Ok but now I wanna know why West Mexico is ignored by other Mesoamerican archaeologists.
I didn’t even know that. Now I want to know.
It was a combination of factors. To start, West Mexico doesn’t have the same sort of monumental architecture that drew early archaeologists as opposed to places like Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Palenque, and Uxmal. That’s not to say that West Mexico doesn’t have monumental architecture, it’s just different and distributed differently.
Second, how the West was conquered and incorporated differed from other areas of Mesoamerica. The Purepecha largely surrendered after smallpox decimated their forces prior to a Spanish excursion. Like Tlaxcala, the allies of the Spanish, Michoacan is not heavily featured or focused upon because there were no large battles to capture the imaginations of readers of history because they fought alongside the Spanish rather than against them. That’s not to say that other West Mexican peoples didn’t fight the Spanish, the Mixton War and later Chichimec War can attest to that, but these wars didn’t involve the months long siege of an island city as it did with the Aztec nor the decades of conquest it took to just secure a foothold in the Yucatan as it did with the Maya.
Third, Mexico’s nationalism post-Revolution drew from the Aztecs (Mexico City as the seat of power) and the Maya (continued to resist Spanish and then Mexican rule) at the expense of ignoring other areas of Mexico like Tlaxcala (not West Mexico, but worth noting), Spain’s former allies, or Michoacan, which largely surrendered and then helped Spain conquer other areas.
Fourth, West Mexico was not immortalized in early works that enticed people’s imaginations like you have with Catherwood and Stephens exploring the Maya region. Lumholtz’s account of West Mexico, while a treasure trove of information for us today, didn’t have the drawings of temples covered by jungle or “mysterious” stone stela of long forgotten Maya rulers.
Fifth, unfortunately there just hasn’t been as much interest in West Mexico by archaeologists over the last century for a myriad of reasons. Few archaeologists means few professors to teach new generations about the area. Few archaeologists means less literature available that can be more difficult to find. Few archaeologists means less networking and collaboration with other archaeologists.
That being said, despite me lamenting about West Mexico there are gaps in coverage in eastern Mesoamerica that those working there just kind of…ignore. There’s comparatively little work published on Puebla and Tlaxcala despite their proximity to the Basin of Mexico, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Guanajuato, Querétaro, and Guerrero. West Mexico just happens to be the largest geographic area that is ignored/overlooked.
Huh. Interesting. And there’s still little interests in these areas?
It waxes and wanes. There was one annual conference for the Society for American Archaeology where two sessions focused on recent research in Michoacan. But last year’s conference had only one paper on Jalisco (probably related to the pandemic). Compare that to the Maya scholars that always have at least three sessions all about the Maya and a ton of other sessions that are a mix of Aztec, Maya, Teotihuacan, maybe Oaxaca, Tula, and the Olmec if we’re lucky.
All I can do as my part is continuing to do research in West Mexico, promoting other West Mexican research, and raising awareness of the region (which I like to do with memes).
I highly recommend checking out Michael Mathiowetz’s research which has been largely focused on the Postclassic connections between West Mexico (specifically the coastal Nayarit Aztatlan culture) and the U.S. Southwest (Ancestral Puebloans). His scholarship not only focuses on the exchange of material goods, such as cacao, bronze, feathers, and turquoise, but the exchange of ideas and iconography, such as a cult related to Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli and Xochipilli.
The last of the three illustrations I made last year for “Witchzine”
fanzine. The theme was “Witches’ Pharmacy/Healing Witches”, so the idea
of my illustrations was inspired by the preparation of a healing ritual.
