Famous Mexican Indians in Trujillo Honduras Area Pre-Columbian Period and Conquest Periods

Famous Mexican Indians in Trujillo Honduras Area  Pre-Columbian Period and Conquest Periods part I

 

By Wendy Griffin

Male--Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, Toltec King,  –Also see Wikipedia article Ce Acalt Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl

 Male--Moctezuma I, Aztec Emperor

Female--Malinche or Doña Marina-Hernán Cortes’s Nahuatl and Maya Chontal Translator-See Wikipedia article- Malinche

Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl  was a legendary Toltec King who was born in Mexico in the tenth century.  Ce means one and Acatl means reed and can be applied to several different plants including tule, water reed used in Honduras and El Salvador to make mats known as petates, junco, a water reed used in Santa Barbara to make baskets and hats and some Garifunas also made hats of this reed, and corrizo, a bamboo like plant which grow in the mountains above 1,500 feet and used in Honduras to make flutes by all ethnic groups and among the Lencas and the Chorti Mayas and the Pipil or Nahuas to make Carrizo baskets. This name Ce Acatl refers to the day of the Aztec calendar he was born, and this practice of using a nickname of the day you were born existed among the elite of the Mayas and the Nahua speakers of Honduras and Guatemala, both at the time of Copan Ruinas (300-900 AD) and at the time of contact with the Spanish. For example, archaeologists believe that 18 Rabbit, the name of the famous Copan king who was beheaded in Quirigua, Guatemala, was named that because of the day he was born.

Topiltzin-tzin in Nahuatl means like Sir in English and Don or Señor in Spanish, it was a title of honor among the Nahua speakers. Topiltzin means like our Prince.  According to the modern Nahua Indians of the Catacamas area of Olancho, the leader that brought them to Olancho was Tapiltzin Axil.  Considering that he has been dead 1,000 years, that is very similar to the name Topiltzin collected in Mexico by Spanish missionaries 5 centuries after his death.

Quetzalcoatl (Snake-Coatl and Quetzal-a bird native to Honduras with green feathers, a red breast, and a long green tail, the national bird of Guatemala, still called Quetzal in Spanish) was the god that this king followed as his patron god. Among the Nahuatl speaking Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl became fused with the god of the hunt, who was also the morning star and who according to legend was sometimes considered the father of Ce Acatl, although like Quetzalcoatl, this may have been a god’s name he was associated with instead of the actual God. Quetzalcoatl the god also became fused with the god of the wind (including hurricanes and the bringing of rains in storms).  Many carved stone heads for the head of corn grinding  stones (metates in Nahua) are found in the Trujillo, Lower Aguan, Olancho, and the Ciudad Blanca areas   showing the god Quetzalcoatl who also has a swirl to indicate the wind  including in the Rufino Galan Museum of Trujillo, the San Pedro Sula Museum and from the Ciudad Blanca are on the website www.roatanet.com/ciudadblanca and the Ciudad Blanca video on Youtube.

This god was also painted in red on white painted pottery in the Naco region of Santa Barbara in the form of a bird with snake fangs in its mouth. This form of pottery known as Naco bichrome is found in the San Pedro Sula Museum where it is in poor condition, and in the collection of Banco Atlantida in Tegucigalpa where it is in good condition, and also in US collections such as at the National Museum of the American Indian’s Mason collection from Campo Dos, (Banana plantation two of United Fruit’s Tela railroad) outside of La Lima, Cortes. It has also been found in Toltec style tombs in El Salvador, and in El Bosque section of Copan Ruinas, a post Classic site which was only inhabited for 100 years in the early postclassic like around 1,000 AD.

Copan Ruinas had already been abandoned about 100 years when the El Bosque site was started. Copan Ruinas may have been abandoned because Chorotegas  and later Nahua speakers swept through the area taking slaves on their ways to settle on the Pacific Coast. As Copan is in a valley, it was not very defensible. The Chortis moved up into the hills in the PostClassic, such as around Sisimile in the Department of Copan, Honduras,  around La Brea, in the Department of Ocotepeque, Honduras, and around Jupilingo in in Camotan and  Jocotan on the Guatemalan side. Most of the names of places in the lowlands in the Chorti area are of Nahua origin (jocotan-place of jocote plums, camotan-place of camote sweet potatos, copan from copante-bridge, Ocotepeque-mountain of ocote pine,  Esquipulas-place of the God Esquipul, Chiquimula-place of Jilquero songbird, Quetzaltepeque-mountain of the Quetzal bird in Nahua etc.) and Chorti or Chol place names are mostly in the mountains when the Spanish come.  

The El Bosque site at Copan Ruinas may be associated with the kingdom of Payaqui (among Nahuas) which Ce Acatl supposedly founded in confederation with the Chortis. Just as the Aztecs sometimes visited the abandoned ruins of Teotihuacan which they did not build to do ceremonies (Teotihuacan was a place of adivination for the Aztecs-Teot means god), the Toltecs seemed to have used ceremonially the ruins at Copan in the Post-Classic. This early Postclassic site was heavily attacked after 100 years—the buildings were burnt and there were up to 100 projectile points like arrowheads and lance points were found in each room. Whoever attacked really wanted to kill the inhabitants.  The followers of the god Esquipul whose name is found among the Nicaroa of Nicaragua who were  originally from Cholula may have been enemies of the people who followed Quetzalcoatl like the followers of  Ce Acalt, forcing them to flee. Or they could have been attacked by the migrating and expanding Maya Quiche, who reportedly wiped out whole lineages in their struggles with their neighbors.

It was common for Nahua speaking rulers to take the name of their patron god, and Quetzalcoatl may also have been an honorific title among Toltec rulers, which is why there can be reported of both Quetzalcoatl dying in the area of the Ciudad Blanca in Olancho, in a place called Huehuetlapalan, reported a few days journey to the east of Trujillo by Hernan Cortes so that it may be the Nahua name as the Ciudad Blanca, and the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl/Morning Star who may be a later king with the same name.

The followers of Ce Acatl did not all die in this raid at El Bosque. When the Spanish Conquistador Pedro Alvarado went to the Cakchiquel and asked them for 1,000 warriors to help him conquer Esquipulas, and Chiquimula, and on to Naco and the San Pedro Sula area,  the Cakchiquel accepted saying they especially wanted to wipe out Acatan. Acalt is the Nahuatl word for tule, but Acat would be the Pipil word and Acatan would be the place of a lot of tule or the place of Ce Acat’s kingdom. According to tradition, Ce Acatl went on to found the city of Cuscatlan which became eventually the kingdom of Cuscatlan occupying most of the center and eastern part of El Salvador, displacing the Maya-Chorti from most of these regions, except a small corner of El Salvador such as Tejutla. Maya Chorti refugees from the lake guijar region supposedly founded Camotan around the 1200’s. Probably more Nahua speakers, including perhaps Nonalalcos, who were reportedly very fierce and may have caused the destruction of both Teotihuacan and Cholula and may have been an ethnicly mixed group, were coming at this time because of a terrible drought in the Central Mexico where according to tradition it did not rain at all. If a million Irish immigrated during the Great Potatoe Famine and a million died who did not immigrate, we should not be so surprised that there were an estimated 700,000 Nahua speakers in Central America at the time of the Spanish conquest.   There are two towns in El Salvador called Nonalalco. The Nahua Indians of Izalco  (the place of obsidian) were reportedly Nicaroas who stopped there on their way from Cholula to Soconosco on Tehuatepec peninsula in Mexico through the Chorti area to the sea in El Salvador, and they expanded north, perhaps going both towards Naco and toward Trujillo, as well as moving south into Nicaragua. This story was collected by Fray Torquemada in the book Monarquia Indiana. The Indians of Izalco, however, were in the state or in alliance with those of Cuscatlan. Not all Nahua speakers in Central America came there the same way, and they may not have been part of a unified state before they came..

The Nahua speaking Indians of the Trujillo and Lower Aguan (Papayeca) and Middle Aguan (Agalteca, Yoro) areas

 The high priest in the Trujillo area at the time of Spanish conquest was called “papa” according to Hernan Cortes and according to Michael Coe  “Papa” was the high priest of the god of Quetzalcoatl worshiped in a round temple in his form of God of the Wind. The capital of the Nahua speaking state in the Trujillo area was called Papayeca, at the time of the Spanish conquest, which would be the place of the “papa” or preist who was in charge of the worship of Quetzalcoatl.  Dr. Paul Healy  of  the Univeristy of Trent in Peterborough, Canada, thought the archaeological site he excavated at Rio Claro, along the road between Sonaguera and Trujillo, near the XV Battallon, was the pre-Columbian ruin of Papayeca.  The post classic archaeological ruin at Rio Claro had fortified walls,  natural ditches around it, was up on a hill, and had temple mounds and many mounds indicating houses.  This area of the lower Aguan River was connected to the Trujillo/Santa Fe area by a path known as the Colobri (Hummingbird) Path, which still exists, although blocked by foreign owned housing, 

These types of forts up in hills were common in Post-Classic in Honduras, although unheard of for the Classic period, and some other similar sites in Honduras include Tenampua near Comayagua, Agalteca, Comayagua, Paso de la Conquista, near La Brea, Ocotepeque of Chorti leader Copan Galel , Cerro Palenque south of San Pedro Sula in Santiago Pimienta of Chief Cocimba, Honduras, and Lempira’s fort near Erandique, Lempira.

 Papayeca had 10 subject towns which extended as far Telica in Olancho near Catacamas, and it was allied with another Nahua speaking town Champagua (damp house or house by the water in Nahua)  which had 8 subject towns. Champa is still the word used in Honduran Spanish for houses that just have palm leaf roofs, like many beach restaurants. It is equivalent to the Mexican Spanish word palapa. At the time of Spanish conquest, several towns in the Santa Barbara and Cortes areas in Honduras had the word –palapa after them like Petoa-palapa  (Petoa still exists in Santa Barbara) in the list of encomiendas or Indian towns given to Spanish soldiers after the conquest of the San Pedro Sula and Santa Barbara area.

Chapagua is still the name of the river east of Trujillo and there is a modern town of Chapagua, although inhabited by mulattos descended from Black English speakers settled there in the early 1800’s by the Spanish of Trujillo, to protect them from Miskito and Rah Indians who extended as far as Santa Rosa Aguan in 1811 still, according to George Henderson, the British superintendant of the Miskito Coast. The names of the chief of Papayeca and Champagua were in Nahua or Nahuatl like Mazalt (Deer) in Nahuatl.

 A number of archaeological pieces in the Rufino Galan Museum  in Trujillo are from the ruins along the Chapagua River which were unearthed when it rained. Some pieces are also believed to be from the Cuyamel caves, which are also above the road between Sonaguera and Truijillo, known locally as the road of “margen izquierda” (the left margin of the Aguan River),  near Rio Claro and which were also previously accessible  from the Trujillo area by the Colobri Path.

The archaeology of the Cuyamel Caves was also reported by Dr. Paul Healy, which included Olmec style pottery and statues (from around 1,000 BC) and then were used again in the PostClassic period (900-1500 AD). The Olmecs from the Gulf Coast of Southern Mexico may have been in the area to trade corn seeds for cacao which grew wild in the area at that time, medicinal plants, and green feathers.  Dr. Paul Healy also excavated a Classic period site in the Trujillo area, Silin Farm, but it was more of a Pech Indian site with no permanent structure, 16 classes of bones of wild animals, more than 16 classes of bones of fish both fresh water and salt water, and mounds of seashells left from eating seafood, including a lot of conch, and mostly red utilitarian pottery, with the only painted pottery one broken sherd of Lenca pottery from the Ulua Valley. This matches what was known of the Pech culture in the twentieth century before the rainforest was cut down.

How Ce Acalt May have come to the Agalta Vally in Olancho, or Agalteca in Yoro on the Aguan River and finally dying in the Ciudad Blanca area in the Olancho/Mosquitia area

According to traditions collected in the 1500’s by the Spanish and reported in Wikipedia, Ce Acatl first went to Tulan, a place of a lot of Tule, the reed used to make sleeping mats or petates.  Tulan or Tolan is now thought by archaeologists to be associated with the archaeological ruin of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico.  Because tule is a water reed, the valley of mexico which had big lakes was a good place to harvest tule. Toltec also became associated with the word for people who knew how to make crafts like tule mats and Carrizo or junco baskets, all plants associated with the word acatl in Nahua. The symbol or glyph of the Mayan Indians for Teotihuacan was a bundle of tule, which is pronounced pop in Mayan, and is the origin of the name Popol Nah, for the house with a petate of tule carved in it at Copan Ruinas. Some archaeologists think that some Teotihuacan warriors went to Tikal in Guatemala and helped found that state among the Mayas. This is how Teotihuacan stone architecture got started among the Mayas who up to that time had built of bajareque or mud and wattle style.

From Tikal, Yax Kuk Mo in Teotihuacan clothes went with his entourage to Copan Ruinas where he founded the Copan dynasty of the 16 rulers.  Up to 100 AD the Copan Ruinas area had mostly been inhabited by Lenca Indians and between 100 AD and 300 AD Mayas from the highlands such as from Kaminaljuyu, whose lake had dried up, were expanding into the Copan Valley. The Lencas moved into the hills because of the fighting. The main site in that region prior to the arrival of Yax Kuk Mo had been in another valley, not in the Copan valley. The Copan dynasty continued to intermarry with elite women from Teotihuacan origin, and the Mayans of Copan and Tikal and Quirigua proudly bosted of their ties to Teotihuacan (Tulan) long after it ceased to be a power.

Teotihuacan was attacked around 600 AD, perhaps by Nonalcos, and many of the Toltecs (people from Tolan or Tulan) settled in a neighborhood in the Mexico Valley, known as Culhuacan. Near Culhuacan is the mountain where the sun god Huitipochlti (spelling) was supposedly born.  In both the Mosquitia and among the Maya Quiche who have a lot of Toltec influence, the Indians have reported even in the 19^th century for the Quiche and in the 21^st century among the Miskitos, “we are from the place where the dawn is born.”

Cholula, which for a time was known as Tula Cholula, is in a valley near Mexico city and Teotihuacan, and was a ceremonial city associated with Teotihuacan. Cholula was attacked after Teotihuacan, probably by the same Nonalcos, and the people were forced to immigrate.  These Indians from Cholula are known as Cholulatecas or Chorotegas in Honduran colonial documents (the origin of the place name Choluteca in southern Honduras) and Nicaraoas and Chorotegas in Nicaragua. They seem to have included speakers of different languages including  Chorotega  and maybe Mazahua, who were Oto-Mangue speakers and the original inhabitants of the Central Mexican valleys and Nahua speakers who came later from Northern Mexico and whose language is related to the Yaqui Indians of Northern Mexico.

When the Indians from Central Mexico left the area, they frequently renamed the new places with the same name as the old places, just like people from England named their new place New England or Spaniards from the town of Trujillo in Spain, name Trujillo in Honduras after their home town. This is why first Tula or Tulan is in Central Mexico, and then it is across the water, as apparently the Nahua speakers called  Chichen Itza, in the Maya area of the Yucatan peninsula Tula or Tulan also. The story collected among the Maya-Chols in the region of Palenque, a ruin in the Lacadon jungle of Chiapas that the Indians were in Culhuacan, now called Palenque, and got crowded and then expanded out to found  over cities like Tula and Chiquimuljá, gives the idea that Palenque was called Culhuacan, just as Chichen Itza was called Tula or Tulan. This story in on the Chiquimula Online website under origins. This idea can also help explain why Nahuas are reported arriving by water, by canoe in parts of Mexico, that they went first  from Central Mexico to the Maya regions, and then go up and found Tula in Hidalgo, which is on the coast, in the area of Mexico known as the Huasteca. There are Huasteca or Wasteka Mayas, but 70% of the Huasteca is now Nahua speaking, according to Wikipedia.

This conflict between Nahua speakers and Mayas was still ongoing at the time of Cortes’s arrival and that is Doña Marina or the Malinche, a Aztec princess who spoke Nahuatl came to be a slave of the Mayas and so was bilingual in Maya Chontal and Nahuatl.     The Maya Chorti dance still done in Jocotan, Guatemala called the Dance of the Huasteca, still features a girl dressed as the Malinche. In Gracias, Lempira, there is a dance called the Guancasco, between the Indians of Gracias and those of Mejicapa, where one of the characters is the Malinche. The Indians of Mejicapa, Lempira were Mexican soldiers brought from Central America by Pedro Alvarado and other conquistadors to help conquer the Honduran Indians. Other towns founded like this included Mejicapa, a neighborhood of Comayagua, and Mejicapa, Usulatac, El Salvador and Aguant…, in the Montagua Valley, in Guatemala.       

This same process happened in Honduras, where both Chulula and Culhuacan were place names in the original 1537 list of villages in the Departement of Cortes, and Tulian (a place of a lot of tule in Nahua) and Calpules (neighborhood, administrative district, owned by clan and rulled by a clan chief in Nahua) are place names still today in Cortes. The place name Calpules is found in many parts of Honduras including Choluteca where there is a new archaeological site in a town called Calpules and in El Paraiso Department near the Nicaraguan border and near Tegucigalpa. . Doña Marina, Hernan Cortes’s translator who spoke Chontal-Maya and Nahuatl, said the Indians of Trujillo spoke like the people of Cholula which she understood, but it had a few differences from Nahuatl, when she was there in 1524. The Indians in the Trujillo area were also reported  by Conquistadors as dressing similar to the Indians in Nicaragua, probably referring to the Nahua speaking Nicaroas.

When people immigrate, they often want things like they had at home, even though they are in a new country. The pottery typical of Cholula and the Teotihuacan areas of Mexico in the Classic period, Fine orange, appears to be related to the potteries  Sula Fine Orange in the Sula Valley and to an incised punctate ware found in the Trujillo, Aguan Valley, Ciudad blanca area and in the Bay Islands, and also to a Fine Orange ware made in El Salvador. These wares are often found in western and northeastern Honduras and in El Salvador together with Tohil Plumbate, a glazed pottery associated with Toltecs and which is also found in Tula, Hidalgo 1000 miles away, and with a  pottery that is painted white with a red design, like Naco Bichrome or a similar ware made in El Salvador. Green obsidian from a mine controlled by Toltecs in Hidalgo Mexico and other Mexican obsideans and obsidian from mines in El Salvador controlled by Nahua speakers are also sometimes found together with these and copper bells used for music in human sacrifice ceremonies.

Copper bells are found in the San Pedro Sula Museum, in the Museum at the Anthony’s Key Resort in the Bay islands, and those at the Smithsonian are from the Quimistan bell cave in Santa Barbara. Among the Aztecs, these bells were known as war bells, and some of the sources of the copper may have in Honduras like the Sula Valley and Manto in Olancho.

 Both in Mayan documents in Guatemala and in Spanish colonial Honduran documents, there are references to Yaqui Indians from Tulan whose leader Ce Acalt (Naxcit in some Mayan documents, meaning Precious stone) founded Payaqui, translated as Among nahuas in the colonial period and as Pa among  and Yaqui (Nahua or Yaqui speaking Indians, also called Chichimec by Mexican sources, in Nahua) by Tulane university linguist Judith Maxwell or Hueyatlato (the large one in Nahua) originally  in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador border area.  Ce Acalt is also specifically noted as having founded Cuscatlan, a Pipil or Nahua speaking city which grew to control most of central and western El Salvador. There is soccer team in El Salvador still named for Ce Acalt Topiltzin.

The Toltec king  Ce Acalt left Central Mexico, went to the Mayan region, went back to Central Mexico and from the the Mexican coast he and his followers travelled along the coast, after stopping in many cities on the way, including in the Maya area of Mexico, such as Palenque and Chichen Itza, to finally arrive in Honduras and Guatemala probably going down the Rio Dulce and the Montagua valley and  founded a country in the border area between Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador known as Payaqui. There is still a Payaqui Hotel in Esquipulas, Guatemala which has a website with a short history of Payaqui.