Called upon to provide her anthropological expertise, Northwestern professor Elizabeth Brumfiel has found herself immersed in the people and culture of an ancient civilization as lead curator of “The Aztec World,” a new exhibit at the Field Museum.
Featuring almost 300 artifacts from museums across Mexico and the U.S., the exhibit gives attendees a look into the everyday life of the Aztec people. The show opened Oct. 26 and will run until April 19.
Brumfiel has spent the last 20 years studying the impact the Aztec Empire had on subject communities in Xaltocan, Mexico. Originally the capital of a small autonomous kingdom, Xaltocan was conquered by the Aztecs before passing under the control of the Spanish colonial empire.
“We excavate and we compare artifacts from the lower layers – from the period of independence – with artifacts from the upper layers; from the period of the Aztec rule and even from the period of Spanish rule,” Brumfiel said. “And we can see how activities, standard of living, symbols and ideas changed from one period to another.”
Brumfiel played a primary role in the project, an endeavor she says was the result of collaboration and competence.
“I have tremendous respect for the professionalism of the Field (Museum) staff,” she said. “That’s one reason I decided to try out this collaboration when they invited me to do it.”
Brumfiel worked closely with Field Museum staff and with curators from Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and the Templo Mayor Museum.
Franck Mercurio, the senior exhibition developer at the Field Museum, said the partnership of the professionals from Mexico was indispensable.
“Even though the show’s going to be exclusively here at the Field Museum, it was a real collaboration between both sets of curators to put this thing together,” he said. Putting the exhibit together was no easy task: Each of the about 200 artifacts from Mexico required legal documentation before it could be shipped across the border. The rest of the artifacts were collected from U.S. institutions, Mercurio said.
“We had a team here at the Field Museum that would go down to Mexico periodically and basically negotiate for objects,” he said. “There was a lot of diplomacy involved.”
Cynthia Robin, an NU anthropology professor specializing in Mayan archaeology, said she was impressed by the exhibit’s ability to convey “a real sense of what it would have been like to be an Aztec in ancient times.”
Unlike previous exhibits she has seen, which focused on the monumental artwork of Aztec society’s upper classes, the exhibit offers a more thorough exploration of the less prominent components of Aztec civilization, Robin said.
“I hope people would come out with a sense of the great achievements of the American civilizations and what they were like,” she said.
