Water Goddess

I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that the “Ancient Americas” exhibition is, for me, a culmination of my interests over the past thirty-five years and, in one sense, a justification of them. From 1955 until 1963, I studied the relationship between temples and landscape in Greece, while, from 1964 until 1973, I worked on similar problems in the American Southwest and Mesoamerica. In 1975, I began to study French gardens and fortifications of the seventeenth century from the same point …

About 2500 years ago the fertile adjoining valleys of Mexico, Puebla, Cuernavaca, and Toluca were already a metropolitan nucleus for the entire northern continent. Other regions in Oaxaca, on the southern Gulf Coast, and in Maya territory were in touch with central Mexico, giving and receiving each in its time. The dominant centre of ancient urban life eventually became the three high intermontane plateau valleys of central southern Mexico, in the quadrant bounded by Tula, Xochicalco, Cholula, …