Artifact Hunting

The following pictures show a memorable excursion with a friend named Carlos and his sister Nataly to a town 40 minutes outside of Puebla named Cuatinchan. Like so many areas in the valley of Mexico, the region has at least a thousand years of inhabited history. We searched for traces of those who came before.

Shards of pottery and fragments of obsidian blades are everywhere.

First find: an arrowhead!!

We simply trudged through plowed fields hoping that fresh artifacts would appear in the upturned earth. Advantage: chance at a find. Disadvantage: most things were broken. Notice the town with the prominent ex-convent from the colonial period.

Traces of ancestors found in petroglyphs in a dry stream bed.

Apparently, these people knew birds.

A true treasure washed down the stream bed! It is broken at the base. As we imagined what could have been the lower portion (a snake? a totem?), Stephen found it about 15 yards away. It tapers to a point like a golf tee. This would have been a decorative pendant of some Cuatinchanian maybe a thousand years ago. We do not know what kind of stone it is made of.

Ahead on the trail, Carlos spotted a small wildcat scurry into this cave.

Unfortunately uncaptured by the camera, Stephen made the find of the day: a jade face pendant about the size of a fifty cent piece. Joseph also found a nice arrowhead and I found a broken grinding stone for a metate. All of us found plentiful fragments of obsidian blades.

Then we toured the ex-convent with rare access to the bell towers and a narrow catwalk circumscribing the buiding.

Spiral staircase!

It was a long ways down from the catwalk.

This was as far as they dared venture onto the catwalk:)