An Archaeological Treasure Trove

Mexico City is a city full of museums, but without a doubt the greatest is the National Museum of Anthropology.  So, of course, that was on the itinerary of places for me to take Nancy and Fred.  This museum is unsurpassed in the entire world for its collection of artefacts from the pre-Hispanic civilizations of Mexico.  But it is also much too large to absorb in one visit.  So I gave Nancy and Fred a very abbreviated tour of some of the museum's highlights.

We began with the display on the Olmecs, the oldest civilization of Mexico.  The Olmecs are best known for the enormous stone heads which they carved.

We spent quite a bit of time looking at the treasures in the Mayan Hall.  Nancy and Fred already had some background on the Mayas, because a few years ago they traveled with me to the Yucatán and we visited the ruins of Uxmal.

Since we went to the archaeological site of Teotihuacán last week, of course we went to the Teotihuacán Hall.  It is dominated by a life size replica of a portion of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.

The centerpiece of the museum is the Mexica (Aztec) Hall.  A portion of the hall is under renovation.  (Probably for that reason admission to the museum was free.)  However we were able to see most of their collection of Aztec artefacts, including the most famous piece in the museum... the Aztec Sun Stone (erroneously called the Aztec Calendar because of the glyphs for the Aztec months which surround the image of the sun god).

Most visitors have seen the image of the sun stone on all sorts of souvenirs.  It's become something of a trademark for Mexico.  But most don't realize how enormous the sun stone really is.

Nancy poses in front of a replica of the headdress of the Aztec emperor.  (The original was sent to the Hapsburg king of Spain, and eventually ended up in a museum in Vienna, Austria.)

As impressive as the museum is, after a few hours, museum fatigue sets in, and having seen some of its highlights, we left and went to lunch.