Aztec priests at Tenochtitlán offered a whole galaxy of starfish to the war god Huitzilopochtli 700 years ago, along with a trove of other objects from the distant edges of the Aztec Empire. Archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) recently unearthed the offering on the site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, in what is now Mexico City.
Ahuizotl, coast to coast
The offering included 164 starfish from a species called Nidorella armata, known less formally as the chocolate chip starfish because it’s mostly the color of cookie dough, but it has dark spots. (It shares the nickname with the other chocolate chip sea star, Protoreaster nodosus, which provides an excellent argument in favor of scientific names.) Nidorella armata lives along the Pacific coastline from Mexico south to Peru, where it hangs out on shallow-water reefs of rock and coral.
For Tenochtitlán, the nearest source of chocolate chip starfish would have been nearly 300 kilometers away from the Aztec capital. Chunks of coral found in the same offering came from about the same distance away but in roughly the opposite direction—the western end of the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, these items came from the farthest eastern and western edges of the Aztec Empire, places that the Aztec ruler Ahuizotl had only recently conquered.
Ahuizotl took the throne in 1486, and he jumped straight into two major projects: renovating the capital, including the Templo Mayor, and expanding the borders of his empire. His campaigns nearly doubled the size of the Aztec Empire, stretching Aztec rule west to the Pacific coast of Mexico and southeast to Guatemala. All that conquest meant that the Aztecs could easily bring starfish from the Pacific and corals from the Gulf of Mexico, along with an assortment of marine shells (and even pufferfish) to Tenochtitlán to lay before their gods.
Conquistadors ruin everything
Back in the capital, Ahuizotl ordered the reconstruction of large parts of the city. His efforts included expanding the Templo Mayor, which in Aztec terms meant building a new, bigger outer layer over the top of the previous temple. (The prior construction was often ritually “killed” before the new one could be consecrated.) That’s convenient for modern archaeologists, who can date each layer of construction at the Templo Mayor.