Honoring a Legacy: Impact of Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Celebrated at Final Lecture

As the historic Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series came to a close in early October, hundreds of students, faculty, and friends gathered to honor Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and his contributions to Mexican archaeology, anthropology, and culture.

“The Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series is the first in Harvard’s 388-year history to be named after a Mexican intellectual,” said Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, at the opening event on October 3.

Carrasco ended his introduction of Matos by quoting a cab driver in Mexico, who summarized his impact on the nation: “He taught us Mexicans who we are.”

Eduardo Matos Moctezuma is the conductor of the Templo Mayor Project, the excavation of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. In this multidisciplinary project, Matos constructed a team of archaeologists, historians, physical anthropologists, art historians, biologists, botanists, restorers, and other specialists to create the leading research in Mexican archaeology.

In 2017, Harvard launched the Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series in his name, a five-year series of lectures sharing the latest scholarship on Mexican history and culture. Due to a generous donation, the lectures were extended for an extra three years to 2024.

The final lectures of the series consisted of two parts: “A Roundtable on Eduardo Matos Moctezuma’s Death in Mesoamerica” on October 3, and “The Archaeology of Tenochtitlan: An Overview” on October 4.

In anticipation of the event, the Moses Mesoamerican Archives & Research Project collaborated with 12 artists from the Universidad Iberoamericana to create 28 posters advertising the lectures.

Sitalin Sánchez, MTS '24, led the project, initiating and arranging the contact between the archives and the artists. The designs were then showcased as a gallery at the October 3 event.

The first part of the lecture series's conclusion, “Roundtable on Eduardo Matos Moctezuma’s Death in Mesoamerica,” was a public discussion held at Harvard Divinity School on Matos’s recent book, Death in Mesoamerica, edited and translated by Scott Sessions. Speakers included Carrasco, Matos, and Sessions, as well as leading Mexican scholars Ximena Chávez Balderas, Leonardo López Luján, Patricia Ledesma, and historian Kris Lane.

Each speaker discussed a different topic of the book: Sessions spoke on the translation, including his decision to add the original Nahua texts in addition to the Spanish; Chávez Balderas gave an overview of the book; López Luján spoke on the archaeology of the Templo Mayor; Ledesma explained the mythology featured in the book, and Lane spoke on what the Project means for the culture today.

This event was co-sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Moses Mesoamerican Archive. The collaboration allowed for a fruitful bilingual discussion. Matos addressed the room in Spanish, followed by a translation to English by Sessions. The Q&A following the roundtable was also in both languages with consecutive translations summarizing the questions and answers in Spanish to English.

“I've always loved talking about the idea of Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the end,” Matos concluded his address. “It is not by chance that it began with lectures on the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan and will end by talking in Leonardo's voice about Tenochtitlan and the great temple.”

For the second and final part of the lecture series, “The Archaeology of Tenochtitlan: An Overview,” Leonardo López Luján elaborated on the archaeological findings and relevance of the Templo Mayor Project. Matos identified López Luján, who arrived at the Project when he was only 16, as his “querido alumno y maestro”—his “dear student and teacher.”

López Luján began his lecture with an overview of Tenochtitlan archaeology, focusing on the recent discovery of the largest Aztec sculpture ever found—a statue of the earth goddess Tlaltecuhtli. He shared pictures and stories from the site, making it clear that although much has been discovered over the past 46 years of the Templo Mayor Project, there is still much more to learn.

López Luján shared the stage with an image of Matos in the Caballero Águila (Eagle Warrior), a painting by artist George Yepes to commemorate the beginning of the lecture series in 2017.

A larger print of this painting resides permanently in Swartz Hall, proving that although the Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series has ended, Matos’s legacy lives on at Harvard and at Harvard Divinity School.

—by Scarlett Rose Ford, HDS news correspondent