Looking back, my intellectual life seems to have been a succession of passions, some small, some larger. It began with butterflies and eventually settled on myriad facets of the world of the Aztecs and the native people of colonial Mexico. This is how it happened.

This paper describes Early Formative (3250–2700 b.p., uncalibrated) anthropomorphic figurines from the site of La Joya, located in the Tuxtla Mountains of southern Veracruz, Mexico. Although recovered within the region traditionally identified as the “Olmec Heartland,” the La Joya figurine collection diverges in some fundamental ways from other published Early Formative Gulf Olmec collections. While the torsos from La Joya generally reflect the poses, postures, and costumes noted at contemporaneous sites, the La Joya figurine heads display characteristics that rarely conform to the traditional “San Lorenzo” stylistic canons. Rather, the overwhelming majority of figurine heads are similar to the Trapiche figurines from north-central Veracruz. These differences suggest that myriad intra- and interregional connections characterized Early Formative occupation along the southern Gulf lowlands. This variation also raises concerns regarding the suitability of the San Lorenzo material as necessarily “representative” of Early Formative Gulf Olmec lifeways.

This study explores the identification and gender attribution of the “Great Goddess” of Teotihuacan through re-examining what purportedly constitutes feminine and masculine in these representations. Recent efforts to reattribute this deity's gender have not offered satisfactory re-interpretations, but instead reify a binary model of Western ideas of gender. Transcending this binary model, I propose that one of the key figures identified as female—the central figure from the Tepantitla mural at Teotihuacan—can better be said to show characteristics of a mixed gender, a tradition for which there is significant precedence in the Americas.

The introduction of European heraldry in the Americas created a special class of material culture and iconography that circulated widely on coins, paper, architecture, and textiles. More interestingly, its appropriation and use by indigenous communities has not received proper archaeological attention. In this paper I analyze the adoption of royal Spanish heraldry by Nahua political systems (altepetl) during the Colonial period, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. My primary goal is to understand the context, meaning, and social practices for three late colonial banners from eastern Guerrero—the Lienzos de Chiepetlan IV, V, and VI. I argue that these three banners can be treated as moveable pieces of a complex heraldic ensemble to form the full ornamented coat of arms of the Spanish king. These three banners permit us to compare and contrast indigenous narratives of allegiance and resistance to Spanish imperialism.

The British Museum's Aztec atlatl is one of their most famous Mesoamerican objects, yet it has not been studied as a weapon in light of current knowledge of spear-throwers, and the details necessary to do so have not been published. Close examination and experimental replication shows that although it is ornately decorated, it is a serviceable spear-thrower. While evidence of actual use of this specimen is ambiguous, we can at least accept the form as an example of working weapons of Contact period Mesoamerica. The actual effects and circumstances of atlatl use against the Spanish and others are difficult to judge from surviving accounts. The iconography of the decoration, as in other instances, associated this atlatl with elite warfare and deities of war and sacrifice.

The excavations of Frans Blom and Clarence Weiant at the small hilltop site of Moxviquil in the early 1950s represent one of the pioneering archaeological projects in highland Chiapas. The results of their excavations, which were minimally published, provide important data on one of the largest Late Classic-Early Postclassic communities in the region. In this paper, we reconsider Moxviquil in light of recent scholarship on Maya urbanism, and present new interpretations of the site as a small city that fulfilled a diversified set of urban functions for residents both within the monumental zone itself, and in the surrounding hinterland areas. Consistent with its likely role as the administrative center of a small, independent highland polity, the monumental center of Moxviquil likely served political, economic, and ritual functions; was an important nucleus of residential settlement; and supported a wide range of household-based craft production and food preparation activities.

The Sotuta pottery complex has been used in the archaeology of the northern Maya lowlands to identify the Terminal Classic period and cultural association with Chichen Itza. The Sotuta complex, however, is made up of many pottery types, the majority of which are inappropriate markers of elite sociopolitical history. It is argued here that Sotuta-complex slate wares developed out of previous local slate wares regardless of the elite sociopolitical changes taking place with the arrival of the Itza. The wares produced and distributed by commoners were independent of elites and have been artificially chained to questions of elite political expansion for which they are inappropriate correlates.

The mapping of the ancient city of Teotihuacan was an archaeological project of singular importance in the history of archaeology. In this paper, we discuss the origin and history of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (TMP) through a series of personal vignettes written by the project's leader, René Millon, which are put into larger context by Jeff Altschul, one of the many students who worked on the project. We examine the characteristics that led to the TMP's successes and its shortcomings and discuss lessons learned that may be of value to planning future big, complex archaeological projects. We argue that above all, a big project needs a big problem to solve. In the case of the TMP, the problem was the origin of the city. Marshaling a team of diverse talents, Millon and his colleagues were able to make many key decisions in ways that successfully overcame problems that had not been heretofore confronted by archaeologists. These decisions include the use of low-altitude aerial photography, the definition of sites to include nonliving urban spaces, the sampling of surface artifacts, strategic test excavations, computerized data management and sophisticated statistical analyses, and a unique manner of publication. Less successful was the project's record in publishing descriptive data. The project's success lay in its ability to take on an important problem and to follow through, even though some tasks required decades to complete and others remain to be completed.

This paper summarizes some accomplishments of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project, with particular attention to issues of accuracy and validity. I then describe experiences and lessons learned in creating electronic files derived from Mapping Project field records and collections. I sketch questions about the city and state of Teotihuacan that loom especially large in my own thinking. Finally, I list some specific field projects at Teotihuacan that I think should be given high priority, as well as opportunities with curated materials, records, and electronic files.

In the 1960s, the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (TMP) focused an ambitious, multiyear survey program on the pre-Columbian urban center of Teotihuacan. In addition to creating a highly detailed map, the TMP made systematic records of surface remains and collected nearly one million artifacts from roughly 5,000 provenience tracts. Taken together, the spatial, descriptive, and artifactual data collected by the TMP still constitutes one of the most extensive and most detailed records in existence for any ancient city. This paper characterizes and provides an update on TMP surface observations, particularly as they exist in digital format. Several analytical case studies illustrate substantive ways in which these data have been used in the decades since the TMP survey to investigate the culture and history of ancient Teotihuacan. The utility of extensive surface survey data for investigating key urban organizational elements such as neighborhoods and social districts is briefly considered, along with the growing importance of the TMP collections and records as increasingly large parts of Teotihuacan are lost to urban sprawl and destructive agricultural practices.

In this paper I focus on the regional surveys undertaken in 1960–1975—their development, implementation, key accomplishments, and major shortcomings. I also point to how resulting survey data and surface collections have provided the foundations for subsequent research on a variety of specific problems, sites, and locales, and how complementary historical and ethnographical studies have contributed to interpretations of pre-Columbian settlement patterns. I consider how off-site survey can, and should, complement the more extensive regional surveys that have been carried out in the past. While lamenting the archaeological record lost to modern development, in a more positive vein I suggest lines of productive future investigation that might still be undertaken to extend the significance of past results, evaluate a series of questions and hypotheses defined by the surveys, and help conserve archaeological sites and collections for future study.

A key component of archaeological research in the Basin of Mexico was a series of systematic regional surveys conducted between 1960 and 1975. This essay discusses efforts to finalize settlement data generated by those surveys, and preliminary analyses of the resulting dataset that include geographic information system applications to examine patterns of settlement over time. The paper begins by reviewing the surveys and the information they produced for more than 3,900 sites. Analyses of demographics, settlement hierarchies, and environmental patterning reveal periods of slow population increase and decrease that indicate no major demographic events, but noteworthy shifts in settlement types and environmental focus. Analyses of spatial patterning reveal evidence of considerable geographic shifts in settlement over time, probable widespread reliance on irrigation throughout much of the pre-Columbian basin, likely major shifts in adaptation to the central lake system in the region, and intraregional migration as a key demographic process in settlement patterning. Amid growing understanding of pre-Columbian settlement patterns in the Basin of Mexico, this paper also defines key research problems involving demographic mobility, the role of water control in adaptation and sociocultural evolution, and implications of changing environmental emphasis in settlement patterning.