Nidorellia armata (Gray, 1840). Specimen of the National Collection of Echinoderms. Photo: C. Conejeros.
In the pre-Hispanic world, the ocean and the living beings that inhabit it had a preponderant role in the field of economy, but also in that of religion and art. This is demonstrated by a recent investigation that identified the presence of five starfish, belonging to two different species, in an ancient offering of the Archaeological Zone of Tula, in Hidalgo.
Carried out by specialists attached to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), a dependency of the Federal Ministry of Culture, and the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology (ICML) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, this research focused on a set of calcareous plates, discovered in the 90s, inside a ritual deposit of the building known as the Burnt Palace.
Although it was suspected that these plates could be the skeletal remains of echinoderms, their study had not been deepened to the extent of defining which species they belonged to, since this phylum includes stars, cucumbers, snake stars, urchins, lilies, cookies and sea hearts.
The aforementioned academics, who have collaborated since 2010 and have participated in the registration of findings such as that of 164 starfish in an offering of the Archaeological Zone of the Templo Mayor, requested access to the Toltec materials, which are under the protection of the National Coordination for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage of the INAH.
According to the director of the Templo Mayor Project of the INAH, Leonardo López Luján, co-author of an article published in the most recent edition of the journal Arqueología Mexicana, to detail this study, the limestone plates were part of a complex offering created to represent a cosmogram, that is, a miniature model of the universe as conceived by the inhabitants of the highland city.
The context, dated to around 950-1000 A.D., was discovered between 1993 and 1994, during the work undertaken by archaeologist Elba Estrada Hernández, in the internal courtyard of the second of the three rooms that the old building had, in order to learn about its construction sequence and rehabilitate its storm drainage system.
In a cavity, 44 centimeters in diameter, which had been carefully sealed, the so-called Offering 1 was found, which contained a tezcacuitlapilli or dorsal mirror, 34 centimeters in diameter, made with tesserae of pyrite and turquoise.
Covering this peculiar element was the aforementioned cosmogram, made up of four groups of objects symbolically associated with the cardinal directions: to the north there were 11 rose-like shell beads; to the south, 17 mother-of-pearl shell plates; to the east, a fragment of soft coral; and to the west, the aforementioned accumulation of calcareous plates.
The accounting of this last set allowed the identification of 2,720 plates, with lengths ranging from 2 to 15 millimeters, and a total weight of 64.84 grams. Due to their age (between 470 and 570 years older than that of the vestiges located in the Templo Mayor) and the context of their burial, the plaques of the Palacio Quemado are softer, have worn surfaces and show a process of mineralization.
After the morphological separation of each of the tiny plates, their taxonomic classification was undertaken and the species to which they belong were successfully identified, for which they were also compared with modern specimens of starfish from the National Collection of Echinoderms "Dr. María Elena Caso Muñoz", of the ICML.
As a result of the above, three individuals of the species Nidorellia armata, popularly known as 'chocolate chip star', and two of Pentaceraster cumingi, whose common name is 'cushion star', were recognized.
According to the group of experts, both species are abundant in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, from the Gulf of California to northwestern Peru and the Galapagos Islands, which establishes direct connections between the human groups that thrived around the Early Postclassic period (900-1200 A.D.), in what is now the Mexican Altiplano and Pacific coast.
And although archaeological starfish had previously been found in Tula – in Richard Diehl's excavations in 1971 – and their artistic representations on sealed ceramic objects were known, the new studies account for the symbolic importance that the Toltecs attributed to echinoderms, both in their ritual life and in their cosmological conceptions.
"To date, only two species of starfish have been identified, both, by the way, also present in the offerings of Tenochtitlan. However, given the great antiquity of the archaeological contexts of Tula, it is possible that more graceful and therefore more fragile species have not survived to our days, but only those with robust anatomy," concludes the aforementioned article.
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