Back to Xochicalco

In Mexico, we have the great luck to live among vestiges of long-gone cultures, some that were conquered and in some way got adapted and survived into our modern, mostly-West-Europan-derived society, and some that thrived but disappeared many more centuries ago. And although not everybody feels the same way, in my family we have always enjoyed visiting archaeological sites — when I was a child and today.

Some of the regulars that follow this blog (or its syndicators) will remember Xochicalco, as it was the destination we chose for the daytrip back in the day, in DebConf6 (May 2006).

This weekend, my mother suggested us to go there, as being Winter, the weather is quite pleasant — we were at about 25°C, and by the hottest months of the year it can easily reach 10° more; the place lacks shadows, like most archaeological sites, and it does get quite tiring nevertheless!

Xochicalco is quite unique among our archaeological sites, as it was built as a conference city: people came from cultures spanning all of Mesoamerica to debate and homogeneize the calendars used in the region. The first photo I shared here is by the Quetzalcóatl temple, where each of the four sides shows people from different cultures (the styles in which they are depicted follow their local self-representations), encodes equivalent dates in the different calendaric systems, and are located along representationsof the God of knowledge, the feathered serpent, Quetzalcóatl.

It was a very nice day out. And, of course, it brought back memories of my favorite conference visiting the site of a very important conference 😉