Excavation History

Prior to 1946, Chupícuaro was the name of a small town of just over 1,000 inhabitants (Porter 521) located in the state of Guanajuato in Central Mexico. Chupícuaro was located at the confluence of the Lerma River and the Coroneo or Tigre, its tributary (519). The area surrounding Chupícuaro was rich in pottery sherds and other archaeological material (Porter 524). It was first noted on a map of archaeological sites in 1926 (521)[1]. This notation was followed in February by a survey visit carried out by Enrique Juan Palacios (521). This survey was developed by the Dirección de Arqueología[2] (521).  Palacios noted archeological remains on the hills of the area and the tepetate, or volcanic “sand and chalky ash deposits”, that underlies the cultural deposits in the area (521, 525). Palacios believed the archaeological remains to be those of the Tarascans (521), a large, formidable state that occupied the area at the time of the Spanish conquest. This early academic interest was followed by further support from the Dirección de Arqueología in the form of the first archaeological exploration of the site by Ramón Mena and Porfirio Aguirre in 1927 (521). They reported that it was a burial site, opened three of the stone-lined tombs, collected ceramic artifacts, and concurred with Palacios’ assessment that the site was Tarascan (521). Later excavation, however, suggests that the occupants of Chupícuaro predated the Tarascans and were likely unrelated (523).

The site, while forgotten by academics, began to attract the interest of amateurs over the following eighteen years (Porter 521-522). The most significant of these was Señor don Camarino Espino, a doctor who practiced in the nearby city of Acámbaro (521). He began to buy archaeological discoveries from locals of Chupícuaro and question them about their finds, amassing a collection of several thousand specimens of Chupícuaro material (522). His impressive collection of what was, at the time, assumed to be Tarascan artifacts, caught the attention of Dr. Daniel F. Rubín de la Borbolla, a researcher of Tarascan archaeology at the larger region’s Lake Pátzcuaro (522). He would establish the definitive academic investigation of Chupícuaro (515). First, Dr. Borbolla and some members of his excavation team spent several weeks in June of 1945 visiting Dr. Espino to view and discuss his collections (522). Next, they began excavations, uncovering three burials and a large number of pottery sherds, which they began to categorize and from which they drew conclusions, discussed in the section on interpreting ceramics (522). Most notably, they realized that the site was Pre-Classic (522) and therefore not Tarascan (523).

Throughout the excavations, Dr. Borbolla’s team was aware that the construction of the Solís Dam necessitated immediate, large-scale salvage excavation (Porter 522). Dr. Borbolla made arrangements with the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the Dirección Arqueología of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia[3] to rent a house in Chupícuaro that would serve as headquarters for the project, and to bring in additional workers, students and locals, for a second field season of work at Chupícuaro from March 1946 to January 1947 (522). The Comisión Nacional de Irrigación[4], masterminds of the Solís Dam project, also committed twenty of their local workmen to the project (522).

Dr. Borbolla’s excavations uncovered almost 400 burials (Darras and Faugère, “Chupícuaro”, footnote 2). They did not find any habitations or other large structures (Porter 522). All the excavated material was stored at a regional museum in Morelia until 1950, when it was moved to Mexico City for study by Muriel N. Porter[5], who was given access to all excavated material, field notes, and other data (522). She also worked with the private collection of Dr. Espino and an “almost equally large collection of purchased and donated Chupícuaro specimens in the Museo Nacional[6] in Mexico City and in the regional museum in Morelia, together with numerous pieces known to exist in museums in the United States” (522). Porter’s findings were published by the American Philosophical Society as a monograph titled The Excavations at Chupícuaro, Guanajuato, Mexico, 1956. The materials from Dr. Borbolla’s excavations found a final home at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología[7] in Mexico City (522). Re-examination of the Porter’s study was made in 1969 in The Natalie Wood Collection of Pre-Columbian Ceramics from Chupícuaro, Guanajuato, México at UCLA (ed. J. D. Frierman), which contained new scholarship on the subject (including a reexamination of the topic by Porter herself, speculation on dates based on analogous data at other sites, discussion of a Chupícuaro sphere of influence based on Chupícuaro ceramics found at other sites, a photographic catalogue of a private collection of Chupícuaro, and release of field notes on each of the burials at Chupícuaro), but no new data from the site itself. Meanwhile, the continued appearance of Chupícuaro artifacts on the antiquities market as they were recovered and sold by looters proved that some portion of the Chupícuaro society’s lands had not been covered by the dam’s flooding (Darras and Faugère, “Proyecto” 2).

Although no further excavation of Chupícuaro was made during this time, an excavation carried out by Shirley Gorenstein in Acámbaro[8] in 1971 yielded the first radiocarbon dates for the region (Darras and Faugère, “Proyecto” 2). It also prompted the work of Charles Florance, a student at the site who conducted systematic regional, rather than site-specific, scholarship on Chupícuaro (Darras and Faugère, “Proyecto” 2). He conducted surveys of 45 sites in the region surrounding Chupícuaro, concluding that the area’s occupation could be extended from Porter’s estimates to include 600 BC to AD 100 (2). Around this time, Michael Snarkis proposed a third, more recent “Mixtlan” phase be added to the simple “early” and “late” chronology of Porter (2). In 1984, Carlos Castañeda and Yolanda Cano excavated at the regional site of La Virgen, finding an architectural pattern of sunken patios (2).

The only other extensive survey and excavation conducted in Chupícuaro since that time (Darras and Faugère, “Proyecto” 2) began in 1998 and has continued more than fifteen years (“Autoridades” 1). It was directed by Brigette Faugère, joined in the project’s later years by Véronique Darras (1). Their work added significantly to knowledge of the timeline and architecture of Chupícuaro. For dates, they used stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating from sites on the banks of the Lerma near to Chupícuaro rather than more distant “analogous” sites in the region (Darras and Faugère, “Chupicuaro”). They dated the site’s occupation to between 600 BC and AD 250 (Darras and Faugère, “Chupícuaro” abstract). They divided this occupation into a sequence of several phases: early Chupícuaro, 600-400 BC; late Chupícuaro I, 400-200 BC; late Chupícuaro II, 200-100 BC; transition phase, 100 BC – AD 0; and Mixtlan phase, AD 0 – 250 (footnote 8). The project determined that Chupícuaro’s cultural peak was between 400 and 100 BC (“Autoridades” 2). During this time, the Chupícuaro region displays the construction of monumental plazas and the best examples of the polychrome pottery for which it are most famous (2).