Xicalango revisited
I posted recently that I had the wrong location for Xicalango in Lords of Death and Life. Well, it turns out the truth is more complex than that!
When I was first doing the research for this comic a year and a half ago I swear there was next to nothing available by googling "Xicalango." Now there's some good material- though my name comes up repeatedly on the search. ;-D It seems there's quite a bit of archaeological disagreement on where exactly this city was located. Everyone's sure it was there- all the Aztec and Mayan sources make reference to it, Cortez's translator was born there, and there are descriptions of its Mexica quarter, legal status with regards to the Empire, importance for trade, wealth of caocao production, lighthouse, slave trade (Cortez's translator), religious pilgrimages, and the ethnic group that lived there. Everyone knows it was on the peninsula at the westernmost edge of the Terminos Lagoon. But it seems that so far that's all we know.
There is a website that claims to have Xicalango's location, based on the discovery of some temple mounds and (possible) fortifications in the region. But the whole area is covered with artifacts and the rainy swampy terrain makes archeology very difficult. Another source suggests the city has been inundated by the lagoon- a reasonable assumption, as the entire peninsula seems to be sinking and Xicalango would have had to be on or near the coast five hundred years ago. Yet another site just says that no one has found it yet.
So. The upshot of all this is that due to academic squabbles and the unfinished work of Mesoamerican archeology, I'm well in the clear for making the city look like anything I want it too. If I want to give Xicalango an impractical improbable seven-story lighthouse I can! Jonathon one, historical nit-pickiness zero! Ha!
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jdalton) wrote,
