Western Mexico Shaft Tomb Tradition - History of Scholarly Research

History of Scholarly Research

The first major work to discuss artifacts associated with the shaft tomb tradition was Carl Lumholtz's 1902 work, Unknown Mexico. Along with illustrations of several of the grave goods, the Norwegian explorer described a looted shaft tomb he had visited in 1896. He also visited and described the ruins of Tzintzuntzan, the seat of Tarascan empire some 150 miles (250 km) to the east, and was one of the first to incorrectly use the term "Tarascan" to describe the shaft tomb artifacts.

During the 1930s, artist Diego Rivera began accumulating many Western Mexico artifacts for his private collection, a personal interest that sparked a wider public interest in West Mexican grave goods. It was in the late 1930s that one of the most prominent of Western Mexico archaeologists, Isabel Kelly, began her investigations. In the period from 1944 until 1985, Kelly would eventually publish over a dozen scholarly papers on her work in this region. In 1948, she was the first to hypothesize the existence of the "shaft tomb arc", the geographic distribution of shaft tomb sites over western Mexico (see map above).

In 1946, Salvador Toscano challenged the attribution of shaft tomb artifacts to the Tarascans, a challenge that was echoed in 1957 by Miguel Covarrubias who firmly declared that Tarascan culture appeared only "after the 10th century". Toscano's and Covarrubias's views were later upheld by radiocarbon dating of plundered shaft tombs' charcoal and other organic remains salvaged in the 1960s by Diego Delgado and Peter Furst. As the result of these excavations and his ethnological investigations of the modern-day indigenous Huichol and Cora peoples of Nayarit, Furst proposed that the artifacts were not only mere representations of ancient peoples, but also contained deeper significance. The model houses, for example, showed the living dwelling in context with the dead – a miniature cosmogram – and the horned warriors (as discussed above) were shaman battling mystical forces.

In 1974, Hasso von Winning published an exhaustive classification of Western Mexico shaft tomb artifacts (including, for example, the Chinesco A through D types mentioned above), a classification still largely in use today.

The 1993 discovery of an unlooted shaft tomb at Huitzilapa is the latest major milestone, providing "the most detailed information to date on the funerary customs" associated with shaft tomb tradition.