Produced to accompany a major exhibition of pre-Columbian objects from West Mexico, long considered a backwater on the periphery of the great civilizations of Mesoamerica, this richly illustrated volume documents the splendid accomplishments of these ancient people.
Editor Richard Townsend is the curator of African and Amerindian art at the Art Institute of Chicago and a recognized expert on Mesoamerica. He has assembled 14 essays by the leading archaeologists and art historians of West Mexico, which comprises the modern states of Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima, including the metropolis of Guadalajara.
The main regional center is at Teuchitlán in western Jalisco, where a complex social, economic, and political system flourished from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 800. Here the people of West Mexico (they are still nameless) erected large stepped pyramids crowned with temples, similar to those built by ancient peoples in more familiar parts of Mexico. In West Mexico, however, the pyramids are circular, as are the courts and platforms that surround them. Platform houses and ballcourts complete the Mesoamerican connection. Only in the last 20 years have archaeologists begun mapping these large ceremonial centers. They remain unexcavated.
It may be a new area for archaeologists, but looters have been busy in West Mexico for 100 years. They have pillaged shaft tombs from six to sixty feet deep in search of the intriguing ceramic figurines found in the burial chambers, and the presentation of these wonderful figurines in this volume shows us why. In fact, it was not until the 1980s that archaeologists found unlooted tombs.
Ancient West Mexico is a spectacular introduction to a long-neglected and fascinating part of ancient North America. It is an archaeological frontier that even the National Geographic Society leaves empty in its 1997 map of ancient Mexico-an omission that is about to change.
The book’s accompanying exhibit, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, moves to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on December 20 (see Events). -Mark Michel
