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Fanning the Sacred Flame
Mesoamerican studies in honor of H. B. Nicholson
By Matthew A. Boxt, Brian Dervin Dillon University of Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2012 University of Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-161-3
CHAPTER 1
H. B. NICHOLSON AND THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL BUG
Eloise Quiñones Keber
In an earlier tribute to the scholarly life and accomplishments of H. B. Nicholson (1925–2007), emeritus professor of anthropology at UCLA, I surveyed his major contributions to the various Mesoamerican subfields of anthropology, archaeology, ethnohistory, art, and iconography (Quiñones Keber 2007). The present chapter offers another appraisal of Nicholson's scholarship in Mesoamerican, especially Aztec, studies. It highlights the seminal influence of archaeology in propelling his scholarly trajectory, in several cases recalling his own words as expressed in publications and conversations over the years.
Dr. Nicholson was especially renowned for his comprehensive knowledge of the Aztecs (Mexica, Nahua) of Central Mexico, who dominated this area of the late Precolumbian world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A thorough researcher and archivist; a prolific writer, moderator, and presenter of scholarly papers at numerous conferences in the United States, Mexico, and Europe; and a popular guest speaker, Nicholson was widely acknowledged as the most accomplished Aztec scholar of his time.
A professor at UCLA for thirty-five years, Nicholson trained over two dozen doctoral students in various areas of anthropology; beyond his own department he also served as a teacher and committee member for students specializing in Latin American history and art history. The esteem in which Nick (as he preferred to be called) was held by colleagues, students, and friends alike was evident in a symposium at UCLA in November 2004. The evening's dinner and spirited "roast" brought back memories, hearty laughs, and an overall feeling of appreciation for having had the opportunity to share so many memorable times with the guest of honor.
Nicholson's expertise was not confined to the Aztecs. It reached back three millennia in Mesoamerica to the earliest Formative Period and extended across eons and oceans to the Old World civilizations as well. As he stated in a short introduction to the Mesoamerican section of the Land catalog of Precolumbian art (Nicholson 1979f), Nick was convinced that "Mesoamerica, taken as a whole, deserves to be ranked as one of the great early civilizations of mankind, fully comparable in its overall cultural achievement to Old World civilizations such as those in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Anatolian-Aegean area, India, and China."
His travels to several of these distant centers of civilizations, particularly in the Middle East, reflected his broad view of human history. He was thus able to assess the accomplishments of the Aztecs of Mexico within a broad comparative framework. Nicholson was blessed with a near-photographic memory of everything he had read or seen, his knowledge of things Mexican and Aztec was encyclopedic, and his astonishing erudition made him a captivating lecturer. His daunting intellectual energy and dogged attention to detail resulted in a lengthy list of publications, commendable not only for their breadth and depth but also for their meticulous research.
IT HELPS TO GET AN EARLY START
H. B. Nicholson had many strengths as a scholar, but underlying them all was a fascination with Mexico itself, its history, archaeology, and art. He was born in La Jolla, California, but his parents soon relocated to the historic city of San Diego, Alta California's first Spanish settlement. Founded in 1769, it prospered as a Mexican pueblo, mission, and presidio until becoming part of the United States. Early on, Nick was familiar with San Diego's rich Spanish and Mexican heritage, and as a boy he enjoyed crossing the nearby border into Mexico with his family for short visits. He loved his hometown and relished hiking in the rugged San Diego back country and swimming in the Pacific Ocean, especially at his favorite spot, La Jolla Cove. Nicholson had the good fortune to attend schools within biking and sometimes walking distance of Balboa Park, the city's cultural center. He recalled that the yard of his elementary school pushed up against San Diego's world-famous zoo, through which he and his pals sometimes took unauthorized shortcuts on their way home.
Balboa Park also housed the Museum of Man, then called the San Diego Museum. The edifice was built in a revival Spanish Colonial style for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, which was organized to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal. Originally intended as a temporary construction to house exhibitions, the museum was one of a group of lavishly decorated buildings that went on to have second lives as cultural institutions. In "Reminiscences: The San Diego Museum of Man and Balboa Park in the 1930s and 1940s" (Nicholson 1993), included in a volume of essays on Aztec studies dedicated to him, Nick looked back at the decisive impact these local surroundings had on him as a child. Here "to a large extent is where it all began, where my interest in the culture history of the area now called Mesoamerica was first ignited" (ibid.: 111). As he further recalled in this autobiographical essay, what first attracted his attention on early visits to the museum were the life-size casts of monumental stelae, zoomorphs, and altars from the Maya center of Quiriguá, Guatemala — left over from the 1915 exhibition — as well as impressive painted views of six Maya sites by the artist Carlos Vierra. He was also captivated by full-scale replicas of feathered serpent columns from the stepped pyramid at Chichén Itzá (the "Castillo"), scale models of this structure and of the House of the Governor at Uxmal, and replicas of other Maya hieroglyphs and relief carvings.
Then, in 1935–1936, during another international exposition held at Balboa Park, the California-Pacific International Exposition, two other pivotal events further determined the direction of his life: a compelling lantern-slide lecture on the "fair god" Quetzalcoatl delivered by a young speaker and a dramatic musical staged in an ancient Maya setting. Thus, by about age eleven, the young Nicholson had acquired what would become an abiding fascination with Mexico, Mesoamerican archaeology, and Quetzalcoatl — subjects that would fuel his scholarship for a lifetime. Nick had indeed been "bitten by the archaeological bug." The bespectacled, trowel-carrying self-caricature of himself as a future archaeologist that he drew around this time remained tacked to the door of S-14, his subterranean office in Haines Hall, until he retired in 1991 (figure 1.1).
Young Nicholson's interest in the ancient Aztecs and Maya was also heightened by the evocative black-and-white Keith Henderson drawings embellishing the 1934 edition of William Prescott's Conquest of Mexico (Boxt and Dillon, this volume). In San Diego's public libraries he tracked down well-illustrated articles on Maya archaeology from the National Geographic written by well-known Mayanists, as well as editions of the various proceedings of the International Congress of Americanists; he was especially fond of two popular publications by Lewis Spence: Myths of Mexico and Peru (1913) and The Gods of Mexico (1923). He recalled that he took out the 1923 Spence volume on so many occasions that by the time he graduated from high school he could quote it almost verbatim. He later credited the beginning of his lifelong interest in Aztec religion and iconography to this little book. As his interests progressively coalesced around Aztec culture, beginning at age sixteen (figure 1.2) Nicholson began a correspondence with George Vaillant, whose Aztecs of Mexico appeared in 1941.
BERKELEY AND HARVARD: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EDUCATION
After graduating early from high school, Nicholson attended UC Berkeley for a semester before volunteering for the US Army in 1943. After a year and a half of training, he saw combat in Germany and was sent to the Philippines after V.E. Day. He was discharged in 1946 and in the summer of that year made his first momentous trip to Mexico City. His first destination was the Salón de los Monolítos in Mexico's old National Museum of Anthropology (then housed off the Zócalo on Moneda Street), today the Museo Nacional de las Culturas. Profoundly moved by this long-awaited opportunity to view firsthand the museum's outstanding collection of Aztec sculpture, Nicholson spent days photographing the pieces and taking copious notes. He also met again with ethnohistorian Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, whom he had encountered earlier at Berkeley and who introduced him to Alfonso Caso, Mexico's premier archaeologist and scholar. Nick was familiar with their work and admired their accomplishments, as well as those of Robert Barlow, then doing both archaeological excavations at Tlatelolco and intensive studies of Aztec history with an emphasis on documentary sources.
In the fall of 1946 Nicholson returned to UC Berkeley. He had many outstanding teachers there, but none impressed him more than the Andeanist John H. Rowe, whom he recalled as a model of thorough and exemplary archaeological and historical scholarship. Nick obtained his BA in anthropology in 1949, then took an academic detour, spending three years at Boalt Hall, Berkeley's School of Law. While he completed his legal studies, they lacked the appeal of the Aztecs, and Nick claimed to have kept his sanity during those dry years by spending most of his time in the library reading his way through the voluminous publications of Eduard Seler in the original German. This turn-of-the-century polymath provided another early model of dauntingly comprehensive and critical scholarship. Nick came to recognize the limitations of the Spence books, some of whose data and interpretations were derived from Seler's work. Although he granted the usefulness of such books in translating and popularizing publications in foreign languages, he became acutely aware of their diluted and uncritical nature, along with their errors of fact. It may have been such a realization that led him to begin to dig deep into all the documentation available in an effort to seek out for himself the primary sources on the Aztecs in their original languages. As he later stated in a letter, "Moving beyond Seler, I went on to deal directly with the primary sources in Spanish and Nahuatl, my own research culminating in various articles in scholarly journals, beginning in 1954" (personal communication, 1983).
After completing his law degree in 1952, Nick made a career-altering decision to return to anthropology and enrolled in doctoral study at Harvard University. While there, he was able to interact with an outstanding group of fellow students as well as with Maya scholars such as Eric Thompson and Tania Proskouriakoff, who were attached to the Carnegie Institution of Washington next door to Harvard's Peabody Museum. Guided by his mentor, Gordon R. Willey, he also undertook his first archaeological excavations at Point Barrow, Alaska, in 1953 (figure 1.3) and in Puerto Rico in 1954.
In 1955, having chosen a dissertation topic probing the historicity of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, the legendary lord of the Toltecs of Tollan, Nicholson spent nearly a year of doctoral research in Mexico. He traveled widely throughout the country, visiting numerous archaeological sites and museums and extensively documenting what he saw with black-and-white photographic prints and later with color slides as well. Having exhausted the Berkeley and Harvard libraries' holdings on the Aztecs and Toltecs, he next turned his sights on Mexican repositories. Even at this early stage of his career, he began to make his mark as a formidable researcher. He conducted extensive archival work in museums and libraries, immersing himself not only in primary documents but also in the full range of secondary scholarship then available, taking voluminous notes and obtaining microfilms and copies wherever possible. Throughout his life, Nick greatly enjoyed the give and take of scholarly exchange. In Mexico he interacted widely with Mexican and other visiting scholars, attending discussion groups and conferences and forming many lifelong friendships.
UCLA: DIGGING DEEPER
While still pursuing his dissertation research in Mexico, in 1956 Nick was interviewed by Clement W. Meighan for a position in UCLA's Anthropology and Sociology Department. This opportunity had resulted from the unexpected death of archaeologist George Brainerd. Nicholson was eventually offered the appointment contingent on his completing his dissertation within the year (figure 1.4). Nick managed to do this despite an exceedingly busy year, with a heavy teaching load and a summer field school to run in Utah.
Upon accepting the UCLA position, Nick also agreed to take over Brainerd's archaeological project at Cerro Portezuelo in Central Mexico, begun in 1954–1955. Located near the now-vanished shoreline of Lake Texcoco, the site had a long history, spanning the Classic and Postclassic Periods from approximately AD 350 to 1500. Beginning as a town within the orbit of the mighty Classic city of Teotihuacan, Cerro Portezuelo survived into the Aztec era. Eight boxes of information, now stored in the Fowler Museum at UCLA, contain records from several years of work at the site, beginning in 1957 under Nick's direction as principal investigator. He was assisted by various UCLA graduate students, some of whom completed dissertations based on research within this project. Among the holdings are "documentation, inventories, maps, photographs, artifact descriptions and analysis, field notes, correspondence, progress reports" (UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Cerro Portezuelo Archives 1954–1962). Analysis of some of the excavated materials was made possible in 1961 by a National Science Foundation Fellowship. In 1962 Clement Meighan conducted a brief surface survey of Cerro Portezuelo and the surrounding areas, and a second excavation in the area followed at the site of Chimalhuacán. Nick and Frederick Hicks coauthored a paper, "The Transition from Classic to Postclassic at Cerro Portezuelo, Valley of Mexico," interpreting some of this original research, for the International Congress of Americanists held in Mexico City in 1962 (Nicholson and Hicks 1964).
At UCLA Nick also collaborated with Meighan on an archaeological project in West Mexico. In his words:
The most important archaeological field project on which we collaborated, as Principal Investigators, was The Interrelationship of New World Cultures, A Coordinated Research Program of the Institute of Andean Research, Project A: Central Pacific Coast of Mexico, 1960–1962, financed by the National Science Foundation. A number of New World archaeologists, representing eight US and Latin American institutions, participated in a series of surveys and excavations along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Ecuador to test the hypothesis of a series of significant maritime/coastal cultural movements on an early or Formative temporal horizon ...
In three field seasons, we directed graduate student teams in a series of reconnaissances and excavations in this archaeologically little-known region, a logical follow-up to Clem's earlier excavations in 1956 and 1959 at sites near Peñitas and Amapa, Nayarit. A number of reports, papers, and monographs by both of us and our students resulted from this project. (Nicholson 1997: 4)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fanning the Sacred Flame by Matthew A. Boxt, Brian Dervin Dillon. Copyright © 2012 University of Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University of Press of Colorado.
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