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Huasteca calendar stone
Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 6:03 pm
by stan
Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 10:46 am
by War Arrow
I got couldn't find server on that one, although I looked at the one on the news page (which has a picture of the Aztec Calendar Stone from Tenochtitlan, which is a bit unhelpful). I'm ashamed to say I know next to nothing about the Huastecs. I'd assumed they were late arrivals in Mexico (700ad ish) but thinking about it, that doesn't really fit well with Huastecan belonging to the Macro-Mayan language group which arrived in Mexico much earlier, as I understand it. I know the Mexica borrowed a few of their Gods (Tlazolteotl and just possibly the big cheese Quetzalcoatl himself), plus they regarded them as genuinely weird. Duran (I think) describes the Huastecs as fierce warriors made all the more formidable by their practices of "piercing, fasts, and nudity". So the sum of my knowledge is "dangerous nudists with shaved pointy heads". I'm therefore looking forward to learning more.
The 600bc thing is amazing. It would seem to make them one of the most long-lived (presumably continuous) cultures in the Americas.