HISTORY AND STRATIGRAPHY IN THE VALLEY OF 



MEXICO l 



By George C. Vaillant 

 Associate Curator of Mexican Archeology, American Museum of Natural History 



[With 13 plates] 



Indian Mexico has a past, but not a history. Thousands of mounds 

 are scattered over the country, and in regions suitable for agriculture 

 the plow constantly produces the shattered vessels and tools of van- 

 ished people. The modern Mexicans also show their heritage from 

 the past. Thirty-nine percent of them are pure Indian, and another 53 

 percent are liberally infused with Indian blood. Even as in Italy, 

 where both the citizens and the land which gives them life bear witness 

 to the background of the Roman Empire, so in Mexico one feels and 

 sees the all-pervading influence of the Indian. 



Yet where the Roman past is part of the historical instruction of 

 every schoolboy, the history of Indian Mexico is to most of us a closed 

 book, and even the professional scholar finds that most of its pages 

 are blaDk. The reasons for the gaps in the historical record are 

 threefold: The Europeanization of Mexico, with the consequent 

 indifference to Indian matters; the conscious destruction of native 

 documents as idolatrous in the days of the evangelization of the 

 country; and the rarity in Mexico of Indian tribes with a knowledge 

 of writing which would enable them to keep historical records. 



The history of Mexico, from its Conquest in 1519 to the Revolution 

 of 1910, has emphasized the fortunes of European overlords and their 

 relations to each other and the outside world. The overwhelming 

 Indian preponderance in the population has been by no means bal- 

 anced by similar representation in the economic and the social world. 

 For 4 centuries, Europe, with all the guile and brute force of its state 

 and with all the spiritual powers of its church, has striven to eradicate 

 from the Indian all traces of his native culture. Since the Revolution 

 of 1910, there has been a conscious effort to transform the Indian 

 population from serfdom into active participation in the social and 

 economic life of the country. With this recognition of the Indian as 

 a potential citizen there has come in Mexico a more general esteem for 



1 Reprinted by permission from The Scientific Monthly, vol. 44, April 1937. 



521 



