Notes #2

The Aztecs Blood and Glory

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- "Before the fall of the Aztec Empire, the four-tiered Great Pyramid rose to a height of 115 feet in the city's central ceremonial precinct; twin shrines capped its summit, one blue, for the god Tlaloc, and the other red and black, for the Aztecs patron god, Huitzilopochtli. The pyramid served as a temple, but it was more than that. It was a man-made sacred mountain and a venue for human sacrifices, martial triumphs and coronations. Succeeding rulers enlarged the Great Pyramid by expanding or building a masonry envelope around the preexisting structure, burying art, artifacts and caches of votive offerings inside." (Hofstadter)
-this shows that they didn't need the influence of the Europeans religion, they were capable of getting by by themselves with their own religion.

-Matos Moctezuma and his team of archaeologists, biologists, chemists, historians and anthropologists found a kind of encapsulation of Aztec material culture: thousands of objects--ceramics, masses of seashells and coral species, jewelry and mother-of-pearl figurines, model-size canoes and an effigy containing the seeds of all the major cultivated plants of the region. (Hofstadter)
-from a modern archeologist's find, shows again that they could get by without the Europeans.

- "This discovery led to the unearthing of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. The excavation, carried out under the direction of archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, yielded an undreamed-of trove of art, artifacts, ritual offerings and human remains." (Hofstadter)
-from an archeologist's find