Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (717 page)

An artificial mound of earth and stone on which was constructed a temple or shrine, found widely over Mesoamerica. The mounds are sometimes terraced or stepped. In some cases the mounds also served as tombs.

 
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Largely obsolete term originally introduced by J. A. Ford and G. Willey to denote the period
c.
ad 700–1700 in the eastern woodlands of North America when a large number of
PLATFORM MOUNDS
were built. See
MISSISSIPPIAN CULTURES
.

 
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In the classical world, the simplest form of temple in which ‘the house of god’ is the same in plan as an ordinary house: a rectangular room, with the long side walls extended to form the walls of a porch, and with two columns between the antae (or wall endings), to support the porch roof and make a fine entry. A good example is the so-called Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi, Greece.

 
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In contrast to the measurable and calculated notion of
TIME
or chronology, temporality is concerned with the secular or routinized way in which a sequence of events, a kind of history, is physically experienced by those who live through them or experience them. Thus the passing of time is treated not as a neutral dimension but rather as being constituted by social practices. The French historian Braudel suggested that different temporal scales could be recognized (events; cycles or conjunctures; and the
longue dureé
), while Ricoeur contended that historical narratives are ‘allegories of temporality’ that use a discursive mode to convey something of the experience of time.

 
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In early Celtic art a characteristic plant-derived motif incorporating a series of running loops or spirals.

 
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Capital city of the Aztecs situated on the site now occupied by Mexico City. Tenochtitlán was founded in
c.
ad 1325 on an island in Lake Texcoco. The city itself was formally planned, with six main canals set on a north–south axis and two main canals running east–west. There were four main districts in the city, each containing between fifteen and twenty wards. Each ward had its own public buildings and was based on kinship groups.
At the centre of the city was a sacred precinct with numerous public buildings. At the focus was the Great Temple (
Templo Mayor
), a truncated pyramid 60m high on which stood two temples: one dedicated to Huitzilopochtli the Aztecs' patron god, the other to Tlaloc the rain god. Legend records that at the dedication of the former some 20000 human victims were sacrificed. There were more than twenty other pyramid-temples in the central area, including those dedicated to Tezcatlipoca and Xipe Totec, together with priests' quarters, seven
tzompantli
(racks for displaying the skulls of sacrificed victims), two ball-courts, arsenals, plazas, and other public buildings.
Surrounding the sacred precinct were the palaces of the rulers. Moctezuma II's palace included not only his luxury residence but also pleasure gardens, an aviary, a zoo, and apartments for human freaks. In the northern part of the city was a massive market complex known as Tlateloco. Tenochtitlán was taken by Hernan Cortés in ad 1519; it was subsequently razed by the Spanish when they came to construct their own city.
[Rep.: S. Linné , 1934,
Archaeological researches at Tenochtitlán, Mexico
. Stockholm: Ethnographic Museum of Sweden; Sum.: A. F. Molina Montes , 1980, The building of Tenochtitlán.
National Geographic
, 156(6), 753–65]