Mexico City, 25 February 2011
In honour of a recent archeological discovery, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, a preeminent Mexican archeologist, will curate an exhibition entitled “Six Ancient Cities of Mesoamerica. Society and Environment”, hosted by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico.
In September 1992, lintels were excavated at the city-state of Tlatelolco and subsequently restored. The conditions in which these pieces were found rendered the restoration process extremely delicate. They had been immersed in a combination of mud and water for more than six hundred years. Luisa Mainou from the National Coordination of Cultural Heritage Conservation was in charge of restoring the lintels. Numerous time-consuming chemical tests had to be conducted in order to determine how to proceed without damaging the relics even further.
The exhibition introduces the spectator to Pre-Colombian civilisations by focusing on objects representing the society and environment of these people. The show includes more than four hundred Pre-Colombian objects from all the major civilisations in South America, such as the Teotihuacan, Palenque, Tenochtitlan and especially Tlatelolco. Each lintel is 190 to 235cm long, 50 to 60cm wide and 20 to 25cm thick. They weigh approximately 200kg. As few similar objects have been found, their age cannot be accurately determined but it is thought that they are five to eight hundred years old. Archeologists are trying to learn as much as possible from these objects in order to broaden our knowledge of Pre-Colombian civilisations.