(jazzy piano music) - [Voiceover] We're in the
museum of the Templo Mayor, the main Aztec temple in
what is now Mexico City, looking at a small, green, stone sculpture of a human face. And although this was found
buried as a kind of offering in the temple precinct, what
we're looking at is something from a far older culture,
older even than the Aztecs. - [Voiceover] This mask actually belonged to the Olmec culture, which
started thriving somewhere between 1500 and 1200 B.C.E. So, more than 1500
years before the Aztecs, the Olmecs were thriving along
the Gulf Coast of Mexico, not even Central Mexico, where the Aztecs are later building their capital city. - [Voiceover] So this
is distant both in terms of geography, but it's also
really distant in terms of time. For the Aztecs, looking back
to the Olmecs is something akin to us in the modern era looking
back to the ancient Romans. - [Voiceover] This mask is
not much bigger than the palm of my hand. It's a traditional Olmec
mask, and it's made in this beautiful green stone. It's polished. It's a great example of Olmec
features, like upturned lips, this almost-baby face, almond
eyes, the cleft in the head. And what's remarkable is
that the Aztecs were actually collecting these objects, and
then ritually burying them at certain points, and this
object would've been one of many buried in a specific offering. - [Voiceover] It shows us that
the Aztecs had a reverence for the ancient cultures
that came before them, that they were thinking historically. - [Voiceover] And that's true, not only that they were looking to the Olmec, the kind of "mother
culture" of Mesoamerica, but they were also looking to,
say, the city of Teotihuacán and its inhabitants, that
was flourishing hundreds and hundreds of years before the Aztec. - [Voiceover] That's the city famous because of its enormous pyramids. - [Voiceover] And it was
where the Aztecs thought the Fifth Era, or the Sun,
was born, and they called it "The City of the Gods." That's what "Teotihuacán" means. And as we look here around the galleries, we can see other masks
that were buried in some of these offerings. They were taken from the
city of Teotihuacán as well. - [Voiceover] So the Aztecs
were collecting objects from both Central Mexico, but
also from quite a distance. They were importing materials
from what is now the southwest of the United States. They were bringing objects
up from the Yucatán. The divisions that we think
of in the modern world did not exist in the same way. - [Voiceover] It's a
great example, not only of their archaeizing or
their looking to the past, but also these vast trade
networks throughout Mesoamerica. (jazzy piano music)