San Miguel Ixtapan

MegalithicCentral AmericaMexicoc. 750 CEEpiclassic central Mexican (Matlatzinca-related)

Ceremonial centre in the Tierra Caliente of the State of México, in the municipality of Tejupilco, in a part of the country that has barely been surveyed. Four occupation stages are recognised : Late Classic 500-700 CE, an Epiclassic apogee 750-900 during Teotihuacán's decline, Early Postclassic reuse and modification 900-1200, then abandonment and a Mexica return. The ball court is a double-T, about 50 m by 7.5 m, with a great many richly furnished burials along its south side, and a carved stone maquette of the site was found here in 1958 — excavation did not begin until 1985. The name is Nahuatl for the place of salt, and the salt is still worked : hundreds of monolithic evaporation pans are cut straight into the banks of the Aquiagua and San Felipe rivers and remain in use. What draws attention now is a corpus of carved megalithic slabs recovered from ranches around the village and at San Francisco Los Nopales a few kilometres away, more than a dozen documented so far, one of them three tons and one sitting on what appears to be a buried pyramidal structure. The films argue the precision of their geometric carving has no Mesoamerican parallel and resembles Tiwanaku work in Bolivia. That comparison is theirs and rests on visual similarity; no contact is established. The slabs themselves are real, unexplained in style, and being rescued one at a time from farmland.

18.8075°, -100.1553°

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