I went to Mexico City, and this museum, for the first time this summer, and agree with the post: it's really an impressive collection, and certainly more than we could do in a day. This plus the Templo Mayor site in the middle of the city plus the Teotihuacan site ~an hour out of town made a great trio, and left me with so much better an understanding of Mesoamerican peoples than I had at the start.
I second the Templo Mayor - wasn't expecting much from the outside, but the layout and explanations in the main museum were second to none, one of my favourite museums i've visited
These pictures are fantastic, and I couldn't agree more about the museo antropología. I've been there three times and I'd love to go back. There were two things in particular that blew my mind the first time I visited:
There's an exhibit about the ancient city of Tenochtitlan, how it was built on top of a lake, the wild history of things that happened there, etc. It was only when I was almost done with the exhibit I realized [edit] Tenochtitlan is Mexico City, the place I had been for the past few days. It was hard to reconcile.
My main takeaway about the Aztecs from history class was that they were the victims of the Spanish conquistadores. That's true, but they have a fascinating backstory where they were the conquerors of other groups and did a variety of amazing and terrible things. I had a one-dimensional view of the region, and I had never even heard of some of the people that they had conquered.
I wonder if this is just a typo s/Teotihuacan/Tenochtitlan ?
Nowadays a significant portion of the lake Texcoco is absorbed in modern Mexico City.
This includes not only Tenochtitlan but also other cities in the Aztec empire like Tlacopan and Azcapozalco which are boroughs in Mexico City. But not all of them!
Teotihuacan and Texcoco, while nearby and connected in the same wider urban area are not part of Mexico City
> Teotihuacan and Texcoco, while nearby and connected in the same wider urban area are not part of Mexico City
Also worth mention: Teotihuacan was already an abandoned ruin almost 800 years before the Mexica (Aztecs) themselves rose to power.
And yet the name of the city is the one the Nahuatl-speaking Mexica gave it since the language and writing of the teotihuacanos remain almost completely unknown to us (and were unknown to the Mexica for that matter as well, although the Maya likely had some cultural memory of teotihuacan having existed as a society during both its period of dominance as well as that of the Mexica.
> where they were the conquerors of other groups and did a variety of amazing and terrible things
The level of ritualized cruelty that pre-Columbian Mexicans were inflicting on each other is really something. Political narratives in both directions clouds the issue, but I challenge anyone leaving a Mexican museum to not feel a bit squeamish.
Mexico City is a wonderful place to visit, if you stay in the nicer areas! (It's the biggest city in North America - there's a lot of both "nicer" and "not-nice" areas) I remember the Museo Soumaya being pretty spectacular when I was there a year ago, and Chapultepec Castle was pretty cool too.
Personally I didn't find the National Archeological Museum to be quite as spectacular as the feature article did, but it was certainly worth spending a few hours there! The restaurant on site was also worth a mention - it went the "authentic dishes from different regions of Mexico" route and did it quite well.
The museum building is and feels very 1960s, and the quality of the exhibits, lighting etc is quite uneven. But as the original article highlights, many of the works on display are astonishing.
Brit here that just visited CDMX. It's absolutely similar to a number of the Spanish palaces in feel/design, but also has some unique elements, such as the garden on the top floor. Plenty of signage in English and Spanish, explaining the history of the place too. It's right on the top of the hill, so on a good day you get an amazing view out over the city.
We went on a Saturday, and it was fairly busy, but the park the was absolutely buzzing with locals and generally had a chill party vibe to the whole area.
Ultimately, it depends how interesting you find castles and palaces - personally I love seeing different ones and comparing/contrasting to others I have visited, following the history of the development over time.
I found the castle forgettable, but the nicer areas of Mexico City are exceptionally pleasant. I took to describing it to people as looking and feeling like "the nicest European city you've ever been to"
As an aside, a pet peeve of mine is when people in pop culture portray the Maya with the Aztec sun stone, or any other such confusion between Mayans and Aztecs. They lived very far apart! It would be like confusing the French with the Czechs!
In fact, their languages are not known to be genetically related at all, unlike the Slavic and Romance languages, which are distantly related through Proto-Indo-European. So maybe we could say it would be like confusing the French with the Hungarians. :-)
Yes, but just like the Hungarians and the French, these two peoples also lived close together, and were culturally and socially involved with one another, even if they spoke completely unrelated languages. Its the same in India as well, there are about 3 different language families spoken in India, but they largely share the same cultural heritage.
As Spaniard and European I always think that what we did to the native Americans was atrocious and led to the lost of lots of knowledge and amazing cultures.
Something that is stuck in my mind is a visit to the Iglesia de Santo Tomás in Guatemala[1], I remember the guide explaining us how the Spaniards used to built Catholic churches on top of any place where the Mayas did their rituals. Now the building is used for Maya's rituals again. Having been raised catholic, culturally and personally, seeing that was a weird liberating feeling. Worth visiting BTW.
Christianity is actually a weird hybrid of Abrahamic religion and pre-existing graeco-roman traditions, and is so in a rather complex way, i.e it's not just absorbing a couple of rites here and there, but it also has roots in hybridation with mystery cults like the mysteries of Eleusis and the cult of Dionysus.
Good read: The Immortality Key, by Brian Murarescu.
The reason I said "true" and not "false" is that the church was very successful at rebranding the whole spiel to the point where the memory of the link was utterly removed from the collective awareness and only through digging and analysis we can reconstruct the story (and even then many people will just find it quite unbelievable).
Yes, it was atrocious, but humans are going to do human things. Cortez's conduct was not so different from how the Aztecs had conquered the region in the preceding 150 years. In any case, germs from Europe, Asia, and Africa would have wreaked havoc no matter what. The Americas would have had to be isolated until the discovery of vaccines.
Still, hard to imagine how much art, music, philosophy, world view in general was lost and where it would be today if American societies could have developed into nation-states.
The restaurant downstairs, the Sala Gastronómica, is also worth visiting. It's considered another gallery where traditional regional dishes are served up. I tried sautéed escamoles (ant eggs) here for the first time. Tasty!
One of my favorite museums that I've visited! One thing that particularly struck me were the figurines in handstand scorpion pose and other various yogic postures. It proves that the indigenous people had a movement culture, so much so that it revered poses like scorpion!
How many Americans are there in Mexico, and how many Mexicans are in the United States of America? Bonus points if you compare "legally" and "illegally" separately! I think that there's a lot of Americans that would take the "everyone goes back home" trade in a heartbeat.
(Complaining about tourists is a time honored tradition among locals everywhere, of course - it's just a bit ironic to me here)
