The History Blog

Two weapons thought to have been confiscated after an April 13, 1933 raid on Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s hideout in Joplin, Missouri will be going on the auction block at Mayo Auction in Kansas City on January 21. One is an 1897 model 12-gauge Winchester shotgun. The other is that classic of Prohibition and Depression-era criminality: a .45 caliber Thompson sub-machine gun, aka the Trench Broom, the Chicago Typewriter, or most famously, the Tommy gun.

The Joplin raid was what made Bonnie and Clyde famous. Before then they were small time local thieves and murderers. When the police organized the raid, they were just following up on complaints from neighbors about their loud, drunken parties and the occasional round of fire from a Browning Automatic Rifle. A total of five officers drove up to the hideout. They were no match for the hail of automatic bullets that came their way. The gang shot their way out, killing two of the officers.

They left all their stuff behind, including an impressive cache of weapons and several rolls of film. All the pictures you’ve seen of Bonnie and Clyde clowning around pointing guns at each other, of Bonnie chewing a cigar with her foot on the bumper of their car, came from those rolls of film. They were widely printed all over the country and new criminal superstars were born.

The sellers are Mark Lairmore and his sisters, the great-grandchildren of Milton L. Lairmore, a Tulsa police detective who had been wounded in the leg during the failed raid on Pretty Boy Floyd in Bixby, Oklahoma in 1932. Lairmore, who was captain of the Tulsa PD’s pistol team and in charge of the department arsenal, received the Tommy gun and Winchester from an unnamed police officer who seized them after the Joplin raid. This connection can’t be fully authenticated because there is no direct evidence of the weapons’ ownership trail from the Joplin raid to Lairmore.

There is good circumstantial evidence, however. On January 26, 1933, in Springfield, Missouri, The Barrow Gang kidnapped Officer Thomas Persell who had pulled them over because they were idling in their car on the side of the road and he suspected they were planning to steal cars (they were). They kept him for a while as they drove around looking to steal replacement parts for their Ford V-8, then let him go. The next day Persell told his story to the press. Among other things, he revealed that Bonnie had threatened him with a Tommy gun, and that Clyde had bragged about having stolen it in Ohio. There are newspaper accounts of the theft and the serial number of the Thompson, 4208, matches the one on the sub-machine gun stolen in Ohio.

Both guns have been on display at the Springfield Missouri Police Museum from 1973 until 2011. Once their father and grandfather died, the Lairmores decided to sell as they didn’t have the same sentimental connection to the weapons. Even with the unconfirmed Bonnie and Clyde history, both guns will appeal to collectors as specimens of historical weaponry in excellent condition.

Anyone wanting to buy the Tommy gun will have to apply for a permit from the ATF. It is a fully automatic weapon and fully operational. The sellers will only turn it over once the proper paperwork has been processed. The Winchester requires a simple federal gun permit because it’s not an automatic.

Regis Cursan, the pastry chef at London’s Nobu restaurant, was scanning the mud of the Thames bank near Putney bridge with his metal detector what he found a small bronze Roman coin. When he rubbed some of muck off, he saw the Roman numeral XIIII on one side and a figure on the other side that he at first thought was a goddess but turned out to be a couple having sex. It was not a coin after all, but rather a spintria, a 1st century token common in the Roman world which some experts believe was used to pay for the services of a prostitute.

This is the first one ever found in Britain which makes it an exciting discovery. Cursan has donated the token to the Museum of London, where it is currently on display.

“This is the perfect archaelogical object. It’s sexy and provocative in the best sense of the word,” said Caroline McDonald, museum curator.

“The lot of a Roman sex slave was not a happy one and objects like this can help the Museum of London provoke debates about issues that are relevant to the modern city and its visitors. Museums should engage with these more grown-up and sometimes less comfortable topics.”

Nice segue from titillated glee to somber reflection on the plight of sex slavery.

The thing is, we don’t know what those tokens bought exactly. The articles about this discovery lean heavily on the brothel token theory, that the numeral on the back represents a price paid maybe even for the specific act depicted on the front. That would be convenient in a mobile, multi-cultural, polyglot empire where prostitutes were slaves who could have come from anywhere and their clients from somewhere else entirely. No need to negotiate price or explain what you want in words; just buy the apposite token and exchange for services.

There could have been a scarier reason for the rise and fall of spintriae. Most of the ones discovered date to the reign of Tiberius. Suetonius says Tiberius was an avid prosecutor of laesa maiestas (literally “injured majesty,” called lese majesty in English after the French) cases. Crimes against the imperial dignity included carrying “a ring or coin stamped with his image into a privy or a brothel” so, the argument goes, a token brothel/toilet economy sprang up under Tiberius to save johns’ necks.

The problem with the brothel theory is that no ancient sources mention the existence of spintriae, and none of them have been found in any actual brothels. Pompeii, for instance, had one official brothel and an estimated 25 smaller ones operating from first floor flats above taverns and private homes. Plenty of spintriae have been found around town, none of them in the brothels.

Romans included explicitly erotic imagery in their daily lives. There are frescoes of people having varied and active sex in the baths at Pompeii. Mighty erect phalluses are everywhere, warding off bad luck. The spintriae could have been used as gambling chips, board game tokens, claim check tokens at the baths, at religious festivals (it’s no weirder than Mardi Gras beads, if you think about it) or handed out as naughty gift items. Martial describes showers of “lasciva numismata” (lascivious coins) raining down on the crowds at Domitian’s triumphal games (Epigrams, Book VIII:LXXVIII).

The late 12th century Buddhist temple complex of Banteay Chhmar (also known as the Citadel of the Cats) in Cambodia has been ill-treated by time, climate, war and looters. Banteay Chhmar is the fourth largest temple built during the Angkorian period. It was built 105 miles from the capital of Angkor in a desolate region of northwest Cambodia near the border with Thailand. It’s baking hot in the dry season, the roads are impassable during monsoon season and jungle vegetation thrives.

It was commissioned by King Jayavarman VII in honor of a Crown Prince, probably his son Indravarman. An inscription found at the site describes how four royal servants saved the prince’s life on two separate occasions. The inscription says they died protecting him and thus their images were placed in the four corners of the shrine. The temple is rich with bas-reliefs depicting deities, history and legend of Khmer culture. Angkor Wat has almost no bas-reliefs.

Despite its historical, religious and artistic importance, however, Banteay Chhmar’s remote location and climatological challenges resulted in eight centuries of neglect. The Khmer Rouge used it as a stronghold and mined the perimeter heavily. After the Khmer Rouge left, looters braved the minefields. In one such shameless and depraved act, Cambodian soldiers drove pickup trucks to the temple walls and used jackhammers to remove entire sections of the bas-relief. The theft was only discovered because by random coincidence a French expert who had worked on Banteay Chhmar found a section of the stolen wall in an antiques store in Thailand and called the cops.

In 2007, the KR mines were finally cleared which gave researchers and very adventurous tourists access to the site. The next year California-based Global Heritage Fund (GHF) began working with the local community under the aegis of Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture to conserve the crumbling structures. Their aim is not to put it all back together like new, but rather to address underlying structural issues and damaging plant growth and turn as many piles of stone blocks back into walls, temples and galleries as possible to ensure the long-term survival of this architectural marvel.

What they don’t want is to make Banteay Chhmar the new Angkor Wat, swarmed by a crushing average of 7,000 visitors a day. Right now Banteay Chhmar averages exactly two visitors a day. The local economy, already bolstered by the construction work on the temple, could benefit enormously from the temple’s becoming more popular, but not too popular.

Sustainable tourism is very much a priority for the Global Heritage Fund and for Banteay Chhmar Community-Based Tourism (CBT), an organization of local villagers dedicated to preservation of local heritage for the benefit of the people who live there. There are no hotels in the area, so if you want to visit the CBT has six homestays in Banteay Chhmar village where you can get a room for $7 a night, and you’ll know all that money stays with the villagers instead of lining Paris Hilton’s trust fund. Five bucks will get you entry to the entire temple complex including all the satellite temples over multiple days.

It’s that kind of local investment in the temple’s well-being that will keep it from becoming the victim of unscrupulous looters, tourist exploitation and its own harsh environment.

You can see footage of the conservation work being done on the temple and the marks looters left behind in this short video from the GHF:

If you have time on your hands, watch this fascinating lecture by Banteay Chhmar expert Dr. Olivier Cunin. He’s got architectural reconstructions of how the temple looked when first built and everything.

A stele from the collection of Norwegian businessman Martin Schoyen includes the clearest image of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II extant and the earliest images of the Great Ziggurat of Babylon, aka Etemenanki, the leading candidate for the Biblical Tower of Babel. This is one of only four known images of Nebuchadnezzar, and the other three are carved on cliff-faces in Lebanon and have been hard used by the elements. The stele shows the king in profile, wearing the conical hat of royalty, holding a staff in his left hand and an unknown object that might be a foundation nail or a scroll with plans for the tower in his right hand.

Nebuchadnezzar reigned over the Neo-Babylonian Empire between 605 B.C. and 562 B.C. During that time he restored and completed the great ziggurat which was first built by an earlier king at an indeterminate time (the Schoyen scholars say 1792-1750 B.C.) in honor of the god Marduk but had been damaged by the Assyrian King Sennacherib when he destroyed Babylon in 689 B.C. Restoration began under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar’s father Nabopolassar and was completed during the son’s reign 43 years later. Nebuchadnezzar boasts of his construction prowess on the stele, describing himself as the “great restorer and builder of holy places.”

“I mobilized (all) countries everywhere, (each and) every ruler (who) had been raised to prominence over all the people of the world (as one) loved by Marduk…” he wrote on the stele.

“I built their structures with bitumen and (baked brick throughout). I completed them, making (them gleam) bright as the (sun)…” (Translations by Professor Andrew George)

He illustrates his great accomplishment with carved images of the gloriously rebuilt Tower: one is a ground plan of the temple showing the outer walls and inner rooms, the other an elevation showing the front of the ziggurat with the relative proportions of each of the seven steps and the temple on top. Unambiguously labeled as “The house, the foundation of heaven and earth, the ziggurat in Babylon,” these are the only contemporary images of the tower known to exist.

The ziggurat was ill-used by subsequent conquerors. Cyrus the Great of Persia took Babylon in 538 B.C. and pulled down the three stair ramps so the tower couldn’t be used as a fortress. By the time Alexander the Great took over in 331 B.C., water damage penetrating through the torn down stair ramps had caused severe structural damage. Alexander planned to restore the foundation of heaven and earth, but when he returned the next year no work had been done so he ordered the ziggurat torn down and rebuilt. It was torn down, but he died before it could be rebuilt.

All we’ve got left now is the square base of the Great Ziggurat just south of Baghdad. It can still be seen from satellites.

The National Museum of Australia spent AUS$130,000 (hammer price AUS$111,000) to acquire a rare 1813 “holey dollar,” Australia’s first official minted currency, at the International Auction Galleries’ Australian & World Rare Coin auction on November 6th. There are only 300 or so holey dollars extant and this particular piece is one of only five which originated from Potosi, Bolivia. The rest are all Mexican silver.

The holey dollar was an ingenious solution to the severe shortage of coinage in the colony of New South Wales. Founded in 1788 by 1,487 British expatriates (778 of them convicts), the colony was so short on coin that rum was used as currency. The New South Wales Corps, the permanent local regiment that was supposed to maintain order, quickly became known as the Rum Corps due to their extra-legal control of the rum trade. In 1805 Governor William Bligh, the same William Bligh who had been captain of The Bounty until Fletcher Christian led a successful mutiny against him, tried to stop the Corps’ rum trade. The Corps responded with the Rum Rebellion of 1808, wherein William Bligh was forcibly deposed from yet another leadership position by underlings he could not control.

For the next two years the Corps ran the colony as they willed, until the arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810. He was tasked with arresting the leaders of the Rum Rebellion and reclaiming political and military control of the colony from the New South Wales Corps. In 1812 the British government sent Macquarie £10,000 in Spanish dollars. Heavy in pure silver and worth eight reales, these Spanish pieces of eight had been used worldwide for currency since they were first struck in 1497. In Australia in 1812 their worth was fixed at five shillings.

Instead of releasing them into general circulation where they would be spent on goods arriving on merchant trade ships from all over the world and thus leave the colony almost as quickly as they arrived, Macquarie decided to solve the currency crisis by making these Spanish dollars a New South Wales currency. In keeping with his liberal policy of appointing emancipists (freed or pardoned convicts) to government jobs, Macquarie hired convicted counterfeiter William Henshall to punch holes in the Spanish dollars and overstamp both the outer pieces and the inner plugs (known as “dumps”) as NSW currency.

Macquarie provided Henshall with a workshop in the basement of a building known as ‘The Factory’ to make the holey dollars and dumps. This building, used by government printer George Howe, was near the corner of Bridge and Loftus streets, by the eastern bank of the Tank Stream. It was effectively Australia’s first mint, with Henshall Australia’s first mint master.

Macquarie initially anticipated that the task of converting the 40,000 Spanish coins would take three months, but the project took over a year to complete. Henshall had to experiment with making the necessary machinery, which proved difficult. It seems that a drop hammer, as opposed to a screw press, was used to stamp the coins. Henshall stamped the coins with their new value and ‘NEW SOUTH WALES 1813′. He incorporated his ‘H’ initial into the spray of leaves of the counterstamp design and also inscribed his initial between the words ‘FIFTEEN’ and ‘PENCE’ on the dump reverse dies.

(The dump pictured above left is from a holey dollar cast of out a 1773 piece of eight in the State Library of New South Wales).

This move doubled the number of coins in circulation, increased their worth by 25% and ensured that the money would not leave the colony. The holey dollars and dumps remained in circulation from 1814 to 1822, when the government was able to supply sufficient sterling coinage to recall the holey ones. By 1829, most of the 40,000 holey dollars had been exchanged for legal tender. The government melted them down for bullion. Only a few collectors kept the holey dollars and dumps, which is why there are only 300 of the former left and about 1000 dumps.

The National Museum’s holey dollar will probably go on display in the Landmarks: People and Places across Australia gallery in 2013, along with other artifacts from the Macquarie era.

National Geographic has a fascinating feature story on an excavation that has literally struck gold, and huge amounts, in a 1200-year-old cemetery of the Sitio Conte peoples in Panama. Led by archaeologist Julia Mayo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, the team began excavating the El Caño site in 2005 and by 2010 had found the gold-packed burial of a chieftain. That was just the beginning.

The team returned last year during the January-to-April dry season and unearthed a second burial every bit as rich as the first. Bearing two gold breastplates in front, two in back, four arm cuffs, and a luminous emerald, the deceased was surely another supreme chief. Near him lay a baby similarly adorned in gold, most likely his son. Beneath both of them stretched a layer of tangled human skeletons, possibly sacrificed slaves or war captives. Radiocarbon tests would date the burials to about A.D. 900—the era when the Maya civilization, some 800 miles to the northwest, was beginning to unravel.

Mayo barely had time to catalog the new finds before her team uncovered more gold. Glinting from the walls of the pit, the artifacts marked the edges of four more tombs. As she surveyed the scene, she couldn’t help but feel stunned. “I was just speechless—fascinated, but also worried,” she remembers. The rains had already begun, and she was now in a race to retrieve all the treasure before the neighboring river flooded the site. Also, she knew looters were sure to come if news of the discoveries got out. She swore her team to silence and prayed for clear skies.

The conquistadores encountered the Sitio Conte people in the 1500s and described their astounding array of gold armature and jewelry (while slaughtering them and taking said gold, of course). It appears that the culture changed very little between the time of the burials Mayo discovered and their descendants’ encounters with the pointy side of the Spanish invaders 700-500 years later. With the exception of some carved stone monoliths, the Sitio Conte didn’t build monumental or even modest but enduring architecture like other Mesoamerican peoples. They lived in bamboo huts and used stone tools, and annual floods have laid waste to organic remains.

At the same time, they had goldsmiths with an exceptional level of skill. This is why earlier archaeologists who studied the Sitio Conte sites in the 1930s and later thought that the gold artifacts must have been imports from more sophisticated neighboring cultures. Mayo’s team has proven definitely that this is not the case.

Specialists at the Smithsonian Institution are analyzing the array of materials Mayo’s team has unearthed and have already made a major discovery. Natural impurities in the gold indicate that the metal was mined and worked in the region. This firmly puts to rest any debate about whether Panama’s treasures were imported from farther south, where cultures were supposedly older and more advanced. The native people in this area may have lived in simple huts, but they were rich enough to support master craftsmen and sophisticated enough to appreciate fine art.

And how:

A recently deciphered lead curse tablet discovered in a well in Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey, just north of the Syrian border) invokes Iao, the Greek name for Yahweh, asking that he turn his terrible power onto a local greengrocer named Babylas.

“O thunder-and-lightning-hurling Iao, strike, bind, bind together Babylas the greengrocer,” reads the beginning of one side of the curse tablet. “As you struck the chariot of Pharaoh, so strike his [Babylas'] offensiveness.” [...]

In addition to the use of Iao (Yahweh), and reference to the story of the Exodus, the curse tablet also mentions the story of Egypt’s firstborn.

“O thunder—and-lightning-hurling Iao, as you cut down the firstborn of Egypt, cut down his [livestock?] as much as…” (The next part is lost.)

The curse was inscribed in Greek 1700 years ago by an unnamed person. There’s no way of knowing what religion he may have been. Antioch in the 4th century had large Christian, Jewish, Jewish Christian (the latter two inspired the future saint John Chrysostom to write some opprobrious homilies that wouldn’t have been out of place engraved on lead and thrown down a well) and polytheistic communities. It’s possible that the unfortunate target of the curse was Christian, as the name Babylas was also the name of a third-century bishop of Antioch and martyr who died in prison during the suppression of Christianity under the emperor Decius (253 A.D.).

Babylas’ putative Christianity could have inspired his hater to ask Yahweh to hit him with the full thunder-and-lightning treatment, or the curser might simply have picked the deity that most suited him for his own reasons. University of Washington professor Alexander Hollmann who translated the tablet at first thought that the use of “Iao” suggested the curse writer was Jewish, but after examining comparable magic invocations Hollman realized Yahweh was deployed in spells cast by polytheists as well.

“I don’t think there’s necessarily any connection with the Jewish community,” [Hollman] said. “Greek and Roman magic did incorporate Jewish texts sometimes without understanding them very well.”

The curse was discovered in the 1930s during an excavation by Princeton University. They found many curse tablets from hundreds of years of Antiochans (one from the late 5th, early 6th century A.D. asks Kronos to bring down the horses of the Green and White chariot factions), so many that scholars are still translating them. The collection, including this most recently translated “Iao” curse, is kept in the Princeton University Art Museum.

Since curses were often rolled or folded up and then dropped in wells or drains to do their otherworldly damage unimpeded, it takes considerable conservation effort and care to open them up to the point where they can be read and translated, hence the deliberate pace.

The Welsh government has taken a most beautiful payment in kind for an outstanding inheritance tax bill: an elaborately decorated 2000-year-old Celtic iron fire guard known as the Capel Garmon Firedog. The owners of the firedog had previously lent it to the Amgueddfa Cymru – the National Museum of Wales, who generously sent me the high resolution pictures included in this post that I couldn’t find anywhere else — where it was one of the most important artifacts in its exhibit of early Celtic art.

The Acceptance in Lieu (AIL) scheme allows owners to transfer “pre-eminent” heritage objects (works of art, archives, manuscripts) to public ownership as full or partial payment of their inheritance taxes. The Minister for Housing, Regeneration and Heritage approves the artifacts on the advice of independent experts and allocates them to a public museum.

The firedog was discovered in 1852 by a man digging a ditch in a peat field near the village Capel Garmon in county Conwy, north Wales. It appeared to have been buried deliberately, probably as an offering to the gods, as it was found intact deep in the peat, lying on its side with large stones placed at each end. This is in keeping with the well-established tradition of burying metal objects in lakes, rivers and bogs as a religious devotion in Iron Age Wales.

It certainly was not a commonplace object when it was first crafted between 50 B.C. and 50 A.D. (The date is an estimate based on comparisons with other firedogs found at chieftain burials. There was no archaeological excavation following its discovery in 1852, so we have no access to the original context where stratigraphic analysis or radiocarbon dating of nearby organic elements could give us a specific burial date.) It would originally have been one of a pair, used to hold logs or skewers on the central hearth of a chieftain’s round-house, an emblem of the chieftain’s wealth and power.

As part of an experiment to duplicate the firedog, conservators X-rayed it and found that it was made of 85 pieces shaped separately and then put together. Archaeologists estimate that the initial weight of iron used to make the twin firedogs was a staggering 38 kilos (84 pounds). The single firedog today is approximately 42 inches long, 30 inches high and weighs nine kilos (20 pounds).

Iron was hard to come by and very valuable. To use this much of it for a decorative (albeit practical) item must have been a prohibitively expensive proposition. The craft itself represents an enormous investment of time. Experts think it would have taken Iron Age blacksmiths perhaps as long as three years to create the firedogs, from gathering the ore, to smelting it through to crafting all the individual parts and then putting them together.

It’s no wonder the Minister approved this trade. For now, the Capel Garmon Firedog will remain on display in the Early Wales gallery of the National Museum in Cardiff. It will eventually be moved to new galleries currently still in the planning phase at St Fagans: National History Museum, another of seven national museums under the aegis of Amgueddfa Cymru.

The team from Cotswold Archaeology excavating the site of a major Roman-era cemetery in Cirencester (the one with the surprisingly high proportion of inhumations) has unearthed a beautiful little artifact that embodies three of my favorite things: chickens, decorative enamel and harlequin patterns. Just shy of five inches tall, the cast copper alloy (probably bronze) figurine was discovered in a child’s grave adjacent to another child’s grave where an intact pottery flagon was found earlier this year. Archaeologists estimate that it dates to the 2nd century A.D.

The breast, wings, eyes and probably the ‘comb’ of the cockerel are beautifully inlaid with enamel, which now appears green and blue. There is a separate plate at the tail end which could be its fanned tail feathers, although it is difficult to tell at this stage. The cockerel also has its beak open as if crowing – could this be a message to one of the gods of the afterlife?

Neil Holbrook, Chief Executive for Cotswold Archaeology commented: “The cockerel is the most spectacular find from more than 60 Roman burials excavated at this site. It was excavated from the grave of young child and was placed close to its head. Interestingly a very similar item was found in Cologne in Germany and it looks like they both could have come from the same workshop based in Britain.”

Roman Britain was an important center of enameled decorative objects, especially the north of the province. The Cologne piece has different colored enamel and is missing its tail, but it’s so similar that archaeologists have little doubt it came from the same shop, possibly even the same maker.

As for why the cockerel was buried with the child, it was probably an offering to Mercury, messenger of the gods and mover between states who escorted the souls of the newly deceased to the afterlife. The rooster was one of his symbols. Julius Caesar noted in Book six, Chapter 17 of his Gallic Wars that Mercury was the most popular deity among the Celtic peoples of Gaul and Britain.

They worship as their divinity, Mercury in particular, and have many images of him, and regard him as the inventor of all arts, they consider him the guide of their journeys and marches, and believe him to have great influence over the acquisition of gain and mercantile transactions.

Caesar, in keeping with interpretatio Romana, the Roman practice of equating local deities with those in the Roman pantheon, may have actually been referring to the Celtic god Lugus which shared some of Mercury’s characteristic attributes, including the rooster. Once Roman occupation was established, dedications to Mercury proliferated over Gaul and Britain, marking him as a far more prominent and popular deity than he was in Rome itself.

As with the other artifacts discovered in this excavation, after it is cleaned and conserved the cockerel is destined to go on display at Cirencester’s Corinium Museum.

Archaeologists have discovered what they think are the original ceremonial offerings made by the builders of Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Sun before construction began around 50 A.D.

Using a 380-foot-long tunnel originally dug towards the center of the pyramid by archaeologists in the 1930s, researchers added an additional three short tunnels and dropped 59 exploratory shafts with the aim of reaching the foundational layer. The old tunnel turned out to stop just 20 feet west of the center, so the new extensions led archaeologists to the pre-construction base of the pyramid where they found the remains of three structures that pre-date the pyramid and the ceremonial offerings they were hoping to find.

The offerings found at the base of the pyramid in the Teotihuacan ruin site just north of Mexico City include a green serpentine stone mask so delicately carved and detailed that archaeologists believe it may have been a portrait.

The find also includes 11 ceremonial clay pots dedicated to a rain god similar to Tlaloc, who was still worshipped in the area 1,500 years later, according to a statement by the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH.

The offerings, including bones of an eagle fed rabbits as well as feline and canine animals that haven’t yet been identified, were laid on a sort of rubble base where the temple was erected about A.D. 50.

“We know that it was deposited as part of a consecration ritual for the construction of the Pyramid of the Sun,” said INAH archaeologist Enrique Perez Cortes.

They also found seven human burials, some of them of infants, who were probably sacrificed in the same consecration ritual that claimed the animals’ lives. Obsidian artifacts were discovered in a variety of forms — projectile points, razors, anthropomorphic designs — along three large discs of pyrite. One of the pyrite discs is almost 18 inches in diameter, the largest ever found at Teotihuacan.

The exquisite serpentine mask was not the only stone mask. There were two other human figures found with shell and pyrite eyes. The greenstone mask is the most unusual, however, because of its top quality artistry and its relatively small size. It’s just over four inches square, smaller in dimension and volume than other Teotihuacan masks which have been discovered. Those masks are not carved in such detail, nor have they been found in a ritual context.

The city of Teotihuacan was founded by an unknown culture approximately 2,500 years ago. By the time the Aztecs settled in the area in the 1300s, the town had long since been abandoned. It was the Aztecs who named it Teotihuacan meaning “the place where men become gods.”