014water, war, corn, and maize.\u00a0 The latter really struck home for me\u2014the region seems to have had abundant crops, far different than Europe.\u00a0 It was the New World that contributed squash and beans and corn (flour and tortillas), and maguey (the Century plant, good for everything from soap to booze), and chilis\u2014can you imagine Thai food before the European discovery of the New World?\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\r\n
Perhaps the two most stunning rooms in the museum were dedicated to the Aztec (Mexica) and the Mayans.\u00a0 The Mayans crowning achievements are in the Yucatan, a little earlier than the Aztecs.\u00a0 Interesting to me were some of the similarities with Cahokia Mounds, our Illinois counterparts, which indicated that the culture and trade stretched through the Americas.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The Spanish, of course, led by Cortes and an army that our guide insists were dregs from the prisons, arrived in 1521 determined to find gold and treasures, and dethroned (and decapitated) Montezuma and two successors, a period known as the Conquest, which initiated almost 300 years of \u201cNuevo Espana,\u201d Spain\u2019s prized possession in the new world, to which Spain brought \u201ccivilization\u201d\u2014the Inquisition, the Catholic Church, and the Spanish language, among other legacies.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The rest of our day was in the Historic Center, which had been the Aztec \u00a0We also visited the 18th<\/sup> century Palace Nacional, now the president\u2019s palace, that had been the home of the 60 or so Spanish <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" January 2, 2019 I\u2019m breathless in Mexico City, and that\u2019s only partly because I\u2019m at 7200 feet, 19 degrees north of the Equator, and about 1600 miles from Bloomington. My physical state is partly due to what we\u2019ve seen and done the last day and a half. Carolyn has had a long fascination with pre-Columbian … Continue reading “Breathless in Mexico City\u2014Literally and Figuratively”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mexico-2019"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8758,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions\/8758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>capital, destroyed by the Spanish, who erected their colonial capital on the site.\u00a0 That included a monstrous cathedral (of course), the largest in Latin America.\u00a0 Built in the 18th<\/sup> century, it\u2019s in the baroque style I greatly enjoy, with an addition in a local style named for the architects that is even more over the top. Our guide said that every time there\u2019s an excavation, something new is found.\u00a0 The famous Aztec calendar (did you know it\u2019s about 6 feet in<\/a> diameter?) being one item, and Temple Mayor, the chief Aztec temple, being another now under excavation.\u00a0 Indeed, looking at the map of what\u2019s known, less that 5% of the historic sites have been excavated.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/a>Viceroys.\u00a0 The building houses spectacular murals by Diego Rivera, encapsulating his (mostly socialist\/Marxist) view of history.\u00a0 When Rockefeller commissioned him to draw a mural in the Rockefeller Center it had likenesses of Karl Marx; the Standard Oil baron paid his friend Rivera, but tore the mural down.\u00a0 The sketches included Mr.Polk\u2019s war (1846-7) and the bizarre interlude when the Archduke Maximilian of Austria was offered the Mexican throne in 1864 and lasted three years before he was deposed and executed, leaving behind the furniture in Chapultepec Castle that I\u2019ll tell more about tomorrow.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n