by Zach Lindsey
I must’ve taken a wrong turn after the ruined church, because I’d been walking for nearly 20 minutes, the mean sun of central Mexico burning my neck.
I turned onto a trail I hoped would lead me back to the Atlanteans, and I saw thousands of red slivers in the dirt in front of me. They were ceramic potsherds, most no bigger than my thumb, all nearly a thousand years old. This was the evidence of the scope of the Toltecs, their city so large fields of its debris were scattered for kilometers around the stone ruins.
Their ceramics are so common out in these woods that these tiny shards don’t even interest professional archaeologists. But I was interested. I picked one up and held it. Before I put it back down, I thought of the person whose thumb must have slipped along the lip when it was made.
Tula (sometimes called Tollan) outside the present-day city of Tula de Allende a couple hours away from Mexico City, was once home to the Toltec people.
When Toltec potters worked en masse here, a great power had recently fallen, the city of Teotihuacan. Toltec leaders used the power vacuum in the region to become the new leaders.
Compared to the people of Teotihuacan, the Toltecs were a flash in the pan. Teotihuacan was at its height from 200 CE to 750, whereas Tula began to grow in 900 CE and by 1150 collapsed from environmental and political pressure. But the Toltecs influenced cultures as far apart as the Maya at Chichén Itzá and the Aztecs, and their idols and monuments brought confusion and wonder to early archaeologists.
That confusion is clear in the lasting name given to the sculptures on top of Pyramid B: Atlanteans.
There is something almost otherworldly about the sculptures. Ethnocentric archaeologists who found similar sculptures at Chichén Itzá couldn’t believe the locals had made them. Easier to believe they came from a lost civilization of Europeans, the fabled philosopher-kings of Atlantis. While we now know they weren’t made by some mystic drowned merfolk, the name stuck.
Their butterfly pectorals are an example of how cultural metaphors do not always transition. We may think of butterflies as gentle and peaceful, but to the Toltecs, they were a symbol of war.
The Toltecs loved war. They may have brought heart sacrifice to the Maya region; if that’s true, the Maya had human sacrifice before the Toltecs, but they didn’t remove the heart. They certainly introduced the Maya to Chac Mool, a conduit between humanity and the gods.
Toltecs likely placed human hearts removed from warriors captured in battle on the plate Chac Mool held on his belly. Then they burned them. They also introduced other symbolism, like the great serpent god Quetzalcoatl. The feathered serpent may have been an allusion to a legendary or real Toltec king.
They also introduced the tzompantli, the terror-inspiring wall of skulls that, like heads on a pike outside a medieval castle, was probably meant to put the fear of the state in enemies.
It must have worked, because the Toltecs had been elevated to the realm of legend by the time the Mexica (one part of the Aztec Alliance) arrived on the scene. Mexica nobility even claimed descent from the Toltecs as a way of proving how dangerous they were.
Compared to their predecessors the Teotihuacans, the Toltecs were no masters of pottery, despite the litter they left behind. Yet their masterful stonework inspired builders for a thousand miles around them. The old, deconsecrated temples they made still stand like sentinels staring down at contemporary Tula de Allende as though they’re still ready to send out the soldiers if necessary.
While stones have chipped away and columns have collapsed over centuries, the ghosts are still there and faithfully cared for by the folks at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). Even on the day I visited, INAH workers were out hauling dirt and reassembling collapsed stone.
Tula may be most important for the place it occupied in history, not what it was or who its people were. Some archaeologists even believe the Toltecs didn’t exist, that someone else lived here. Whoever they were, they rose after the fall of Teotihuacan. They inspired the Aztecs and helped alter the Maya government at Chichén Itzá.
It was its own land, a unique culture with a unique outlook on the world and unique problems. This city was once home to as many as 40,000 people, whose lives have been reduced to the litter they left and the influence they had.
Today, their banners, streamers, and rich feather decorations rotted away, organic paints long gone, it’s hard to imagine those lives. But, like all the great archaeological sites, it is possible to blink at the top of Pyramid B and remember that you’re looking out at the same mountain they looked at, with the same type of scrub brush and cacti clinging to the side of it. Or maybe, you’ll turn a corner at Tula like I did and be able to put your thumb where a Toltec once put theirs.
As for the colonial-era church which also sits on the site, well, after years of traveling Mexico I’ve learned that the Spanish imprint can be as beautiful as the indigenous imprint. But there is something nice about seeing just how ruined the church is in comparison with nearby stone structures that have survived longer and better. Just don’t take a left at that church.
If You Go:
- Tula is a great day trip out of Mexico City. Buses go there regularly, and a taxi driver can take you to the ruins, which, despite being quite isolated on a plateau, are surprisingly accessible from the city core.
- Bring water and lots of sunscreen. If you’ve just spent the last few days in Mexico City, you may be used to room-temperature weather, but Tula is at a lower elevation, flatter, and just plain hotter.
- Buy something from the souvenir vendors! They have some of the best vendors I’ve seen, selling things better by far than the weird medley of Maya imagery and American football symbols that show up at Chichén Itzá or the fairly bland objects most vendors at Teotihuacan sell.
- The museum is nice, but if you’re in a hurry, skip it in favor of the ruins. As I said, the Toltecs weren’t the greatest potters in Mesoamerica by any measure.
- It’s illegal to take anything from an archaeological site, even if there are thousands of potsherds here!
Zach Lindsey is an Irish-American English as a Second Language instructor and student of historical linguistics. He is interested in the way architecture, stonework, and murals communicate cultural values. You can see more photos of art and architecture he’s seen on his journeys on archaeogato.tumblr.com.
Photos by Zach Lindsey:
A view of Tula from the top of Pyramid B
The Atlanteans on top of Pyramid B
A snake with a skull emerging from its mouth
Columns at Tula
There are many good reasons to go to Cancún: a long, relaxing break from a stressful job, a way of visiting other cities in Quintana Roo and Yucatán like Tulúm or Mérida, a chance to 
There is one big clue, though: the pyramid at San Miguelito.
Curiously, this temple faces away from the other stone buildings at San Miguelito. Instead, it faces El Rey. Between the pyramid and El Rey, there may have been an uninterrupted stretch of houses and other structures. Unfortunately, “low level houses were not registered during the design and construction phase of the hotel zone during the seventies,” according to a National Institute of History and Anthropology (INAH) placard at San Miguelito.
Today, the ruins of El Rey are at kilometer 18, across the street (and yes past the golf course; try to keep your snickering and cynical commentary to yourself for a moment).
Most of these buildings as we see them date to the Postclassical era, but like most Maya structures, they were built in phases. The costa oriental temple had at least two construction phases. The pyramid at San Miguelito had at least three.
Quezada’s modest gallery is on the corner of the main street across from the historic, refurbished railroad line. As I enter, the artist, now in his early seventies, breezes in from the side room. Dressed in a faded tan cowboy hat, trim, medium height, bantamweight, looking fit as an Oklahoma rodeo wrangler, he welcomes me: “Buenas tardes, señor. Mi casa es su casa,” His rugged, suntanned face exudes a quiet humility and keen curiosity shaped by his many years of desert life. Later, he puts his arm around me, and Dick snaps my photo.
The pale sky-blue adobe walls in the front room are lined with ollas and vases, glazed in a rainbow of rust-red, brown, and eggshell hues and painted with intricate, geometric designs. Sunlight, streaming through the thin violet-blue curtains, casts an iridescent glow on them. I am mesmerized by their spiral, thin-walled shapes and meticulously painted and etched patterns.
My mind wanders as the room slowly fills with the lyrical beauty of Garcia’s baritone voice and guitar strumming. I gaze out the window. The heat glimmers over the parched, dust-colored land. Nothing seems to be alive except patches of creosote and agave clinging to the desert emptiness. How could such incredible artistic beauty come to exist in such a remote, hardscrabble place?
“The first time I saw those pieces,” Juan tells me in Spanish, “I knew I had found a hidden treasure. I knew that the ancient ones must have found the materials here.” Over many years, he has patiently experimented with different clays, pigments, drawing and firing techniques to make ollas or pots with the ancient culture’s iconography and design.
Like a tale out of the Wizard of Oz, it began in 1976 when MacCallum stopped off at a second-hand swap shop in the New Mexico border town of Deming where he bought three unsigned pots. Intrigued by their intricate beauty and wondering if they were pre-Columbian in origin, he embarked on an adventure south that would take him to Mata Ortiz and the unknown potter.
The homes, some humble brick adobes; others larger cinder-block buildings, resonate with an infectious warmth and vitality for work. Children breeze in and out as if flying on broomsticks. Pots and vases line oilcloth-covered tables. I look over the shoulders of men and women as they shape, polish and paint at tiny sunlit work stations. They shape the lower portion of the object in a plaster mold, place a single coil of clay atop it, and then by hand work the clay upwards to form their thin-walled bowls, jars, and pots.
Today, one of Quezada’s pots can sell for thousands of dollars. In 1999, he received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, Mexico’s highest award given to a living Mexican-born artist.
I had visited Ek Balam for the first time in 1995. I was on the way to Chichen Itza from Coba, on the old road. After passing the town of Valladolid, a dirt road led to this small site. It was called Ek Balam, Night Jaguar. I ended up there about midday when it was hot and humid, with no breeze at all. However, after driving all morning on a dirt road that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere and leading to nowhere, I spotted a small palapa hut. It was the ticket booth, and it looked deserted, just like everything else around us. When I stopped, an old Mayan man came out to the front of the hut. He was the caretaker of the site, or the ticket agent. I wished that I could speak Mayan, and his Spanish wasn’t much better than mine, so I felt like it was a missed opportunity to get to know someone interesting and to learn more about the place I was visiting from a local. I purchased my ticket from him and he pointed me in the right direction and I set off to see this little-known site.
I realized that the tallest pile of rubble, overgrown with trees, was a good sized pyramid. Although steep, with a barely visible trail on it, I climbed to its top. It was a real challenge for me since there were not even tall enough trees growing on it to shade me from the scorching sun. In spite of it, I still made it to the top and was rewarded with a great view. I could only guess how important this site would have been with a structure this big. I fantasized on seeing the pyramid and its features, wondering what they were like. I noticed big pieces of cut stones, that I recognized as part of a building. As I learned in later years, I had been standing on top of the Acropolis, indeed the biggest structure at the site.
Years later, there I was standing on top of the same tall mound, but this time I had climbed it on a stairway, stopping along the way to marvel at the statues on its sides. The view from the top was pretty much the same though there were a lot more structures standing.
Ek Balam is a very compact site. Although it was a larger city, only the center of it, the main plaza has been excavated, which covers about one square mile. This makes it very easy to walk, though. A large arch stands at the entrance of the city, with the remains of a sac-be going through it. The sac-be, or ancient Mayan road (translated as “white road”, due to the color of the limestone that it had been constructed from), connected Ek Balam to other sites, like Coba and Chichen Itza. When I passed through the arch, I felt like I had entered the ancient city.
The Acropolis is definitely one of the most impressive structure in all of the Yucatan, a palace and pyramid in one. Though not as tall as Nohuch Mul in Coba, it is much larger overall, measuring 480 ft in length, 180 ft in width and 96 ft in height. Since it has been excavated, it is definitely the most spectacular, with all of the intricately carved figures, unlike any other we’ve seen in all of Yucatan, standing on its walls. The palace has six levels, and at the entrance a monster-like figure, possibly a jaguar, with huge carved teeth is guarding the entrance to the Underworld, the place the Ancient Maya went after death.
Inside the pyramid is the tomb of a great ruler, Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’. Other than the jaguar, many other carved figures, some of the warriors, decorate the walls.
There is no Mayan site without at least one stelae, a large standing stone, filled with drawing and writing, and Ek Balam is no exception. The one here depicts a ruler, with the hieroglyphic writing around his figure, erected in honor of Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’. Writing in stone was very important to the Maya. They have erected stelae in every known site. It was a way for them to record history and preserve their past. They have also written codices or books, however, most of those didn’t survive, burned by the Spaniards or just disappeared in the jungle, so stelae are very important for the study the Mayan writing and history. They were usually erected to commemorate a moment in history, a moment important to someone, mostly to the rulers of the cities. Because of this, stelae have a figure of the ruler they are talking about, with the important dates in his life. They have the date of his birth, of his accession as a ruler, some important dates of his rule, and finally the date of his death or descend into the Underworld.
All photos by Jeff Fromm:
In San Ángel, the two artists fed, and bled, off each other. Medical problems plagued Frida, and her third pregnancy ended in yet another abortion. Diego had affairs, including one with Frida’s own sister, Cristina, resulting in a temporary separation. But Frida’s artistic and intellectual power also grew during this time, not only thanks to her husband, but also to the circle they drew around them. There, the surrealist André Breton recognized Frida’s talent and offered to show her work in Paris. Not long after, she gave her first solo exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery in New York City. The San Ángel house was an incubator for both Frida’s talent and her misery. The two went hand in hand, as she painted portrait after portrait of herself in the form of an invalid and scorned woman, sad and withering away just as her star began to grow. Yet, through all this, Frida was slowly, but surely, becoming recognized for something more than her marriage to Diego Rivera. She was an artist in her own right, standing on her own two, albeit crippled, feet.
Plaza San Jacinto is a popular gathering place, especially on Saturdays, when a giant arts and crafts market, known as El Bazaar Sábado, takes over. It’s a place to buy handcrafted jewelry and ceramics, wooden trinkets and textiles—giving off a flavor that’s a bit more ‘artisanal’ than the art you might find on the walls of Kahlo’s San Ángel house (now a gallery). Not that that’s a bad thing. Handicrafts (known as “artesania”) are a staple of Mexican culture, and influenced Frida greatly. Like Diego Rivera, she strongly believed in the connection between Mexico’s cultural past and its artistic present, and much of her inspiration (in color, dress and style) was derived from the work of the street artists and indigenous people who surrounded her. Many of the objects sold at San Ángel’s Saturday market are timeless, the very same things Frida must have walked past so many years ago: colorful skulls for Día de los Muertos, embroidered blouses, and molcajetes (mortar and pestles) made from the volcanic rock of nearby, smoking, Popocatépetl.
While Plaza San Jacinto is the neighborhood’s most popular outdoor space, the neighboring church (of the same name) provides a much more beautiful and calm place in which to rest. The Iglesia de San Jacinto was built in the 16th century, and feels almost lost in time. Both the building and its garden predate the Great Fire of London, with an architecture and sensibility that might be more at home in Italy, or France, than Mexico. The cloister feels Tuscan, the sanctuary Spanish. The garden is wonderfully wild, almost English in style, hidden behind large stone walls, yet easily accessible through both the church and a stone archway. It’s one of the most serene places in Mexico City, a beautiful spot to rest and contemplate, and begin to understand how truly ancient this country is, even in its colonial manifestations.
Frida’s painting, The Two Fridas, tackles that very same subject, and dates from the years in which she lived in San Ángel. In the double self-portrait, a European Frida holds the hand of an indigenous Mexican version of herself. Even more importantly, their bloodstreams are connected by an artery flowing from heart to heart, bleeding out one end. In many ways, The Two Fridas is about acceptance – of Kahlo’s ancestry, and of Mexico’s—though it’s also about struggle, both in her understanding of her own personal identity, and of her marriage. It’s no accident that Frida needs to hold her own hand in the picture. The Two Fridas was painted just as her marriage was falling apart, and she divorced Diego for the first time.
Despite the tragedy that surrounded their relationship, Frida’s San Ángel house is not an inherently sad place to visit. It’s architecturally interesting, and provides a hands-on, visceral glimpse into the two artists’ lives—a chance to see the furniture, books and giant papier maché dolls that filled Diego’s studio, and the ghosts that are left behind in Frida’s. Outside, tall cactuses grow like relics of a great pre-Columbian past, and purple Jacaranda trees frame Frida’s part of the building, which like her house in Coyoacán is painted a deep, vibrant blue. For all the pain and hardship she endured there, her resilience shines through.
