Ancient Mexico Research Articles

Figures androgynes de la Vieille Europe et du Mexique Ancien

The symbolic images of the persistent research for integration or synthesis of opposites have been expressed throughout history, in the myth and in an abundant set of plastic, poetic and literary works. In what follows, from some examples of the European Neolithic (7000-3500 B.C.) and the Pre-classic period of Ancient Mexico (2500-1500 B.C.), this symbolism of duality is emphasized as expression of the continuing human quest for completeness.

Mycobiome-Host Coevolution? The Mycobiome of Ancestral Human Populations Seems to Be Different and Less Diverse Than Those of Extant Native and Urban-Industrialized Populations.

Few data exist on the human gut mycobiome in relation to lifestyle, ethnicity, and dietary habits. To understand the effect of these factors on the structure of the human gut mycobiome, we analyzed sequences belonging to two extinct pre-Columbian cultures inhabiting Puerto Rico (the Huecoid and Saladoid) and compared them to coprolite samples found in Mexico and Ötzi, the Iceman’s large intestine. Stool mycobiome samples from extant populations in Peru and urban cultures from the United States were also included. The ancient Puerto Rican cultures exhibited a lower fungal diversity in comparison to the extant populations. Dissimilarity distances showed that the Huecoid gut mycobiome resembled that from ancient Mexico. Fungal genera including Aspergillus spp., Penicillium spp., Rasamsonia spp., Byssochlamys spp., Talaromyces spp., Blastomyces spp., Monascus spp., and Penicilliopsis spp. were differentially abundant in the ancient and extant populations. Despite cultural differences, certain fungal taxa were present in all samples. These results suggest that culture and diet may impact the gut mycobiome and emphasize that modern lifestyles could be associated with the alteration of gut mycobiome diversity. The present study presents data on ancient and extant human gut mycobiomes in terms of lifestyle, ethnicity, and diet in the Americas.

Amber Brian, Bradley Benton, Peter B. Villella and Pablo García Loaeza, translators and editors. History of the Chichimeca Nation: Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico

Amber Brian, Bradley Benton, Peter B. Villella and Pablo García Loaeza, translators and editors. <i>History of the Chichimeca Nation: Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico</i>

More than Vestiges Photographic Archives of Ancient Mexico

This article explores the importance of photographic archives (fototecas) in preserving the sources with which to create a national visual history and identity. It charts the arc from imperial photography of Mexico, lodged in European and U.S. archives, to the development of Mexican institutions dedicated to the preservation of the photographic patrimony. Particular attention is paid to the photography of indigenous peoples by foreigners and Mexicans, and the location of the archives in which that imagery is held. Some of the archives mentioned are found in Mexico: Archivo General de la Nación, the Fototeca Nacional-Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the Museo Nacional, and the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas (INPI). Others are located elsewhere: the Smithsonian Institute, the Getty Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, American Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. Among the photographers mentioned are: Desiré Charnay, León Diguet, Teoberto Maler, Frederick Starr, Carl Lumholtz, Julio de la Fuente, and Nacho López.

“ENCLOSURES WITH INCLUSION” VIS-À-VIS “BOUNDARIES” IN ANCIENT MEXICO

AbstractRecent in-depth research on the Nahua Corpus Xolotl, as well as on a large variety of compatible sources, has led to new insights on what were “boundaries” in preconquest Nahua thought. The present article proposes that our modern Western concept of borders and political boundaries was foreign to ancient Mexican societies and to Aztec-era polities in general. Consequently, the article aims to add a novel angle to our understanding of the notions of space, territoriality, and limits in the indigenous worldview in central Mexico during preconquest times, and their repercussions for the internal social and political relations that evolved within the Nahua-Acolhua ethnic states (altepetl). Furthermore, taking its cue from the Corpus Xolotl, the article reconsiders the validity of ethnic entities and polities in ancient Mexico and claims that many of these polities were ethnic and territorial amalgams, in which components of ethnic outsiders formed internal enclaves and powerbases. I argue that in ancient Mexico one is able to observe yet another kind of conceptualization of borders/frontiers: “enclosures with inclusion,” which served as the indigenous concept of porous and inclusive boundaries, well up to the era of the formation of the so-called Triple Alliance, and beyond.

Aristotle, Buddhist scripture and embryology in ancient Mexico: building inclusion by re-thinking what counts as the history of developmental biology.

ABSTRACTIt has not gone unnoticed in recent times that historical writing about science is heavily Eurocentric. A striking example can be found in the history of developmental biology: textbooks and popular science writing frequently trace an intellectual thread from the Greek philosopher Aristotle through 19th century embryology to 20th century genetics. Few in our field are aware of the depth and breadth of early embryological thinking outside of Europe. Here, I provide a series of vignettes highlighting the rich history of embryological thinking in Asia and Latin America. My goal is to provide an entertaining, even provocative, synopsis of this important but under-studied topic. It is my hope that this work will spur others to carry out more thorough investigations, with the ultimate goal of building a more inclusive discipline.

Ancient high‐status burial of a woman at Tlailotlacan, a neighborhood in the city of Teotihuacan

The discovery of an elite burial in Tlailotlacan, a neighborhood of Teotihuacan, gave us a unique opportunity not only to put together a group of multidisciplinary specialists, but to revive this remarkable woman who inhabited, ate, drank, and traveled through most of Mesoamerican. The different analysis carried out provided us with a unique opportunity to reconstruct part of the relations between inhabitants from different regions in ancient Mexico.

Review: Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin, by Angela Herren Rajagopalan

Review: <i>Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin</i>, by Angela Herren Rajagopalan

Tláloc: atmospheric knowledge and political epistemology in ancient Mexico

ABSTRACT Humankind experience in the world corresponds to the appropriation of its external environment and to its own self-conformation. The link of human collectives with what is called “atmospheric phenomena” in Occidental society is mainly expressed as climatic and meteorologic knowledge. In this article, this is examined through the analysis of the inscribed knowledge concerning the deity called Tláloc which was produced by the pre-Cortesian people from Anáhuac and through the study of the episteme that may have supported it. To inquire into the atmospheric knowledge inscribed in the deity and gain a glimpse into the atmospheric experience of pre-Cortesian people as well as their later epistemic and cognitive conquest and destruction by Spanish conquerors, we have selected a set of ancient iconographic inscriptions of Tláloc as our central object of study. The text begins with an interpretative framework of Tláloc’s pre-Cortesian images; then, we demonstrate the heterogenous constitution of an intellectual device clustered around Tláloc, the deified expression of its atmospheric and human capacities, and its posterior desacralization and dehumanization by Spanish conquerors; we conclude with a reflection on the study of the inscribed knowledge produced by the peoples of ancient Mexico.

Lead and strontium isotopes as tracers for Early Formative pottery exchange in ancient Mexico

The sourcing of ceramics contributes to resolve questions about the nature of interactions between ancient societies. One such question concerns the primacy of the Olmec center of San Lorenzo in the development of the first unified iconographic style and its role in the early evolution of Mesoamerican civilization. Applying a combination of the isotopic systems of lead and strontium to a selection of ceramics dating to Early Formative period (1500-1000 BCE), this research evaluates the isotopic approach as an independent tool to address previously debated questions. The results demonstrate the capacity of isotopic analyses to discriminate between production centers, identify imports, relate unassigned samples to their production center and ceramics to raw material, and produce insights into production strategies (ceramics used locally versus exports). It subsequently shows how this approach can help solving existing hypotheses relying on ceramic provenance in the Early Formative period in Ancient Mexico. The findings discussed in this study more largely demonstrate that the isotopic approach constitutes a powerful tool to source ceramics and should be considered where contradictory hypotheses exist on their provenance.

Shrine of decapitated heads suggests violence against foreigners in ancient Mexico

Shrine of decapitated heads suggests violence against foreigners in ancient Mexico

Locations of Cinnabar-Mercury Occurrences in Peru: Implications for Pre-Contact Gold Production

The Huancavelica cinnabar-mercury occurrence is the most well-known, but not the only, cinnabar-mercury occurrence in Peru. Therefore, a compilation of the approximately 20 other cinnabar-mercury occurrences is important in assessing the regional availability of this important mineral and its industrial uses in pre-contact Peru. These include: 1) cinnabar use as an ancient red pigment and, 2) more importantly, retorting cinnabar was an important source of mercury that was used for pre-contact alluvial gold amalgamation and, later Colonial silver amalgamation. Geochemical sampling of the lesser-known Chonta occurrence also indicates Ag, Pb-Zn, or Au exploration targets. Retorting cinnabar has been widely documented and dates to 8000 years ago in ancient Turkey; during Roman time; in ancient Mexico; medieval Europe; the western US; and Indonesia. Using only cinnabar, clay for the ceramic retorts, and charcoal, coal, or other fuels, this artisanal process provided the mercury that was essential to the small-scale gold mining technology that produced tons of gold from alluvial sources before the arrival of the Spanish explorers in ancient South America. In present-day Peru, mercury is used to produce tons of gold from small-scale mines, and by analogy, the tons of gold produced in pre-contact Peru are hard evidence that is consistent with small-scale gold mining and mercury amalgamation in the past.

Weapons of Resistance: The Material Symbolics of Postclassic Mexican Spinning and Weaving

Material culture studies demonstrate how objects may act to communicate information regarding social identity. In this study we consider ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence for Postclassic spinning and weaving as symbols relating to female ideology in ancient Mexico. We then relate a contextual interpretation of texts and images to contemporary symbolism, particularly associated with members of the female earth/fertility deity complex depicted and described in precolumbian and early colonial pictorial manuscripts. For our case study we analyze decorative imagery found on baked-clay spindle whorls from Postclassic Cholula, Mexico. This collection is representative of an iconographic system relating to female ideology. Whorls, as well as other spinning and weaving tools, paralleled male-oriented weapons to create a symbolic equivalence or, as we argue, a usurpation of the male symbols within a female worldview as a form of resistance to male domination. We conclude that the symbolic system used on spindle whorls and in other aspects of female practice created a communication network understood by Postclassic women.

La función del reconocimiento y la autodeterminación en los principios del Derecho Internacional Humanitario Consuetudinario de Mexihko - Tenochtitlan

Este artículo es una síntesis dialéctica entre la guerra florida del México precuahtémico y el Derecho Internacional Humanitario, a través del hilo conductor de los usos costumbres, en tanto que son fuente de derecho consuetudinario, lo que, incluyecategorías filosóficas, tales como el reconocimiento y la autodeterminación. Se analizan los procesos de juridificación internacional en materia humanitaria durante el ritual de la guerra florida, dicho estudio se hace a partir de la óptica de los principios de precaución de ataque y de distinción, así como el trato a prisioneros de guerra contenidos en los Convenios de Ginebra y sus Protocolos adicionales, para dar cuenta de una Confederación política de naciones aliadas. Así, se supera la noción imperial aztekah, que ha quedado obsoleta ante la hermenéutica que guía la lengua nahua.

Encrypted Astronomy, Astral Mythologies, and Ancient Mexican Studies in Austria, 1910-1945

This paper examines the beginnings of Austrian studies on ancient Mexico by analyzing the work of Damian Kreichgauer and Friedrich Röck in the early twentieth century. Both argued that a priest elite intentionally “coded” astronomical data in ancient Mexican manuscripts. The first section of the article sheds light on the theoretical background of this interpretation. The main section, based on numerous archival sources, is dedicated to the deciphering procedure elaborated by Röck, the first director of the Ethnological Museum in Vienna (today Weltmuseum Wien). Since Röck’s method seemed to revolutionize the discipline, it gained a great deal of attention from German Nazi authorities. The final section deals with Röck’s student Karl Anton Nowotny, who elaborated an ethnographic approach of ancient Mexican studies in Austria after World War II. This study provides new insights into the historical background of post-war ancient Mexican studies in Austria.

Idea of a New General History of North America: An Account of Colonial Native Mexico ed. by Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci

Reviewed by: Idea of a New General History of North America: An Account of Colonial Native Mexico ed. by Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Idea of a New General History of North America: An Account of Colonial Native Mexico. By Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci. Edited and translated by Stafford Poole. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2015. Pp. xv, 288. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8061-4833-5.) Lorenzo Boturini is best known for having assembled one of the largest collections of Mexican colonial indigenous codices in the mid-eighteenth century ever. As he struggled to recover the collection from the Mexican authorities, Boturini printed in 1746 a catalogue, along with a historiographical proposal on how to write a new history of ancient Mexico. The proposal drew on new forms of evidence, primarily Nahua vocabularies. This book is a fine translation of Boturini’s original eighteenth-century Spanish publication, Idea de una nueva historia general. Boturini’s printed catalogue of codices is confusing and garbled, for the Italian relied on memory to reconstruct it. It took John B. Glass over thirty years to locate the titles and whereabouts of Boturini’s original collection. As for Boturni’s new ideas on how to rewrite the ancient history of “North America,” they belong in a cultural world that is long gone. Why then to translate today an utterly alien text? The introduction fails to explain why. The critical apparatus in the translation is not very helpful either. Boturini was a peculiar disciple of Giovanni Battista Vico, who believed that after the Noachian flood societies fragmented into roaming individuals who had to rebuild communities from the ground up—one mute and bumbling couple and extended family at a time. Boturini’s proposal relied on Euhemerist ideas, very popular among early-eighteenth-century French antiquarians like Nicolas Fréret. Heroes in classical mythology and therefore in Ovid’s Metamorphoses were archived to document the past of ancient “poetic” peoples. In 1746, Boturini did not yet have an archive for the Indies; he offered to assemble one after returning to Mexico. Idea is therefore more of a Viconian reading of Ovid than a Euhemerist analysis of actual Mesoamerican ancient oral traditions. The Idea is largely the history of the Indies’ scared, orally inarticulate individuals who slowly begin to speak to each other using “poetic” shorthand: symbols, objects, names. In Boturini’s hands, for example, the names of thirteen deities in Mexican ritual calendars become the archive of Mexico’s turbulent post-Noachian struggle to create a social contract. We learn that Tlaloc, the deity of lighting, stands for the Nahua’s fear of higher powers among promiscuous individuals copulating daily in the open. “Tlaloc” reveals the origin of the first families in caves. Methodologically and historiographically, Boturini has little to offer us today. Yet his Idea is an extraordinary political, cultural, and intellectual testament to the complexities of mid-eighteenth century Mexico and Spain. Historians such as Ivan Escamilla (not cited by Poole) have used the origins of Boturini’s archive of codices to reconstruct networks of church patronage in the cathedrals of Puebla and Mexico, where Boturini enjoyed unprecedented backing. Nahua nuns, for example, offered him contacts to Nahua elites in indigenous barrios in Mexico and Tlaxcala. He also enjoyed support of key merchant families in [End Page 178] Mexico’s consulado (merchant guild). Boturini obtained his archive of codices while acting as representative of merchant-corregidores while the Nahua were struck by the matlazáhuatl epidemic in Tlaxcala. The epidemic forced many Tlaxcalans to part with family heirlooms, along with property and lands, to pay their debts. Poole did not do his homework on the historiography on Boturini and dismisses as unreliable Georgio Antei’s 2007 biography of Boturini. Antei maintained that Boturini was not a noble but a commoner born in a village in the Italian Alps without offering clear documentation. Poole argues that Antei’s conclusions are speculative and untrustworthy. The problem is that Antei draws on Italian publications of Pío Rajna and Enrico Besta, dating back to the 1930s, both very solidly footnoted. Finally, Poole dismisses my own reading of Boturni’s Idea as the beginning of a historiographical...

Virginia Miller. Review of "Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico" by Virginia M. Fields, Victoria I. Lyall, and John M. D. Pohl.

Virginia Miller. Review of "Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico" by Virginia M. Fields, Victoria I. Lyall, and John M. D. Pohl.

Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800

Peter Villella has provided a welcome addition to the scholarly literature with this longue durée intellectual-cultural history. North American Anglophone scholarship on indigenous histories of Latin America have focused heavily on responses to Spanish rule and Spanish culture. This book seeks to understand, rather, the multidirectional processes of identity formation—Spanish, indigenous, mestizo—in Mexico. In the author’s words, the book “is not a story of one-way memory transmission, but rather of resonance, dialogues, intersections and parallels. The cacique agenda of self-fashioning developed in tandem with creole historiography” (5). Solange Alberro explored similar themes—of the uses by creoles of a heroic indigenous past—in her works Del gachupin al criollo and El águila y la cruz. But Villella’s work is among the first English-language studies to provide a comprehensive analysis of the confluence of indigenous elite self-fashioning and creole constructions of a uniquely Mexican cultural consciousness. To that end, the book offers a geographic complement to the recent (2014) study by Danna Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of New Mexico.Elegantly written, deeply researched, and offering an impressive sweep of three centuries, Villella’s book explains how the construction of Mexican historical identities was a complex process of “negotiation within domination” (20), a phrase associated with the book by the same name edited by Ethelia Ruiz-Medrano and Susan Kellogg. Methodologically, this book offers much to consider but most impressive is its wide-ranging use of sources. Unlike many intellectual histories, this book analyzes printed sources but also legal disputes, cacique appeals to the crown, genealogies, and archival material related to negotiation of indigenous privileges.The book begins with the earliest efforts of indigenous caciques to assert their traditional rights as pipiltin, or aristocratic elites. The book then moves from the 1530s through the earliest parts of the nineteenth century. The range of the book is impressive in itself, but it is the execution that impresses the most. Unlike some intellectual histories, Villella’s book moves at a brisk stylistic pace without sacrificing quality analysis. It is, in short, a deeply satisfying book to read.The book has a compelling organization that facilitates its reading. Each chapter takes up a thematic and chronological question. Chapter 2 examines the ways that indigenous caciques who asserted titles and rights placed themselves within the Spanish regalist system as legitimate aristocrats. These caciques stressed the “primordiality of their legacies, their steadfast fealty to the Spanish monarch, and their impeccable Christian orthodoxy” (48). Chapter 3 analyzes the development of Spanish texts about indigenous history from the 1530s to the 1580s, emphasizing the role played by cacique informants in that process. Villella thus places the most famous of these projects, Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, within this broader historiographic process.Remaining chapters follow the decline of the indigenous nobility and the rise of an explicitly Mexican historical-cultural consciousness, even if Villella does not use those precise terms. Chapter 4 discusses “cacique-chroniclers,” the best-known of whom is Fernando de Alva Ixtlixochitl. The study links this tradition with the emergence of creole historiography, notably in the case of Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana. Chapter 5, focused on the seventeenth century, explains the development of “cacique-hidalgos” especially in light of a growing creole appreciation for the importance of ancient Mexico for the developing baroque cultural consciousness. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora takes center stage in this self-conscious cultural identity formation. Chapter 6 is focused on the ways that Catholicism was promoted by both creoles and caciques as a strategy of “baroque-era myth-making asserting political and genealogical continuities between New Spain and the native civilizations that preceded it” (187–88). Jesuit Francisco Florencia and doña Beatriz de Tapia (descendant of Otomí conquistadors) figure prominently in this discussion. Chapters 7 and 8 follow the story through the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, reflecting on the ultimate demise of indigenous cacique power in the context of the ultimate Mexicanization of religion and culture.More tightly focused on a specific theme of intellectual-cultural history, the book nevertheless has echoes of The First America, David Brading’s monumental study of creole political consciousness. Even if the latter is more concerned with creoles, Villella’s study seeks to examine the multidirectional process of intellectual and religious acculturation on a multiethnic front. This is an important new kind of intellectual history that helps us to understand the mutual processes of cultural identities forged by indigenous elites and creole sympathizers with indigenous society. Given its felicitous style, the book will find a wide audience—from professional historians to graduate students to undergraduate students and, dare I say it, to lay readers as well.

The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement by Ulrich L. Lehner

Reviewed by: The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement by Ulrich L. Lehner Nigel Aston The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement. By Ulrich L. Lehner. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2016: Pp. vi, 257. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-19-023291-7.) Of the making of "Enlightenments" there is no end, and it seems only fair that the Catholic Church should have its own niche patent, however much that association might have unsettled Voltaire and other leading philosophes. But, as Ulrich L. Lehner argues in his wide-ranging study, it is time to (re)state the exaggerated disconnection between infâme and lumières and show how, in many areas of its life, in its balance of faith and reason, in its work with state reformers, Catholicism partook of what most scholars would deem characteristics of the moderate Enlightenment. Professor Lehner is not the first historian to point this out. He treads in the steps of David Sorkin, Christopher M. S. Johns, Michael Printy, and others in making the case for a/the Catholic Enlightenment. What distinguishes his book is its global reach and its illumination of so many parts of the Church's life, witness, and worship. In his first chapter, Lehner takes the reader on a worldwide tour of Catholic Enlighteners at work, specifying contexts as he proceeds and noting "national" variants such as the "Enlightenment in Tridentine mode," which he finds in Spain and Italy, and in such practitioners as Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Themes one might expect to be emphasized are here, including conciliarism, antipathy to the Jesuits, and the privileging of social utility and good works over mysticism, but less expected ones, too, such as the Church's interest in the latest healthcare trends (the endorsement of vaccination among them) and advocates of flexibility in marriage teaching and clerical celibacy. He considers the course of Catholic historical criticism of the Bible from Richard Simon to John Geddes, the alignment of so many clergy behind the temporal régimes that sponsored Febronianism in Germany and Regalism in Iberia, and the intellectual gifts of such defenders of enlightened Catholicism as Nicolas Bergier in France, the critic of Rousseau but the personal friend of Diderot. Lehner argues that religion was becoming "for many an intellectual exercise" (p. 25), but some of the evidence he himself presents in this chapter might count against him. [End Page 355] Having set the scene, he then looks at that very 'Enlightened' commitment to toleration in principle and practice evidenced by many Catholic intellectuals, clergy and lay. Jansenists in France would not be silenced though the Bourbon monarchy was slower to legalize toleration for non-Catholics than the Habsburgs. In a hyperbolic moment, Lehner hails Joseph II's 1781 Edicts as a "quantum leap into modernity" (p. 60), but it is Poland's short-lived Constitution of 1791 that contains the least restrictions on religious freedom. Then, in a compelling overview of Catholic women and the Enlightenment, he finds many talented women with progressive views and not afraid to articulate them, among them Josefa Amar, as well as the Benedictine Benito Feijóo, who were Spanish precursors of women's rights, and scientists like Laura Bassi and Maria Agnesi in Italy. Lehner makes a plausible case for seeing what he calls a second wave of Tridentine reforms in the first half of the eighteenth century as offering women more scope in the Church and more recognition by it, with clergy, for instance, being ready to make the case for wives having an equal share with their spouses in the moral education of the family. Lehner next ranges on to the Catholic Enlightenment beyond Europe arguing that the Church was more appreciative of Amerindian culture than secular society. Among individuals featuring here are the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavigero with pronounced anti-racist convictions on display in his four-volume history of ancient Mexico (he demonstrated that syphilis was a European import to the New World, not the other way round) and, in the post-Independence United States, John Carroll, its first Catholic prelate, one prepared to endorse even the democratic election of bishops. The fifth chapter, "Devils, Demons...

Natural Materials to Absorb Water from Environment

In nature, there is a large number of materials to be discovered, all with different characteristics and for certain functions. In the case of plants, they are responsible for collecting, taking care and protect water naturally.In Mexico there are different plants of the cactus family, which catch and retain water for their existence, so some plants collect more volume of body water than they have. It is very important for this investigation.In Mexico and throughout the continent there is a common cactus or chumbera that easily adapts to the environment and very rampant in this country, so that its study and analysis makes it one of the most important natural systems for this research, because 95% of it is water and the other 5% is organic material.Later, the common Maguey or agave plant is analyzed, which is important for the history of ancient Mexico, this long before the Spaniards arrived in America. The agave juice and whole plant were an important part of Mexican culture [1], even today is used in many regions and is an important part of the economy in this country.Last but not least is the barrel cactus plant, which surprisingly lets us see how natural systems build structural and formal elements in order to the creation and configuration of new materials that can significantly help to collect water.