New Blood from an old stone

Resumen

In this paper I am reconsidering a great "stone of the sun", the featured monument type in the 1581 Historia de las Indias de Nueva España by Fray Diego Durán, the Dominican chronicler. The monument is the sacrificial stone known to modern scholars as the Stone of Tizoc. Durán actually saw it when it was unearthed in the third quarter of the sixteenth century from the Plaza Mayor of the new colonial capital of New Spain, beneath which it had been interred since the destruction of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in the 1520s. Durán subsequently matched the monument to a passage in the Nahuatl history he was using as the basis for his own chronicle -a passage describing a sacrificial stone commissioned by Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina (Motecuhzoma 1) for the immolation of prisoners from the Mixtec area. In reality, the described monument must have been the Motecuhzoma 1 Stone, the first of the type with conquest scenes, which was unearthed from the patio of the Ex-Arzobispado Palace in 1988, whereas the very similar Tizoc Stone was carved some twenty years later.