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Excavation of Mexican site reveals decapitation of conquistadors
Mark Stevenson The Associated Press Published Friday, October 9, 2015 1:42AM EDT
Students stand on a temple at the Zultepec-Tecoaque archeological site in Tlaxcala state, Mexico Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015. (AP / Rebecca Blackwell)
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MEXICO CITY — Excavations at the site of one of the Spanish conquistadors'
worst defeats in Mexico are yielding new evidence about what happened when
the two cultures clashed — and a native people, at least temporarily, was in
control.
Faced with strange invaders accompanied by unknown animal species, the
inhabitants of an Aztec-allied town just east of Mexico City reacted with apparent
amazement when they captured a convoy of about 15 Spaniards, 45 foot soldiers
who included Cubans of African and Indian descent, women and 350 Indian
allies of the Spaniards, including Mayas and other groups.
According to artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin site, the inhabitants of
the town known as Texcocanos or Acolhuas carved clay figurines of the
unfamiliar races with their strange features, or forced the captives to carve them.
They then symbolically "decapitated" the figurines.
"We have figurines of blacks, of Europeans, that were then intentionally
decapitated," said Enrique Martinez, the government archaeologist leading this
year's round of excavations at the site, where explorations began in the 1990s.
Later, those in the convoy were apparently sacrificed and eaten.
The convoy was comprised of people sent from Cuba in a second expedition a
year after Hernan Cortes' initial landing in 1519 and was heading to the Aztec
capital with supplies and the conquerors' possessions. The ethnicity and gender
of those in the convoy were determined from their skull features.
Some place the number of people in the group as high as 550. Cortes had been
forced to leave the convoy on its own while trying to rescue his troops from an
uprising in what is now Mexico City.
Members of the captured convoy were held prisoner in door-less cells, where they
were fed over six months. Little by little, the town sacrificed, and apparently ate,
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the horses, men and women.
"The aim of the sacrifices ... was to ask the gods for protection from the strange
interlopers," the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a
statement.
But pigs brought by the Spaniards for food were apparently viewed with such
suspicion that they were killed whole and left uneaten. "The pigs were sacrificed
and hidden in a well, but there is no evidence that they were cooked," Martinez
said.
In contrast, the skeletons of the captured Europeans were torn apart and bore
cut marks indicating the meat was removed from the bones.
Some of the first European women to set foot in Mexico weren't treated
chivalrously. Along with the men, they were apparently kept in the walled-in
spaces for months, with food tossed in, perhaps through small windows. A find
last week indicates one woman was sacrificed in the town plaza, dismembered,
and then had the skull of a 1-year-old child, who apparently was sacrificed as well,
placed in her pelvis, for reasons that were probably symbolic and remain unclear.
While Spaniards later wrote accounts of the massacre that occurred in 1520, a
dark year for the conquistadors, archaeologists are finding things they didn't
mention.
"The interesting part is that the historical sources (mainly Spanish chroniclers)
didn't mention the presence of women in the convoy, and here we have a large
presence of women" among remains excavated so far, Martinez said.
Fifty 50 women and about 10 children are estimated to have been in the convoy,
and all were killed.
The Spaniards' goods were, on the whole, treated indifferently. A prized and
elaborate majolica plate from Europe was tossed into the wells as were the
Spaniards' jewelry and their spurs and stirrups, which were of no use to the
Indians. A horse's rib bone, however, was prized and carved into a musical
instrument.
"This seems to be even more spectacular information about an important event
of the Conquest ... about which we have very little historical documentation,"
wrote University of Florida archaeologist Susan Gillespie, who was not involved in
the project. "It does add new dimensions to the acts of resistance of the
indigenous people. There is the wrong-headed notion that many of them simply
capitulated to the more superior European forces. But it is the victors who write
the histories of war."
The bloodiness of the brief chapter of dominance by the indigenous group is
sealed in the second name of the Zultepec ruin site, Tecoaque, which means "the
place where they ate them" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language.
When Cortes' soldiers returned to the town, they found that townspeople had
strung the severed heads of captured Spaniards on a wooden "skull rack" next to
those of their horses, leading some to think the Indians believed that horse and
rider were one beast.
When Cortes learned what happened to his followers, he dispatched a punitive
expedition of troops to destroy the town, setting into motion a chain of events that
actually helped preserve it.
The inhabitants tried to hide all remains of the Spaniards by tossing them in
shallow wells and abandoned the town.
"They heard that he (Cortes) was coming for them, and what they did was hide
everything. If they hadn't done that, we wouldn't have found these things,"
Martinez said.
Cortes went on to conquer the Aztec capital in 1521.
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A worker clears the area around broken pottery lying in situ at the Zultepec-Tecoaque archeological site in Tlaxcala state, Mexico, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015. (AP / Rebecca Blackwell)
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