Postclassic Urbanism at Calixtlahuaca: Reconstructing the Unpublished Excavations of José García Payón

García Payón’s Excavations

José García Payón excavated at Calixtlahuaca between 1930 and 1938. As was common at that time, he concentrated his efforts on the monumental architecture of the site (Figure 2). Structure 3, a large four-stage circular pyramid dedicated to the wind god Ehecatl, is the best-known building (Figure 3, shown above, Figure 4). García Payón also excavated other religious structures at the site, including Structure 4 (a large rectangular temple) and an odd cross-shaped building decorated with tenoned stone skulls; these are part of Group B (Figure 5, shown below). García Payón excavated a large architectural complex, Structure 17 (Figure 6, Figure 7, shown below), that he wrongly identified as a "calmecac" (school). This complex, however, conforms precisely to the standard Aztec palace plan (Evans 1991; Smith 2003:139-145), and more likely was the city’s royal palace. He also excavated several smaller structures in Group C at Calixtlahuaca (known locally as "el Panteón;" see Figure 8, shown below), where he encountered rich burials and offerings with ceramic vessels, bronze objects, jewelry of greenstone, obsidian, and rock crystal, and other items. Similar burials with offerings were excavated in the plaza in front of Structure 3 (Figure 4). The only surviving illustration of the burials is an engraving shown here in Figure 9, taken from García Payón’s (1941b) brief article.

One offering, from either Structure 5 or Structure 6 in Group C (García Payón’s published descriptions are contradictory on this point) supposedly included a Roman figurine (García Payón 1961; Hristov and Genovés 1999). As I describe in my website: (http://www.albany.edu/~mesmith/tval/RomanFigurine.html), this object cannot be considered a valid or well-documented archaeological find; see also Schaaf and Wagner (2001).

José García Payón failed to adequately publish the results of his fieldwork at Calixtlahuaca. The most important of his publications are brief articles on ceramics and burials (García Payón 1941a, b). He published the first volume of a planned multi-volume report (García Payón 1936), but this book consists of ethnohistory and general information about the Toluca Valley, with next to nothing on the excavations. Just before his death in 1976, the State of México issued a reprint of the 1936 report (García Payón 1974). The historian Mario Colín Sánchez, Director of Cultural Patrimony for the State of México, located some of García Payón’s notes and text (Colín 1974), and turned them over to Leonardo Manrique and Wanda Tommasi de Magrelli to edit for publication, evidently not telling them exactly where he had found the material. They organized the material into three planned volumes to be published in the book series, "Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de México," of which Colín was the general editor. The first volume consisted of brief textual descriptions of excavations and architecture (García Payón 1979). The second, some maps and photographs of architecture, appeared two years later, shortly after the death of Tommasi (García Payón 1981). Manrique submitted the manuscript for the third volume–a series of over 100 hand-colored illustrations of artifacts–to Colín in early 1982 (García Payón n.d.). Shortly thereafter, Colín died and the publication series came to an abrupt halt. Manrique tells me that he has no idea what happened to the illustrations, and no one else seems to have searched for these until now.

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