Pyramid of the Plumed Serpent

I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that the “Ancient Americas” exhibition is, for me, a culmination of my interests over the past thirty-five years and, in one sense, a justification of them. From 1955 until 1963, I studied the relationship between temples and landscape in Greece, while, from 1964 until 1973, I worked on similar problems in the American Southwest and Mesoamerica. In 1975, I began to study French gardens and fortifications of the seventeenth century from the same point …

The Southwest touched my imagination when, as a college student in Nebraska in the early 1960s, I received a letter and some photographs from my friend Deane who had stopped in Arizona while traveling west; she described the towering rock formations around Sedona and the studio she was renting, once the residence of Surrealist artist Max Ernst, who left behind a yard still strewn with sculptural fragments. Among these was one that I was amazed to identify as the original for his famous 1948 …

About 2500 years ago the fertile adjoining valleys of Mexico, Puebla, Cuernavaca, and Toluca were already a metropolitan nucleus for the entire northern continent. Other regions in Oaxaca, on the southern Gulf Coast, and in Maya territory were in touch with central Mexico, giving and receiving each in its time. The dominant centre of ancient urban life eventually became the three high intermontane plateau valleys of central southern Mexico, in the quadrant bounded by Tula, Xochicalco, Cholula, …

Pre-Columbian studies have so far produced three different interpretive models or paradigms of the cultures that existed in ancient West Mexico before the rise of the Tarascan state in the Postclassic period. These models, which might be handily tagged “Daily Life in Marginal Villages,” “Shamanism,” and “Complex Society,” were developed successively, although the latter two models were more shifts of emphasis in research than explicit efforts to progress from a critique of an earlier model. …