The Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan

By Claudia Brittenham

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The Templo Mayor, the principal temple of the Aztec empire, was home to many kinds of collections that together served to establish the real and symbolic primacy of the imperial center. Called the huey teocalli, or Great Temple, in Nahuatl, it lay at the heart of the capital city of Tenochtitlan. The Templo Mayor was a twin temple, its northern sanctuary dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc and its southern to the solar deity Huitzilopochtli (Figure 1; López Austin and López Luján 2009; López Luján 2019b; Matos Moctezuma 1988; 2002). It was rebuilt by successive emperors at least seven times between its founding c. 1325 CE and the Spanish invasion in 1519; the final stage of the temple is estimated to have been over 45 meters tall.

Figure 1. Model of the successive stages of construction of the Templo Mayor in the Museo del Templo Mayor. Photograph by Steven Zucker (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), via Flickr.

The Templo Mayor stood just to the north of the royal palace and the central marketplace of the Aztec capital, part of a walled ceremonial complex comprising numerous structures including other temples, altars, a skull rack, priests’ residences, and schools. Conquistador Hernán Cortés described the Sacred Precinct as a space “large enough to hold a town of four hundred inhabitants” (Cortés 2001 [1522]: 218; see also Cortés 2001 [1519]: 105-107; Sahagún 1950-1982 [1575-77]: Book 2, Appendix, 179-193; López Luján 2019b; Matos Moctezuma 2009; Umberger 1996:86-94; Zamora Corona 2021). After the fall of Tenochtitlan to the Spanish in 1521, the temple was razed to the ground.

Figure 2. The Templo Mayor. Codex Ixtlilxochitl, f. 112v, c. 1580. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrit Mexicain 65-71.

As a result of this destruction, almost none of the collections kept by the temple at the time of the Spanish invasion survive today. We know the latest stages of the Templo Mayor primarily through texts written by Indigenous and Spanish chroniclers during, and in the aftermath of, colonization (Figure 2; sources are compiled in Boone 1987; Dahlgren et al. 2009; León-Portilla 1987). Archaeology, by contrast, is the primary source for information about the earlier stages of the temple; as these buildings lay below ground level in 1521 they were not entirely destroyed when the temple was razed (Figure 3).  Excavations by the Proyecto Templo Mayor (Templo Mayor Project) and the Programa de Arqueología Urbana (Program of Urban Archaeology) over the past four decades have done much to enrich our picture, not just of the principal temple, but of the entire Templo Mayor complex. Yet there is sometimes a gap between textual sources describing temple collections and archaeological evidence for a rather distinct set of practices, often unseen or inaccessible, that survived the destruction of the Spanish invasion. Thus, while we can assume that the temple amassed and stored wealth of various kinds, many of them perishable, including textiles, featherwork, food, incense, and precious metals, few of these objects survive today and even fewer of them can be definitively associated with the Templo Mayor. We know even less about the collections of other temples in Tenochtitlan and elsewhere within the Aztec empire. In this essay, I will focus on three elements of collecting at the Templo Mayor: the accumulation of gods; the wealth buried in caches within the body of the building; and the ways that historical objects were incorporated into temple collections.

Figure 3. Staircases of successive reconstructions of the Templo Mayor, all of which were razed to ground level in 1521. Photograph by Steven Zucker (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), via Flickr.

Like temples around the world, the Templo Mayor complex was home to numerous god-images, whom the Aztecs considered to be living embodiments of their deities. As Cortés describes it:

“There are three rooms within this great temple for the principal idols, which are of remarkable size and stature and decorated with many designs and sculptures, both in stone and in wood. Within these rooms are other chapels, and the doors to them are very small.  Inside there is no light whatsoever; there only some of the priests may enter, for inside are the sculptured figures of the idols, although, as I have said, there are also many outside” (Cortés 2001 [1519]:106). 

But in addition to stone or wooden statues, Aztec gods were made present in other ways as well. The statue of Huitzilopochtli, the tutelary god of the Mexica (the rulers of the Aztec empire), was a perishable image, made yearly out of amaranth grain and then dressed in luxurious textiles and a feathered cape (Boone 1989:31-54; Durán 1971 [1576-1579]:70-89, 457-460; Sahagún 1950-1982 [1575-77]: Book 2, Chapters 24 and 34, 71-73, 141-150; Díaz del Castillo 2008 [1568/1632]:178). But even more precious was the tlaquimilloli, or sacred bundle, which contained relics of the god’s presence (Bassett 2014; Olivier 1995, 2006). Human god-embodiers, or teixiptlahuan (singular teixiptla), dressed in attributes of the god that might have come from temple storerooms, also moved within the Sacred Precinct confines and throughout the city (Bassett 2015:52-88, 130-161; Boone 1989:4-9; Clendinnen 1991:249-253; Hvidtfeldt 1958).

The Templo Mayor was not just a repository for images of deities worshipped by the Mexica.  Another important thing collected at the Templo Mayor were conquered deities. These gods were kept in a storehouse called the Coateocalli, or “Serpent Temple,” or sometimes just Coalcalco, “At the House of the Serpent” or Coatlan, “Among Serpents” (Durán 1994 [1581]: Chapter 58, 431-436; Sahagún 1950-1982 [1575-77]: Book 2, Appendix, 182; Dahlgren 2009:152, 159, 173, 196, 218). As described in the Spanish text of the Florentine Codex, “it was a room with bars like a jail cell, in it they enclosed all the gods of the towns that they had taken in war; they held them there like captives” (Sahagún 1975 [1575-1577]: Book 2, Appendix, 159).  What’s crucial is that these images, what we might now call statues, were not collected for their aesthetic or historical value as things. Instead, they were understood to be living deities whose identity was strongly tied to those conquered communities; they were treated not just as spoils of war, but as war captives, their presence serving as a surety for good behavior on the part of the conquered territories (see also Townsend 1982:36, 43, 71; Umberger 1996:94-96). Moreover, the collection of conquered gods in the Coateocalli served as a map and record of Aztec conquests.

Figure 4. Offering of greenstone beads and figures in a stone box from the Templo Mayor, reconstructed in the Museo del Templo Mayor. Photograph by Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Captive gods were not the only way that the empire was represented within the collections of the Templo Mayor.  Caches seeded throughout the body of the temple during its successive renovations also made the temple the symbolic center of empire—and indeed of the known world—through the accumulation of exotic materials that constitute another kind of collection (Figures 4-5). Over 200 offerings and caches have been excavated from the seven successive construction phases of the Templo Mayor and its surrounding structures (Broda 1987a, 1987b; López Luján 2005, 2020; Nagao 1985). Complex, layered accumulations of works of art and products of the natural world, these offerings arranged sands, shells, corals, plants, animal bodies, vessels, jewels, and sculptures made out of wood, stone, and resin in precise configurations designed to appeal to particular deities and symbolically recreate the order of the universe. Dedicatory caches were common in temples throughout Mesoamerica, but the scale of the Templo Mayor caches, as well as the variety of exotic materials contained within them, set them apart from other Aztec offerings (Guilliem Arroyo 2003; López Luján 2005: 8-11, 99-105, 212-213, 384-385n140). These unseen collections incorporated materials from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the limits of Aztec territory, casting the Templo Mayor as the center of the world. Because the Aztecs understood the earth as land floating on a primordial sea, the aquatic offerings also made the temple into a microcosm of the universe, contained within the capital city of Tenochtitlan, which, as an island in the middle of a lake, was also understood as a cosmic model (Broda 1987b).

Figure 5. Offering from the Templo Mayor, as reconstructed and displayed in the Museo del Templo Mayor. Photograph by Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

These foreign and exotic materials arrived at the Templo Mayor via multiple avenues. Some might have been paid as taxes or tribute to the Aztec state by subjugated territories, yet not all of the kinds of items deposited as offerings in the Templo Mayor appear in imperial taxation registers such as the Codex Mendoza (Berdan 2007; Berdan and Anawalt 1997; Brittenham 2022). Some items must have arrived by other mechanisms, perhaps requested as exceptional gifts in honor of a temple dedication, taken as spoils of war, or bought in the market (López Luján 2005:77-78; Solari 2007). Other goods might have come out of royal storehouses or been made using materials drawn from the animals in the royal zoos (Restall 2018:119-139; Solari 2007:239-247). For example, the Florentine Codex records that the feather cape for the god-image of Huitzilopochtli was made by featherworkers in the emperor’s own workshop (Sahagún 1950-1982 [1575-77]: Book 9, Chapter 20, 91; discussed in Hirth 2016:44-46). Even some of the supposedly “foreign” objects at the Templo Mayor may have been made in Tenochtitlan workshops in emulation of distant styles (Melgar Tisoc and Solís Ciriaco 2015).

Among the objects deposited in caches and offerings—or otherwise collected and displayed at the Templo Mayor—were a number of works of Mesoamerican antiquity, products of the Olmec, Teotihuacan, and Toltec cultures that had thrived centuries before the rise of the Aztec empire (Figure 6; López Luján 1989, 2002, 2013; López Luján and De Anda Rogel 2019; López Luján and López Austín 2009; Umberger 1987). Aztec people went looking for antiquities in the ruins of abandoned cities (Sahagún 1950-1982 [1575-77]: Book 10, Chapter 29, 165-168; Caplan 2021; Rojas Silva 2022), but also manufactured counterfeit or archaizing objects to supplement archaeological finds (Melgar Tisoc and Solís Ciriaco 2015).  These objects bolstered claims of legitimacy for the empire, whose leaders were relative newcomers in the Valley of Mexico.

Figure 6. Olmec-style mask from Offering 20, Templo Mayor, on display in the Museo del Templo Mayor. The Olmec thrived between 1200-400 BCE, well over a millennium before the rise of the Aztec empire.  Photograph by Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

­If Indigenous archaeology helped sustain Aztec power, modern excavations at the Templo Mayor have served a similar function for the modern Mexican nation-state. Long believed to have been completely destroyed and inaccessible underneath the Cathedral, the site of Templo Mayor was discovered just a block to the east of the Cathedral in 1978. Created to display the objects being excavated from the remains of the temple, the Museo del Templo Mayor (Templo Mayor Museum) was dedicated in 1987, and thus, after a long hiatus, the collections of the Templo Mayor now form the basis of a museum collection (Figure 7). The building was designed by architects Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Jorge Ramírez Campuzano, who also collaborated on the design of the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology) two decades earlier.

Figure 7. The Museo del Templo Mayor, with the excavated Templo Mayor the foreground. By GAED - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

After visitors first pass through the excavated temple grounds outside, the carefully choreographed route through the museum takes visitors up three levels on the south side of the building, past exhibits cataloging the history of the site, the nature of the offerings, and works associated with the Huitzilopochtli side of the temple; visitors then cross over, on the upper floor, to the northern side of the building, where they see objects excavated from the Tlaloc side of the temple, and then, as they descend, exhibitions of the plant and faunal remains excavated from the site just outside. On the western side of the building, glass windows overlook the excavations, and balconies within the structure allow visitors to look down on monolithic sculptures of the goddesses Coatlicue and Tlaltecuhtli that once stood at the foot of the temple staircases (Figure 8). A triumph of museography whose ritualized transit evokes key aspects of temple ritual half a millennium earlier, the museum was designed to showcase finds from the early years of excavation, but it has proved a challenge to accommodate new discoveries from more recent decades. Recently, the complex has been expanded by a new visitor center to the west that displays a carved pavement and other structures that were originally part of the Templo Mayor complex.  As excavations from the Templo Mayor continue to yield important new discoveries, these rich temple collections overflow the storehouses created to contain them today.

Figure 8  Interior of the Museo del Templo Mayor. Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Claudia Brittenham is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, with interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. Her next book, Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, will be published in 2023.