Zapotec civilization
The Zapotec civilization was an indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mesoamerica. Archaeological evidence shows; the Zapotec left archaeological evidence at the ancient city of Monte Albán in the form of buildings, ball courts, magnificent tombs and grave goods including finely worked gold jewelry. Monte Albán was one of the first major cities in Mesoamerica and the center of a Zapotec state that dominated much of the territory that today belongs to the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Zapotec civilization originated in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca in the late 6th Century BC; the three valleys were divided between three different-sized societies, separated by 80 square kilometres “no-man’s-land” in the middle, today occupied by the city of Oaxaca. Archaeological evidence, such as burned temples and sacrificed captives, suggests that the three societies competed against each other. At the end of the Rosario phase, the valley's largest settlement San José Mogote, a nearby settlement in the Etla valley, lost most of their population.
During the same period, a new large settlement emerged in the “no-man’s-land” on top of a mountain overlooking the three valleys, called Monte Albán. Early Monte Albán pottery is similar to pottery from San José Mogote, which suggests that Monte Albán was populated by the people who left San José Mogote. Although there is no direct evidence in the early phases of Monte Albán's history and fortifications around the site during the archaeological phase Monte Alban 2 suggest that the city was constructed in response to a military threat. Archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent V. Flannery liken this process to what happened in ancient Greece -: a centralization of smaller dispersed populations congregated in a central city to meet an external threat; the Zapotec state formed at Monte Albán began to expand during the late Monte Alban 1 phase and throughout the Monte Alban 2 phase. During Monte Alban 1c to Monte Alban 2, Zapotec rulers seized control of the provinces outside the valley of Oaxaca because none of the surrounding provinces could compete with the valley of Oaxaca politically and militarily.
By 200 AD, the Zapotecs had extended their influence, from Quiotepec in the North to Ocelotepec and Chiltepec in the South. Monte Albán had become the largest city in what are today the southern Mexican highlands, retained this status until 700 AD; the expansion of the Zapotec empire peaked during the Monte Alban 2 phase. Zapotecs colonized settlements far beyond The Valley of Oaxaca. Most notably, this expansion is visible in the sudden change of ceramics found in regions outside the valley; these region's own unique styles were replaced with Zapotec style pottery, indicating their integration into the Zapotec empire. Archaeologist Alfonso Caso, one of the first to do excavations in Monte Albán, argued that a building on the main plaza of Monte Albán is further evidence for the dramatic expansion of the Zapotec state. What today is called Building J is shaped like an arrowhead and displays more than 40 carved stones with hieroglyphic writing. Archaeologists interpreted the glyphs to represent the provinces controlled by the Zapotecs.
Each glyph group depicts a head with an elaborate head dress carved into the slabs. These are assumed to illustrate the rulers of the provinces. Heads turned upside down are believed to represent the rulers of those provinces taken by force, while the upright ones may represent those who did not resist colonization and had their lives spared. For this reason, Building J is called “The Conquest Slab”. Marcus and Flannery write about the subsequent dramatic expansion of the Monte Albán state: "a great disparity in populations between the core of a state and its periphery, it may only be necessary for the former to send colonists to the latter. Small polities, may accept a face-saving offer. Larger polities unwilling to lose their autonomy may have to be subdued militarily. During the expansion of Monte Alban 2 state, we think we see both colonization and conquest"; the name Zapotec is an exonym coming from Nahuatl tzapotēcah, which means "inhabitants of the place of sapote". The Zapotec referred to themselves by some variant of the term Be'ena'a, which means "The Cloud People".
The Zapotec languages belong to a language family called Oto-manguean, an ancient family of Mesoamerican languages. It is estimated that today's Oto-manguean languages branched off from a common root at around 1500 BC; the Manguean languages split off first, followed by the Oto-pamean branch while the divergence of Mixtecan and Zapotecan languages happened still. The Zapotecan group includes the Zapotec languages and the related Chatino. Zapotec languages are spoken in parts of the Northern Sierra, the Central Valleys as well as in parts of the Southern Sierra, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and along parts of the Pacific Coast. Due to decades of out-migration, Zapotec is spoken in parts of Mexico City and Los Angeles, CA. There are over 100 dialects. Zapotec is a tone language, which means that the meaning of a word is determined by voice pitch, essential for understanding the meaning of different words; the Zapotec languages features up to 4 distinct tonemes: high, low and falling. Between Monte Alban phases 1 and 2 there was a considerable expansion of the population of the Valley of Oaxaca.
As the population grew, so did the degree of social differentiation, the centralization of political power
Monte Albán
Monte Albán is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site in the Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán Municipality in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The site is located on a low mountainous range rising above the plain in the central section of the Valley of Oaxaca where the latter's northern Etla, eastern Tlacolula, southern Zimatlán & Ocotlán branches meet; the present-day state capital Oaxaca City is located 9 km east of Monte Albán. The excavated civic-ceremonial center of the Monte Albán site is situated atop an artificially-leveled ridge, which with an elevation of about 1,940 m above mean sea level rises some 400 m from the valley floor, in an defensible location. In addition to the monumental core, the site is characterized by several hundred artificial terraces, a dozen clusters of mounded architecture covering the entire ridgeline and surrounding flanks; the archaeological ruins on the nearby Atzompa and El Gallo hills to the north are traditionally considered to be an integral part of the ancient city as well.
Besides being one of the earliest cities of Mesoamerica, Monte Albán's importance stems from its role as the pre-eminent Zapotec socio-political and economic center for close to a thousand years. Founded toward the end of the Middle Formative period at around 500 BC, by the Terminal Formative Monte Albán had become the capital of a large-scale expansionist polity that dominated much of the Oaxacan highlands and interacted with other Mesoamerican regional states such as Teotihuacan to the north; the city had lost its political pre-eminence by the end of the Late Classic and soon thereafter was abandoned. Small-scale reoccupation, opportunistic reutilization of earlier structures and tombs, ritual visitations marked the archaeological history of the site into the Colonial period; the etymology of the site's present-day name is unclear, tentative suggestions regarding its origin range from a presumed corruption of a native Zapotec name to a colonial-era reference to a Spanish soldier by the name Montalbán or to the Alban Hills of Italy.
The ancient Zapotec name of the city is not known, as abandonment occurred centuries before the writing of the earliest available ethnohistorical sources. Being visible from anywhere in the central part of the Valley of Oaxaca, the impressive ruins of Monte Albán attracted visitors and explorers throughout the colonial and modern eras. Among others, Guillermo Dupaix investigated the site in the early 19th century CE, J. M. García published a description of the site in 1859, A. F. Bandelier visited and published further descriptions in the 1890s. A first intensive archaeological exploration of the site was conducted in 1902 by Leopoldo Batres General Inspector of Monuments for the Mexican government under Porfirio Diaz, it was however only in 1931 that large-scale scientific excavations were undertaken under the direction of Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Caso. In 1933, Eulalia Guzmán assisted with the excavation of Tomb 7. Over the following eighteen years Caso and his colleagues Ignacio Bernal and Jorge Acosta excavated large sections within the monumental core of the site, much of what is visible today in areas open to the public was reconstructed at that time.
Besides resulting in the excavation of a large number of residential and civic-ceremonial structures and hundreds of tombs and burials, one lasting achievement of the project by Caso and his colleagues was the establishment of a ceramic chronology for the period between the site's founding in ca. 500 BCE to end of the Postclassic period in CE 1521. The investigation of the periods preceding Monte Albán's founding was a major focus of the Prehistory and Human Ecology Project started by Kent Flannery of the University of Michigan in the late 1960s. Over the following two decades this project documented the development of socio-political complexity in the valley from the earliest Archaic period to the Rosario phase preceding Monte Albán, thus setting the stage for an understanding of the latter's founding and developmental trajectory. In this context, among the major accomplishments of Flannery's work in Oaxaca are his extensive excavations at the important formative center of San José Mogote in the Etla branch of the valley, a project co-directed with Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan.
A further important step in the understanding of the history of occupation of the Monte Albán site was reached with the Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Valley of Oaxaca Project begun by Richard Blanton and several colleagues in the early 1970s. It is only with their intensive survey and mapping of the entire site that the real extension and size of Monte Albán beyond the limited area explored by Caso became known. Subsequent seasons of the same project under the direction of Blanton, Gary Feinman, Steve Kowalewski, Linda Nicholas, others extended the survey coverage to the entire valley, producing an invaluable amount of data on the region's changing settlement patterns from the earliest times to the arrival of the Spanish in CE 1521; as indicated by Blanton's survey of the site, the Monte Albán hills appear to have been uninhabited prior to 500 BCE. At that time, San José Mogote was the major population center in the valley and head of a chiefdom that controlled much of the northern Etla branch.
As many as three or four other smaller chiefly centers controlled other sub-regions of the valley, including Tilcajete in the southern Valle Grande branch and Yegüih in the Tlacolula arm to the east. Competition and warfare seem to have characterized the R
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated d/b/a OCLC is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services. OCLC maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system. OCLC began in 1967, as the Ohio College Library Center, through a collaboration of university presidents, vice presidents, library directors who wanted to create a cooperative computerized network for libraries in the state of Ohio; the group first met on July 5, 1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization, hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, to design the shared cataloging system.
Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The plan was to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database to streamline operations, control costs, increase efficiency in library management, bringing libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the world's information in order to best serve researchers and scholars; the first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26, 1971. This was the first online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data. Between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the governance structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States.
As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with "networks", organizations that provided training and marketing services. By 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on the OCLC Members Council. During 2008, OCLC commissioned two studies to look at distribution channels. In early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic and full-text information to anyone. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from private libraries worldwide; the Open WorldCat program, launched in late 2003, exposed a subset of WorldCat records to Web users via popular Internet search and bookselling sites.
In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. WikiD was phased out; the Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988. A browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013; until August 2009, when it was sold to Backstage Library Works, OCLC owned a preservation microfilm and digitization operation called the OCLC Preservation Service Center, with its principal office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users; this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. Starting in 1971, OCLC produced catalog cards for members alongside its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, such as CONTENTdm for managing digital collections.
It offers the bibliographic discovery system WorldCat Discovery, which allows for library patrons to use a single search interface to access an institution's catalog, database subscriptions and more. OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications; these publications, including journal articles, reports and presentations, are available through the organization's website. OCLC Publications – Research articles from various journals including Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Research, Reference & User Services Quarterly, College & Research Libraries News, Art Libraries Journal, National Education Association Newsletter; the most recent publications are displayed first, all archived resources, starting in 1970, are available. Membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding. Newsletters – Current and archived newsletters for the library and archive community.
Presentations – Presentations from both guest speakers and OCLC research from conferences and other events. The presentations are organized into five categories: Conference presentations, Dewey presentations, Distinguished Seminar Series, Guest presentations, Research staff
Zoomorphism
The word zoomorphism derives from the Greek ζωον, meaning "animal", μορφη, meaning "shape" or "form". It can mean: Art that imagines humans as non-human animals Art that portrays one species of animal like another species of animal Art that creates patterns using animal imagery, or animal style Deities depicted in animal form, such as exist in ancient Egyptian religion Therianthropy: the ability to shapeshift into animal form Attributing animal form or other animal characteristics to anything other than an animal. Mark the Evangelist as a lion in Christian iconography; the Egyptian gods were depicted as zoomorphic or as hybrid The names of the two most prominent Hebrew Bible female prophets - Deborah and Huldah - were in the Babylonian Talmud interpreted in zoomorphic terms as "wasp" and "weasel." A literary phrase such as "The roar of the ocean". Sin lurking like a beast waiting to devour Cain in Genesis. Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo, Robert Ardrey in African Genesis and Konrad Lorenz in On Aggression all wrote from a sociobiological perspective.
They viewed the human species as an animal, subject to the evolutionary law of Survival of the fittest through adaptation to the biophysical environment. Fenrisulfr, a wolf in Norse mythology Airavata, the king god of elephants in Indian mythology. Paw feet bathtub, with feet in the shape of a lion's paws The sphinx from the "Oedipus Rex" by Sophocles Elephantine Colossus, a hotel In The Flintstones and Night at the Museum, the dinosaurs Dino and "Rexy" behave and vocalize like dogs. Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a lion, the king of Narnia Robotic pets, like AIBO, modeled on dogs or other animals In 2010 city planners from Southern Sudan, which would become independent a year unveiled plans for the city center of its capital, Juba, to be built in the shape of a rhinoceros; the city of Wau was to be transformed in the shape of a giraffe. Amity-enmity complex
Chaac
For the region on Io see Chaac-Camaxtli Region Chaac is the name of the Maya rain deity. With his lightning axe, Chaac produces thunder and rain. Chaac corresponds to Tlaloc among the Aztecs. Like other Maya gods, Chaac manifold. Four Chaacs are wear the directional colors. In 16th-century Yucatán, the directional Chaac of the east was called Chac Xib Chaac'Red Man Chaac', only the colors being varied for the three other ones. Contemporary Yucatec Maya farmers distinguish many more aspects of the rain and the clouds and personify them as different, hierarchically-ordered rain deities; the Chorti Maya have preserved important folklore regarding the process of rain-making, which involved rain deities striking rain-carrying snakes with their axes. The rain deities had their human counterparts. In the traditional Mayan community, one of the most important functions was that of rain maker, which presupposed an intimate acquaintance with the rain deities, a knowledge of their places and movements. According to a Late-Postclassic Yucatec tradition, Chac Xib Chaac was the title of a king of Chichen Itza, similar titles were bestowed upon Classic rulers as well.
Among the rituals for the rain deities, the Yucatec Chʼa Cháak ceremony for asking rain centers on a ceremonial banquet for the rain deities. It includes four boys chanting as frogs. Asking for rain and crops was the purpose of 16th-century rituals at the cenotes, of Yucatán. Young men and women were lowered into these wells, so as to make them enter the realm of the rain deities. Alternatively, they were thrown into the wells to be drawn up again, give oracles; the rain deity is a patron of agriculture. A well-known myth in which the Chaacs have an important role to play is about the opening of the mountain in which the maize was hidden. In Tzotzil mythology, the rain deity figures as the father of nubile women representing maize and vegetables. In some versions of the Qʼeqchiʼ myth of Sun and Moon, the rain deity Choc'Cloud' is the brother of Sun. Chocl commits adultery with his brother's wife and is duly punished. Versions of this myth show the rain deity Chac in his war-like fury, pursuing the fleeing Sun and Moon, attacking them with his lightning bolts.
Chaac is depicted with a human body showing reptilian or amphibian scales, with a non-human head evincing fangs and a long, pendulous nose. In the Classic style, a shell serves as his ear ornament, he carries shield and lightning-axe, the axe being personified by a related deity, god K, called Bolon Dzacab in Yucatec. The Classic Chaac sometimes shows features of the Central Mexican precursor of Tlaloc. A large part of the most important Maya book, the Dresden Codex, is dedicated to the Chaacs, their locations, activities, it illustrates the intimate relationship existing between the Chaacs, the Bacabs, the aged goddess, Ixchel. The main source on the 16th-century Yucatec Maya, Bishop Diego de Landa, combines the four Chaacs with the four Bacabs and Pauahtuns into one concept; the Bacabs were aged deities governing its water supplies. In the Classic period, the king impersonated the rain deity while a portrait glyph of the rain deity can accompany the king's other names; this may have given expression to his role as a supreme rain-maker.
However, it is the war-like fury of the rain deity that receives emphasis. The king personifying the rain deity is shown carrying war implements and making prisoners, while his actions seem to be equated with the violence of a thunderstorm. About Chaac's role in Classic period mythological narrative, little is known, he is present at the resurrection of the Maya maize god from the carapace of a turtle representing the earth. The so-called'confrontation scenes' are of a more legendary nature, they show a young nobleman and his retinue wading through the waters and being approached by warriors. One of these warriors is a man personifying the rain deity, he represents an ancestral king, seems to be referred to as Chac Xib Together with the skeletal Death God, Chaac appears to preside over an initiate's ritual transformation into a jaguar. Klein, Chac: Dios de la lluvia, a film made with Mayan actors. Yopaat, a related southern Maya storm god Aktzin Braakhuis and Kerry Hull, Pluvial Aspects of the Mesoamerican Culture Hero.
Anthropos 2014/2: 449-466. Cruz Torres, Rubelpec. García Barrios, Ana, El aspecto bélico de Chaahk, el dios de la lluvia, en el Periodo Clásico maya. Revista Española de Antropología Americana 39-1: 7-29. Redfield and Alfonso Barrera Vasquez, Chan Kom. Roys, Ralph L; the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. 1967. Taube, Karl, An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. Thompson, J. E. S. Maya History and Religion. 1970. Tozzer, Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, a Translation. 1941. Wisdom, The Chorti Mayas
Lightning
Lightning is a violent and sudden electrostatic discharge where two electrically charged regions in the atmosphere temporarily equalize themselves during a thunderstorm. Lightning creates a wide range of electromagnetic radiations from the hot plasma created by the electron flow, including visible light in the form of black-body radiation. Thunder is the sound formed by the shock wave formed as gaseous molecules experience a rapid pressure increase; the three main kinds of lightning are: created either inside one thundercloud, or between two clouds, or between a cloud and the ground. The 15 recognized observational variants include "heat lightning", seen but not heard, dry lightning, which causes many forest fires, ball lightning, observed scientifically. Humans have deified lightning for millennia, lightning inspired expressions like "Bolt from the blue", "Lightning never strikes twice", "blitzkrieg" are common. In some languages, "Love at first sight" translates as "lightning strike"; the details of the charging process are still being studied by scientists, but there is general agreement on some of the basic concepts of thunderstorm electrification.
The main charging area in a thunderstorm occurs in the central part of the storm where air is moving upward and temperatures range from −15 to −25 °C, see figure to the right. At that place, the combination of temperature and rapid upward air movement produces a mixture of super-cooled cloud droplets, small ice crystals, graupel; the updraft carries the super-cooled cloud droplets and small ice crystals upward. At the same time, the graupel, larger and denser, tends to fall or be suspended in the rising air; the differences in the movement of the precipitation cause collisions to occur. When the rising ice crystals collide with graupel, the ice crystals become positively charged and the graupel becomes negatively charged. See figure to the left; the updraft carries. The larger and denser graupel is either suspended in the middle of the thunderstorm cloud or falls toward the lower part of the storm; the result is that the upper part of the thunderstorm cloud becomes positively charged while the middle to lower part of the thunderstorm cloud becomes negatively charged.
The upward motions within the storm and winds at higher levels in the atmosphere tend to cause the small ice crystals in the upper part of the thunderstorm cloud to spread out horizontally some distance from thunderstorm cloud base. This part of the thunderstorm cloud is called the anvil. While this is the main charging process for the thunderstorm cloud, some of these charges can be redistributed by air movements within the storm. In addition, there is a small but important positive charge buildup near the bottom of the thunderstorm cloud due to the precipitation and warmer temperatures. A typical cloud-to-ground lightning flash culminates in the formation of an electrically conducting plasma channel through the air in excess of 5 km tall, from within the cloud to the ground's surface; the actual discharge is the final stage of a complex process. At its peak, a typical thunderstorm produces three or more strikes to the Earth per minute. Lightning occurs when warm air is mixed with colder air masses, resulting in atmospheric disturbances necessary for polarizing the atmosphere.
However, it can occur during dust storms, forest fires, volcanic eruptions, in the cold of winter, where the lightning is known as thundersnow. Hurricanes generate some lightning in the rainbands as much as 160 km from the center; the science of lightning is called fulminology, the fear of lightning is called astraphobia. Lightning is not distributed evenly around the planet. On Earth, the lightning frequency is 44 times per second, or nearly 1.4 billion flashes per year and the average duration is 0.2 seconds made up from a number of much shorter flashes of around 60 to 70 microseconds. Many factors affect the frequency, distribution and physical properties of a typical lightning flash in a particular region of the world; these factors include ground elevation, prevailing wind currents, relative humidity, proximity to warm and cold bodies of water, etc. To a certain degree, the ratio between IC, CC and CG lightning may vary by season in middle latitudes; because human beings are terrestrial and most of their possessions are on the Earth where lightning can damage or destroy them, CG lightning is the most studied and best understood of the three types though IC and CC are more common types of lightning.
Lightning's relative unpredictability limits a complete explanation of how or why it occurs after hundreds of years of scientific investigation. About 70 % of lightning occurs over land in the tropics; this occurs from both the mixture of warmer and colder air masses, as well as differences in moisture concentrations, it happens at the boundaries between them. The flow of warm ocean currents past drier land masses, such as the Gulf Stream explains the elevated frequency of lightning in the Southeast United States; because the influence of small or absent land masses in the vast stretches of the world's oceans limits the differences between these variants in the atmosphere, lightning is notably less frequent there than over larger landforms. The North and South Poles are limited in their coverage of thunderstorms and theref
National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico)
The National Museum of Anthropology is a national museum of Mexico. It is the most visited museum in Mexico. Located in the area between Paseo de la Reforma and Mahatma Gandhi Street within Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, the museum contains significant archaeological and anthropological artifacts from Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage, such as the Stone of the Sun and the Aztec Xochipilli statue; the museum is managed by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, or INAH. It was one of several museums opened by Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos in 1964.. Assessments of the museum vary, with one considering it "a national treasure and a symbol of identity; the museum is the synthesis of an ideological and political feat." Octavio Paz criticized the museum's making the Mexica hall central, saying the "exaltation and glorification of Mexico-Tenochtitlan transforms the Museum of Anthropology into a temple." Designed in 1964 by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Jorge Campuzano, Rafael Mijares Alcérreca, the monumental building contains exhibition halls surrounding a courtyard with a huge pond and a vast square concrete umbrella supported by a single slender pillar.
The halls are ringed by gardens. The museum has 23 rooms for exhibits and covers an area of 79,700 square meters or 857,890 square feet. At the end of the 18th century, by order of the viceroy of Bucareli, the items that formed part of the collection by Lorenzo Boturini — including the sculptures of Coatlicue and the Sun Stone — were placed in the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, forming the core of the collection that would become the National Museum of Anthropology. On August 25, 1790, the Cabinet of Curiosities of Mexico was established by botanist José Longinos Martínez. During the 19th century, the museum was visited by internationally renowned scholars such as Alexander von Humboldt. In 1825, the first Mexican president, Guadalupe Victoria, advised by the historian Lucas Alamán, established the National Mexican Museum as an autonomous institution. In 1865, the Emperor Maximilian moved the museum to Calle de Moneda 13, to the former location of the Casa de Moneda. In 1906, due to the growth of the museum's collections, Justo Sierra divided the stock of the National Museum.
The natural history collections were moved to the Chopo building, constructed to shelter permanent expositions. The museum was renamed the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, was re-opened September 9, 1910, in the presence of President Porfirio Díaz. By 1924 the stock of the museum had increased to 52,000 objects and had received more than 250,000 visitors. In December 1940, the museum was divided again, with its historical collections being moved to the Chapultepec Castle, where they formed the Museo Nacional de Historia, focusing on the Viceroyalty of the New Spain and its progress towards modern Mexico; the remaining collection was renamed the National Museum of Anthropology, focusing on pre-Columbian Mexico and modern day Mexican ethnography. The construction of the contemporary museum building began in February 1963 in the Chapultepec park; the project was coordinated by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, with assistance by Rafael Mijares Alcérreca and Jorge Campuzano. The construction of the building lasted 19 months, was inaugurated on September 17, 1964, President Adolfo López Mateos, who declared: The Mexican people lift this monument in honor of the admirable cultures that flourished during the Pre-Columbian period in regions that are now territory of the Republic.
In front of the testimonies of those cultures, the Mexico of today pays tribute to the indigenous people of Mexico, in whose example we recognize characteristics of our national originality. The museum's collections include the Stone of the Sun, giant stone heads of the Olmec civilization that were found in the jungles of Tabasco and Veracruz, treasures recovered from the Mayan civilization, at the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza, a replica of the sarcophagal lid from Pacal's tomb at Palenque and ethnological displays of contemporary rural Mexican life, it has a model of the location and layout of the former Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, the site of, now occupied by the central area of modern-day Mexico City. The permanent exhibitions on the ground floor cover all pre-Columbian civilizations located on the current territory of Mexico as well as in former Mexican territory in what is today the southwestern United States, they are classified as North, Mayan, Gulf of Mexico, Mexico and Teotihuacan.
The permanent expositions at the first floor show the culture of Native American population of Mexico since the Spanish colonization. The museum hosts visiting exhibits focusing on other of the world's great cultures. Past exhibits have focused on ancient Iran, China, Egypt and Spain. Doris Heyden Felipe R. Solís Olguín, director 2000–2009 Official website Website of the INAH
