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Turn of the 20th Century - present Shaft Tomb Research
Various researchers - Isabel Kelly, Stanley Long, Otto Schondube, Peter Furst, Robert Pickering
Shaft Tombs have been recognized as a West Mexican phenomenon since the turn of the century, at least. Carl Lumholtz and Adela Breton were early researchers whose travels through the area brought them into contact with shaft tombs, and the detailed hollow figures found within them. The hollow figures attracted such attention, in fact, that even in Lumholtz' time these artifacts were being looted, collected, and faked for profit.
Archaeologists were left in a very difficult position, as they did not appear to have the knowledge or extended fieldwork necessary to locate the tombs. Initial attempts focused on drawing looted tombs so that some information survived, and Isabel Kelly's work in Colima is a good example of this. This research established that there was a wide variety of tomb forms, but at their most basic the tombs consisted of a vertical shaft of varying depth (.5 to 20 meters) and one or more chambers either at the bottom or more often excavated off to the side. The bodies were interred within the chamber(s), and hollow and solid figures, ceramics, jewelry, weaponry, and other items were placed with the dead. These early studies also showed that shaft tombs were to be found across the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima, and so the notion of a "shaft tomb culture" developed.
Eventually some archaeologists began a highly controversial dialogue with the looters themselves to try and rescue some information before the materials taken from the tombs vanished forever into the Precolumbian art market. Stanley Long carried out survey work and excavations in the Magdalena valley (northwesternmost of the Tequila valleys) in the early 1960s. There he recorded a series of looted tombs, and excavated partly opened tombs. Jose Maria Alcala, one of the workers Long hired to help him, kindly provided this photograph of himself pulling loose earth from down within one of these previously looted tombs, as Long filled a bucket from down below. Months after Long returned to California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art purchased a bulk collection of shaft tomb materials that Long was able to show had come from a specific tomb in the Magdalena valley. He also conducted interviews with the looters in order to flesh out his more carefully collected field data. His dissertation then focused on a detailed inventory and study of these tomb materials, but unfortunately the ordinary and critically important materials such as ceramics were left unsynthesized. His survey data and Postclassic materials excavated from Las Cuevas are still housed at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and have never been published.
Another group of scholars in the 1960s moved towards generalizing about the shaft tombs and developing some kind of synthesis. Otto Schondube, for example, examined the radiocarbon dates of the shaft tombs collected by Long and others and argued that they ranged from the Formative through the Middle Classic periods, or what we would call the Pre-Tabachines and Tabachines phases in central Jalisco. The radically different material culture of the Epiclassic (known in central Jalisco as the El Grillo phase) ushered in more classically "Mesoamerican" cultural traits. Today it would be better to refer to this new orientation as more specifically "central Mesoamerican", since more general Mesoamerican attributes (monumental architecture, ballcourts, iconography) all existed previously. Peter Furst focused more on the interpretation of the hollow figures, which he related to shamanic symbolism and practices, based both on general studies of shamanism and specific studies of some Huichol Indians.
The 1970s ushered in a period of more focused excavations of intact shaft tombs at Tabachines in the Atemajac valley, at El Openo in northwestern Michoacan, and later in the Sayula Basin, in the Bolanos Canyon of northern Jalisco, along the coast of Jalisco, and in the central Tequila valleys. There have also been more sophisticated analyses of the artifacts from the tombs by Robert Pickering (currently of the Buffalo Bill Historic Center), helping to authenticate items of uncertain provenance. Current interpretations tend to emphasize the diversity of shaft tombs and their associated offerings, and the notion of a shaft tomb culture is being largely dropped, but few have stepped forward to suggest a more social interpretation to replace it.
Comments to Chris Beekman