still to be found in places at some distance from the 
capital (Mexico City) and that they seemed old enough 
to have been constructed before the Conquest. 
3. Cuezcomatls, vasiform grass and daub granaries. 
In 1609, Fray Alonso de la Mota y Escobar (Simpson 
1984) includes the following statement in his memoirs 
with reference to San Juan Cuezcomatepec, a village 25 
kilometers northwest of Cordoba, Veracruz: 
“*Hablase en este pueblo lengua mexicana perfecta llamase en ella 
Cuezcomatepec que suena el pueblo de los troxes porque dizen las tenia 
aqui Molezuma de mucha cantidad de mahiz que por ser tan frio y seco 
se conseruaua aqui como en deposito para los tiempos de sus hambres.”’ 
As will be shown later it seems reasonable to assume 
that the Indian word cuezcomatl refers to the vasiform 
type of granary. 
Most students of the Nahuatl] language indicate that 
the etymology of the word cuezcomatl is not known. 
From a very ancient period the word has meant a gran- 
ary and cuezcomatl has been used as a root word in the 
composition of other words. However, Siméon (1885) 
writes in his Dictionnaire de la Langue Nahuatl: 
**Cuezcomatl, s. Havre-sac, magasin de pain; sommet de la téte, 
crane. En comp. nocuescon, mon crane; tocuezcon, notre crane, le crane 
en general. Avec les postp. c, tlan: cuezcomac, dans le havre-sac, dans 
le grenier; cuezcomatitlan, parmi les havre-sacs.”’ 
While Garcia Cubas (1888-1891) adds that comatl 
means vasija or container. It seems then that cuezcomatl 
might mean a container in the form of a skull. A study of 
Pl. XIII, the vasiform grass and daub granary of the 
ancient ‘Tarahumaras related to the present-day grana- 
ries, suggests the possible reason for the use of this word 
for these structures. 
4. Wattle and daub cask-like granaries. TTorquemada 
(1723) has a chapter in which he relates the looting of 
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