THIS ENGLISH TRANSLATION IS FROM THE ORIGINAL IN SPANISH
Introductión
Over three decades ago, in the winter of 1962, an elderly widow gave me shelter in the village of Santiago Xaltzintla, near the pass of Cortez. The woman, whose husband was killed in a water dispute, had been a slave before the Revolution; she still had the scars from the chains around one of her ankles. She never had any academic schooling nor any contact with any medium of electronic communication and as a result, her relationship with nature and her cleaving to her ancestral traditions were still very strong.In the evenings, we sat around the fire and drank atole; although we conversed in Spanish, she admitted to thinking in Nahuatl - like a metaphoric language allusive to the elements of nature, usually through botanical, zoomorphic or cosmological abstractions (nahualtocaitl)-. To her the volcano of Popocatepetl was a masculine, inherently violent, living organism, whose name was Gregorio, who had long before destroyed an area within the borders of three hills: Teteolotitla, Teoton, and Xaltepec. The lava and ash deposits were abundantly manifest. Before the awe-inspiring presence of Gregorio, the people petitioned requests in a cave on Teteolotitla, offering him white copal incense, chocolate, tobacco, and a black chicken.Making cosmic references, the elderly woman related that a solar phenomenon, observable from Teoton or from the slopes of Popocatepetl, would occur at the summit of La Malinche and designated the time in which the sun is vertical.
At that time, I didn't know what a zeniths passing was, nor was I particularly interested in astronomy, but with time, as my interest in archaeoastronomy grew, I concluded that those comments related to the winter solstice and its importance to the indigenous villages of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley.
In this form, rethinking the incalculable comments from the kind old woman, and acquainting ourselves to the study of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, the objective of the present study is to discuss the identification of several natural and cultural features that could serve as pre-Columbian points of reference with regards to solar phenomena, the layout of the cosmos and its degree of influence in the establishment of the human settlements of this region within the boundaries of the city of Cholula and the adjacent slopes of the Malinche, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl volcanoes.
The basis of our investigation is found in the close relation that has existed for millennia between the indigenous peoples and their natural surroundings, giving rise to a constant observation of nature and the conformity of their settlements to the geography and natural phenomena. The results of this work are mainly derived from constant observation and field measurements, as well as our participation in Workshop for Archaeoastronomy of the Institute of Historical Research of UNAM.
Every scrap of evidence that we come across in our study is described according to whether it is a natural geological attribute or an archaeological site, taking into account spatial configurations like the location and orientation of given points of reference, which in turn seem to indicate the existence of a premeditated spatial order or a complex of natural attributes and sites arranged geometrically. In particular, it appears to us that the landscape and details that we will discuss later, were artificially adapted to imitate the constellation of Orion. We hold that these spatial configurations represented sacred geography or ritual measuring of space.
Figure 1.The Puebla-Tlaxcala region with the sites treated in this study.
(Adapted from Garcia Cook, 1976:109)
