The adventurous travels of an Englishwoman in Mexico
By Florelisa Hernández – January 2009
The consolidation of archaeology as a scientific discipline could have never been possible without the adventurous spirit and travels of many westerners that made valuable contributions to understand more of the back then “unexplored worlds”, Carl Lumholtz, Alexander Von Humboldt, Frederick Catherwood, are a few examples. However, it was a woman traveler, Adela Breton, one of the pioneers of the exploration of ancient Indian sites in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit.
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Adela Breton on horseback
with
her guide 1896.
City of Bristol
Museum and Art Gallery |
Adela Breton (1849-1923) was a Victorian gentlewoman whose parents supported her education and artistic training. Anthropology and the "new" science of geology appealed to her father and soon captured her own interest. After her father's death, Adela began a lifetime of travel, exploring past cultures and landscapes. Often camping or staying in small villages, accompanied only by her Indian guide and companion, she created a pictorial account of the Mexican countryside in the 1890s.
Adela traveled to the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco in May 1895, her interest in antiquities was aroused by descriptions of ancient ruins and artifacts in the surrounding region. An adventurous and experienced traveler, she soon made arrangements to explore the area and boarded a local train to Etzatlan, at Hacienda Guadalupe, she was taken to see the site of a large earth and masonry tumulus already partly excavated by the land owner. There she drew detailed sketches and witnessed the find of an impressive burial, above which some twenty earthenware figures had been placed. Breton acquired two of them, as well as a jar and several shell bracelets, and several pieces of worked obsidian, all of these objects were eventually sent to the Bristol Museum in England. Continuing her journey by horseback around the marshes of the Laguna de Magdalena she visited by canoe La Otra Banda, an island on which a remarkable outcrop of black obsidian mark the site of ancient tool making workshops. Returning southward around the base of the extinct Volcano de Tequila, Breton arrived to the town of Teuchitlan, local guides took her to a terraced hillside overlooking the spreading valley, she was shown an extraordinary set of mounds arranged in three circles, each with a large tumulus or pyramid rising in the center. This archaeological site, known as Guachimonton, has since then been identified as the largest in the entire region. Breton’s observations and sketches were published in two articles en 1903 and 1905. By portraying the association of tumuli, high status burials, ceramic tomb sculptures, shell jewelry, large obsidian mines and workshops and the monumental ritual circles at Teuchitlan, Breton pointed to the essential features of what is only now emerging in archaeological investigations as the heartland of an ancient complex society with a distinctive symbolic and aesthetic system, yet with many social, economic and cultural forms akin to those of other Mesoamerican peoples.
Between 1894 and 1908 Breton took thirteen excursions to the Mayan archaeological sites in Yucatan, Mexico, researching the artwork and producing valuable watercolor paintings of the ruins.
She died in 1923 of an illness, during a trip to attend the International Congress of Americanists in Rio de Janeiro.
Jalisco and Nayarit, like most places of Mexico, are a rich source of pre-Hispanic culture, unfortunately the lack of coherent cultural plans, of vision, of interest, and some other factors has made impossible the accessibility of publics to the interesting and vast information about the ancient past of West of Mexico (Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit). Email to a friend
Florelisa Hernández
E-mail: florelisa77@hotmail.com
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* Florelisa is an Art Restorer, writer, translator, and Certified Interpretive Guide by the NAI, (US). She offers her freelance services of writing, translating, public relations, and marketing consultant. You can reach her at pv@biokhronos.com.mx
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