Cotzumalhuapa culture
The so-called Cotzumalhuapa culture (also Cotzumalguapa culture ) is named after the town of Santa Lucía Cotzumalguapa in the Escuintla Department in Guatemala . It essentially consists of the El Baúl , Bilbao and El Castillo sites and, in addition to the Monte Alto culture , Takalik Abaj and some smaller sites, belongs to the Mesoamerican Pacific cultures that stretch from Guatemala to Cara Sucia in El Salvador extend. The cultural landscape of Cotzumalhuapa was severely damaged by modern settlement activities and sugar cane cultivation .
location
The small town of Santa Lucía Cotzumalguapa is located about 85 km southwest of Guatemala City or Kaminaljuyú at about 500 m above sea level. d. M. on the southern slopes of the volcanoes - especially the 3,763 m high Volcán de Fuego - shaped highlands of Guatemala. The main discovery sites, the Fincas Bilbao and El Baúl , are about 3 to 5 km north of the town.
Research history
Drawings and descriptions by the Austrian traveler Dr. Habel, who visited the site in 1862, induced Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), the director of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, to visit Cotzumalhuapa in 1876 and to purchase some antiquities from Bilbao for the Berlin Museum. The reliefs of the stone slabs were sawn off to save weight, transported to the coast and loaded onto a ship. A block crashed into the port of Puerto San José and has not yet been recovered. The seven others came to Berlin via Stettin and for a long time adorned the staircase of the Dahlem Museum. For a number of years they have been placed in the Ethnological Museum Berlin (again added to steles) .
The British archaeologist Eric Thompson (1898–1975) was the first to discover the 10 km² main area and several secondary sites as far as El Salvador ( Cara Sucia ) - with the exception of Monte-Alto - at the end of the 1940s - combined into a cultural complex.
Attractions
architecture
Little can be said about the architecture of the sites, as all the facilities are covered by sugar cane fields and urban development. Only a few elevations still indicate former building complexes. A peculiarity of the Cotzumalhuapa culture were the cobbled streets discovered during excavations; the longest of them connected the Acropolis of El Baúl with that of Bilbao and measured about 2.5 km with a width of 11 m to 14 m. Even a wooden bridge, the length of which was about 33 m and whose stone pillar foundations, which are about 6 to 8 m apart, can still be seen today, was built.
Sculptures
The Cotzumalhuapa culture became famous for the independence and diversity of its sculptures, which include both relief steles and fully sculptural works of art dating from around 200 BC. Can be dated to AD 800. An essential characteristic of the Cotzumalhuapa monuments is - with one exception - the complete lack of dates and characters. The stylistic representation is also very inconsistent, so that some researchers believe that the immigration of the Nahuatl- speaking Pipilen from Mexico, who met an indigenous population who spoke another language and probably also thought differently, was partly responsible for the mix of styles. The most important steles are:
- El Baúl , stele 1
- Priest Royalty with Zeremonialmesser and early date in the long count of Maya (March 2, 37 n. Chr.)
- El Baúl, stele 5
- Two ball players with gloves (?); the winner standing with a coyote mask, the loser lying on the floor in front of him
- Bilbao , steles 1–4 (in Berlin)
- Ball players with wide yoke stones ( yugos ) around the hips and a cloth tied up between the legs; the heads are turned upwards; in the upper area a deity and a few round glyphs
literature
- Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos: Cotzumalhuapa . In: Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican cultures . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, ISBN 0-19-510815-9 .
- Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos: Cotzumalhuapa style. In Susan Evans: Archeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America Taylor & Francis, 2000.
- Lee Parsons: The Pacific Coast Cotzumalhuapa Region and Middle American Culture History. In: Negotiations of the XXXVIII. International Americanist Congress , Munich 1969.
- Glyn Daniel: Encyclopedia of Archeology 1996.
Web links
Coordinates: 14 ° 22 '52.8 " N , 91 ° 1' 7.1" W.