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The Offerings of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan. Revised edition. Leonardo López Luján, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.421 pp.
The excavation of the Aztec Templo Mayor was one of the most important archaeological projects in Latin America in the past few decades. The finding, by chance, of a major buried sculpture in downtown Mexico City in 1978 led to the discovery that the remains of this central temple of the Aztec empire-whose location was long known-were far better preserved than anticipated. A happy combination of Mexican political will and archaeological leadership by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and others led to a thorough multi-year excavation of great scope and quality, and fieldwork around the Templo Mayor continues to this day. Although much attention has rightly focused on the foundation walls of the great temple itself, the most abundant, complex, and spectacular findings have been the numerous buried offerings placed in and around the temple.
This book is a revised edition of a work first published in Mexico (in Spanish) in 1993, and then in English (by the University Press of Colorado) in 1994. There is a new preface by H. B. Nicholson, many new and improved illustrations, some minor corrections to the text, and some updating of citations and text in the extensive endnotes. As one of the most important scholarly books in English on the Templo Mayor excavations, it is good to have this work back in print, now in a paperback edition for the first time.
The opening chapters summarize the history...