The Templo Mayor offerings as vehicles of enacted relations with alterity

The term Bilderfahrzeuge—coined by Aby Warburg—which translates in a double sense as ‘image vehicle and traveler,’ provides a fertile ground to explore the Mesoamerican past by considering the mobility of images/objects, commodities, and with them the circulation and transmission of practices, knowledge and ideas across time, space, cultures and media.

Warburg accomplished to articulate the notion of the ‘migration of images’ in a paradigmatic manner as Bildatlas. It is a thought-provoking model to reflect upon the corpus of diverse ‘things’ found in copious archaeological contexts that attest contacts between distant places within (and beyond) Mesoamerica: certain materials (e.g. jade, turquoise, shells, metal[work]s), ceramics, and other exotic goods, as well as specific motives and stylistic traits. Another decisive contribution of Warburg’s for the study of visual/material culture is his encounter with the Amerindian universe during his journey to the Hopi land, which proved to be a starting point for the anthropology of art by bringing together ‘art’ and ritual.

In this paper, the Templo Mayor offerings are posited as paradigmatic cases of ‘vehicles’ of assembled relations with many places. Amerindian rituals oftentimes are an exploration of alterity that demands from a person to undertake long travels and explore distant lands/seas in order to procure certain objects and/or exchange/trade goods. The materiality of objects obtained in this way is crucial since they materialize the established relations with those places (and persons). At the same time, it indicates the need to enact relations with entities from other worlds and cosmological domains.