Steam rising from an active volcano (far in the distance), a roadside billboard reminder that human trafficking is against the law, cacao beans drying on a patio . . . and of course, an archaeological site that boasts that it is “the place where it all began.” It’s been quite a day!
Yesterday, sitting outside Starbucks at the Mexico City airport, my head was full of Thomas Friedman’s thesis about the world being hot, flat and crowded . . . and specifically, I was thinking about the “flat” part. (I’m sure Friedman was not the first with this idea, but my mom was intrigued by his book a couple of years ago, so we talk about it a lot in my family!) Anyway, yes, it was true that I was in Mexico, but this airport wasn’t so different from the one in Denver . . . it even had teen-agers in I heart Justin [Bieber] t-shirts. I needed a passport for this?
Today, however, I’m thinking about the connectedness of the world across time, not across borders. We spent the day learning about an ancient settlement called Izapa, which flourished from about 250 BC right on up to the time of European conquest, with a few ups and downs and lots of changes along the way. So these people were not just pre-Columbian, they were pre-Olmec and pre-Mayan. What remains today (or at least what is uncovered today) are a dozen stone “stelae”—each about five feet tall and three feet wide. They sit in a field at the end of a rutted road through a cacao plantation, which really looks more wild than cultivated.
Thousands of years ago, this was a broad open-air plaza at the foot of a pyramidal, earthen mound. The mound is built to mimic the shape of a nearby volcano, and if you’re here on a summer evening, you can apparently see that Venus seems to rise straight out of the volcano—and thus straight out of the pyramid. And scattered (well actually, deliberately lined up with astrological features and square lines) around the edges of the space are the stelae.
This one's in a museum in Tapachula, which houses many of the stelae with more distinct carvings.
So we heard the story of the day of creation . . . August 14th . . . and learned about the animals and people depicted in the ancient carvings, but for me the highlight was when a group of kids from Tapachula on an outing with their family stopped to ask if we were Americans : ) They tried out some English on us, then Nichole got to talking with them about why they were visiting this place today. Their answer boiled down to “because it’s where we come from.” Imagine, visiting these stones and knowing they were made by your people . . . or maybe knowing that all people are our people . . . --Kris
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