Terracing and Siting Cuyuxquihui

The site (Figure 1) sits on a flank of the Cerro Blanco. Builders sculpted the flank into a series of five terraces, moving from the lowest in the north, ascending regularly toward the south, where the final terrace opens out onto a large central plaza with a sandstone cliff on its eastern flank. On much of the western flank, a wall was built parallel to the steep 200 m decline toward the valley floor. This wall could have served both as a retaining wall to avoid landslides and as a defensive construction against attacks coming from the valley floor (Ruiz Gordillo Reference Ruiz Gordillo1991).

Figure 1.

Cuyuxquihui map, redrawn and modified after Ruiz Gordillo (Reference Ruiz Gordillo1992).

Figure 1 Long description

Architectural site plan of an unlabeled site or complex. The left side contains the label, Ball Court, placed above a long rectangular court shape. Near the ball court are two small rectangular blocks with interior markings. Below and to the right of the ball court area, the numbers 4 and 5 appear beside a small cluster of short rectangular shapes. Near the middle left, the number 1 appears beside a small square feature. Slightly to the right of that, the number 3 appears beside another small square feature. From the central area toward the right, the plan shows a long, narrow, connected layout made of straight line segments forming corridors and room like rectangles, with several turns and junctions. Farther right, a larger rectangular enclosure is shown with interior linework near its upper edge. A small separate rectangular element appears near the upper right. At the bottom left, a north indicator labeled N points left, indicating north is toward the left side of the plan. A scale bar is shown near the bottom left. No legend is visible.

The terracing along with the construction of the retaining wall would likely have demanded more human energy than any other public project associated with the creation of the site. The importance of terracing in the central area continues the focus seen at El Tajín during its final apogee phase (Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson, Evans and Webster2001). The area of Tajín Chico at El Tajín, to the north of the pyramid/plaza/ballcourt ceremonial district, was built into an artificially terraced hillside. The Tajín Chico area was the last to be developed at El Tajín and shows the same interest in large terracing projects that continually move a person up through terraces linked by monumental stairway entrances, as at Cuyuxquihui.

While the emphasis on retaining walls and terraces in the construction of elite space is similar at both late El Tajín and early Cuyuxquihui, the location of the site amid their respective landscapes is very different. As noted by a number of authors (Ruiz Gordillo Reference Ruiz Gordillo1986; Ruiz Gordillo and García García Reference Ruiz Gordillo and García García2011), Cuyuxquihui is a defensive hilltop site located on the flank of Cerro Blanco, 200 m above the Tecolutla plain, with a clear view of that plain. El Tajín, on the other hand, is nestled amid the rolling hills found between the Tecolutla and Cazones river drainages. Cuyuxquihui uses its elevation to manage access and to serve as a defensive measure, while El Tajín has no such advantage in managing access to the site.

Structure 1

Cuyuxquihui’s major monumental structures are found in the main plaza on the uppermost terrace. Structure 1, the most imposing structure at the site, sits on the western side of the main plaza (Figure 2). The building is approximately 40 m wide by 10 m high, which is smaller than the major pyramid at El Tajín, the Pyramid of the Niches. That said, it is by far the largest pyramid at Cuyuxquihui and is one of the largest known for the region during the period immediately after the fall of El Tajín. The building currently visible is built atop at least one previous building (Ruiz Gordillo Reference Ruiz Gordillo1992). In the ultimate phase the building was covered with a thick stucco and painted red with blue accents (Ruiz Gordillo Reference Ruiz Gordillo1986). Fine ceramics and lithics are associated with the building, as one would expect from the most imposing and centrally located pyramid at the site.

Figure 2.

Cuyuxquihui Structure 1. Photo by the author.

Perhaps most interesting from a material culture perspective is the ceramic tablet in Figure 3. The illustrated tablet is a composite made from the pieces of several different tablets found around Mound 1, suggesting that these tablets were deliberately fragmented (Ruiz Gordillo Reference Ruiz Gordillo1991). The tablets appear mold-made, which has a long tradition in small-scale ceramics in the region. The tablet iconography is some of the most complex at Cuyuxquihui, showing a figure facing the viewer with two large bunches of feathers emerging from the headdress. In the figure’s right hand (on the viewer’s left) is an elaborately plumed bird. The left hand holds a five-pronged device that is associated with a flowering object just below the hand. The human figure is seated on or in two conventionalized serpent heads facing one another, with stepped maws, circular eyes, and prominent scrolls along the back of the head. Close to these scrolls one can see rounded forms surmounted by two circles. The entire composition is circumscribed by circle motifs similar to the serpent eyes.

Figure 3.

Ceramic tablet from the environs of Structure 1, Postclassic period. Drawing by Daniela Koontz and used with permission.

Several iconographic elements of the small tablet may be compared with the Structure 4 Panel from El Tajín, an important work that was associated with the central ritual plaza at that site (Figure 4). The scroll-headed serpentine figures, the bundle of darts, and the surmounting feathers are all structurally similar. The central motif is very different, however: at Cuyuxquihui it is the seated human figure, while at El Tajín a raised banner or similar device stands in the center. The human actors in the El Tajín example are shown in profile and are all participating in the rites around the central standard (Koontz Reference Koontz2009:20–21; Ladrón de Guevara Reference Ladrón de Guevara2010:102–103). While many of the objects manipulated by both scenes are similar, the relationship of the viewer to the human actor(s) is not. At El Tajín the human actors are caught up in a complex narrative and relate to one another through profile presentation. The viewer is given access to the scene but is not implicated by any of the figures gazing out at the viewer. This is a typical narrative strategy at El Tajín during its florescence, with only a handful of exceptions found in the North Ballcourt program at the site. In the Cuyuxquihui tablets, the human manipulates many of the same power objects but appears frontally, with a direct gaze oriented toward the viewer. This arrangement is not typical at El Tajín in any medium. The significant differences between the context of a small mold-made ceramic plaque and a 1 m wide carved stone relief may have had something to do with the change of narrative presentation. The tablet is small and would have been examined by a small number of individuals in an intimate setting, while the public art of El Tajín was much larger in scale and meant for larger audiences. To find comparable public sculpture that has a similar frontality and direct gaze, one must go back to the Early Classic period in the Tecolutla Valley, when the elite of the region commemorated themselves with modest-sized stelae decorated with a frontal presentation of the ruler (Pascual Soto Reference Pascual Soto2006). Alternatively, Huastec sculptural traditions to the north using frontal presentation of rulers on monumental stone stelae, such as the stela from San José Tuxpan, would be roughly contemporary with the Cuyuxquihui plaque.

Figure 4.

Structure 4 Panel, El Tajín, late-Terminal Classic period. Drawing by Daniela Koontz and used with permission.

Structure 3

Structure 3 is a long, low platform that caps the central plaza to the south. The building went through three phases that account for the entire history of the site. At some undefined point a plain stela was erected near the center of the platform. In the first phase, the platform facade was decorated with murals of large red circles throughout. Entry was via a large stairway. The accompanying material culture was mainly Postclassic Totonac, with some late El Tajín materials mixed in. The second phase saw some of the murals covered over by the addition of three simple stairways, without alfardas. The third phase added alfardas to the stairways in a cruder building style than seen in earlier phases. This last phase was associated with cultural materials from the altiplano. These materials are very likely the physical evidence of the documented Mexica push toward the coast in 1465 and thereafter (Ruiz Gordillo Reference Ruiz Gordillo1991).

Structures 4–5

There is less to say about Structures 4 and 5, which close off the east side of the main plaza. This is due largely to the landslides from the steep slope of Cerro Blanco immediately above and to the east of the two structures. These landslides, which are dated by the Cuyuxquihui archaeological project to around AD 1500, are responsible for covering most of one of the paired structures and all of the other. Archaeologist Javier Omar Ruiz Gordillo was able to reveal a wall that connected the back of both structures, according to information provided at the site. He also noted that both structures were very similar in size and shape.

Ballcourt

Finally, we survey the ball court far to the south of the main plaza, an area that at this writing is completely covered in vegetation. From earlier plans and photographs it is clear that there was a traditional ball court alley flanked by the mirror-image side structures. There were no sculptures or other finds reported in conjunction with the court. The ballcourt measures 73 m in length, with a playing alley of 4 m. The placement of the monumental masonry ball court to the south of the main pyramid is like that at El Tajín. However, this is the only ballcourt known for Cuyuxquihui, while El Tajín had 11 courts in the central precinct and at least 17 in the greater urban area. This difference could be partially due to the greatly reduced scale on which the builders of Cuyuxquihui were working, but it may also have to do with the changing role of the ballgame in society and its function in elite hierarchies. Related to this latter point is the absence of ballgame paraphernalia like stone yokes and palmas at Cuyuxquihui, while these objects were integral to El Tajín ritualism in the preceding Classic and Epiclassic periods. It is interesting to note that archaeology at the nearby site of Santa Luisa produced a particularly fine example of the carved yoke type, buried in an elite context in the period just preceding the rise of Cuyuxquihui (Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson1970). These fine stone portable sculptures, obviously used to mark elite status, were no longer fabricated beginning in the period that marked Cuyuxquihui’s rise.

Final Considerations

What have we learned from this quick tour around what is now available to us of Cuyuxquihui? We are only beginning to sketch out the fundamental transformational processes occurring in the region around El Tajín as that polity declined. We can say that although sometimes cited as the inheritor of El Tajín’s role of regional capital, Cuyuxquihui is a much smaller site than its predecessor by any metric. This reduction in the size of the region’s power center maps onto the regional population decline during this period. Cuyuxquihui is more easily defensible than El Tajín, which may indicate an increase in elite warfare, as argued by some scholars for El Tajín’s last period, most recently and convincingly by Arturo Pascual Soto (Reference Pascual Soto2015) in his work on the Mound of the Building Columns. To explore this question, however, would require more data on the regional depopulation during this period.