Cacaxtla Murals: Battle Scenes in Epiclassic Mexico

The Cacaxtla murals are a group of brilliantly coloured wall paintings at the hilltop site of Cacaxtla in Tlaxcala, central Mexico, created between about AD 650 and 900. Their most famous scene, the Battle Mural, shows warriors in jaguar costume defeating opponents in bird headdresses. Painted in a style close to Maya art, hundreds of kilometres from the Maya region, they reveal the far-reaching contacts of the Epiclassic world after the fall of Teotihuacan.

The site and its rulers

Cacaxtla sits on a ridge overlooking the Puebla–Tlaxcala valley. Its centre is a huge artificial platform, the Gran Basamento, on which palaces, courtyards and temples were built and rebuilt over several centuries.

Colonial-era histories, such as those of the Tlaxcalan historian Diego Muñoz Camargo, describe a people called the Olmeca-Xicalanca who dominated this region, including the great city of Cholula, before Nahua groups arrived. Many archaeologists connect them with Cacaxtla, and some think they had links to the Gulf Coast. Because the evidence comes from much later sources, this identification is widely accepted but not certain.

Discovery

In 1975 people from the nearby village of San Miguel del Milagro, digging on the hill, uncovered painted walls. The Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) began excavations that same year and soon revealed the Battle Mural and other paintings.

To protect the fragile murals from rain and sun, a large metal roof was later built over the central platform. The roof, one of the largest of its kind in Mexico, now shelters most of the painted buildings.

The Battle Mural

The Battle Mural runs along the sloping walls on either side of a stairway in the building known as Building B. Together its two sections are about 22 m long and show several dozen nearly life-size figures.

The victors wear jaguar skins and carry spears, shields and knives. The defeated wear bird headdresses and feathered costumes, and many are shown with wounds, falling or stripped of their weapons and ornaments. The scene is unusually graphic for Mesoamerican art.

The defeated warriors have profiles and ornaments that resemble Maya figures, and scholars have long debated whether the mural records a real battle between local people and Maya or Gulf Coast enemies. Others read it as a ritual or mythical combat, perhaps one that was re-enacted in ceremonies. The debate is unresolved.

Bird Man and Jaguar Man

In another structure, Building A, the doorway is flanked by two painted figures. On one side, a man in a bird costume stands on a feathered serpent and holds a ceremonial bar. On the other, a man in a jaguar costume stands on a jaguar-serpent and holds a bundle of spears from which water drips.

The two figures echo the jaguar and bird warriors of the Battle Mural but present them as powerful rulers or deities, linked to water, fertility and war. Calendar glyphs painted beside them follow central Mexican conventions rather than Maya writing.

The Red Temple and Temple of Venus

Other paintings include the Red Temple, whose murals show maize plants bearing human heads and a figure resembling a merchant god, with a backpack and cacao plant. In the Temple of Venus, two figures, painted blue, wear scorpion tails and Venus star symbols, linking warfare, fertility and the planet Venus.

Art and meaning

The murals combine a naturalistic, flowing Maya-like style with central Mexican symbols and dates. The painters used a bright blue pigment known as Maya blue, along with reds, yellows and black.

Some scholars think Maya artists worked at Cacaxtla; others think local painters were trained in Maya styles or deliberately imitated them. Either way, the murals show that the elites of Epiclassic central Mexico shared artistic ideas with the Maya and the Gulf Coast. Similar mixing appears at Xochicalco, a contemporary city in Morelos.

Neighbouring Xochitécatl

Less than 2 km away, on a neighbouring hill, stands Xochitécatl, an older ceremonial centre. Its main buildings, including a circular structure known as the Spiral Building and a large platform called the Pyramid of the Flowers, were first built in the Formative period, centuries before Cacaxtla’s height. The site was reoccupied during the Epiclassic, when Cacaxtla flourished.

Excavations at Xochitécatl found large numbers of clay figurines, most of them depicting women, which suggest rituals connected with fertility. Together, the two hilltops formed a single political and religious landscape. They are managed as one archaeological zone today, with a site museum displaying objects found during the excavations.

Decline

Cacaxtla was occupied until around 900–1000, when it declined and was abandoned. Later peoples built over the area, and the paintings, buried under earth and new construction, survived for more than a thousand years.

Timeline

• c. 650: Cacaxtla rises as a regional centre after the decline of Teotihuacan.
• c. 650–900: The murals are painted in several phases.
• c. 900–1000: The site declines and is abandoned.
• 16th century: Colonial histories record the Olmeca-Xicalanca.
• 1975: Local residents uncover murals; INAH excavations begin.

Why it matters

The Cacaxtla murals are among the best-preserved paintings of ancient Mesoamerica. They show that, after the collapse of Teotihuacan, central Mexico was a place of war, new states and wide-ranging contacts, where Maya art and central Mexican ideas met on the same walls.