When Lynn Foster was asked to contribute remarks on Mesoamerican gold
to a panel discussion of the Spanish conquest, she expected to find little
to say. Both the Aztec and Maya referred to gold as “excrement of
the sun;” the Spanish conquerors claimed that the Mesoamericans valued
jade, not gold; and few Mesoamerican gold objects survived the conquest.
But lack of artifacts does not mean that gold was unimportant.
Although the total weight of gold artifacts found in Mexico to date is
less than 50 pounds, Cortez received a quarter-tun of gold per year, and
Moctezuma may have received as much as 2 tons annually. Pre-Columbian
sumptuary laws restricted the wearing of gold to nobility. Gold was
not irrelevant. Lynn Foster’s research turned up some surprising
results, not only about the value of gold but also about the depth of its
significance in Mesoamerica. Much of the gold came from elsewhere,
and Foster suggests that it may have been regarded as an “improved,” more
workable form of iron pyrite, a substance that earlier Mexicans had long
used for ritual objects such as mirrors.
Lynn Foster received her doctorate in philosophy, but she has spent
more time studying Mesoamerican civilization than she has Plato or Aristotle.
A former senior research scholar in Hispanic Studies at the University
of Massachusetts in Boston, she has written several books on Mesoamerica
and Latin America, among them Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World
and the recently published and updated edition of A Brief History of Mexico.
She has given talks and published papers in her area of special interest,
Chichen Itza, and is currently writing a book on that site.