In his memoirs he recalled that he and a crew of Indian adobe makers from Chalco found several of the tecpatl that would later become part of the Trocadéro collections. The day after his first finds of a piece of obsidian and a flint double-edged blade with two pointed ends, he returned to the area. “I found two other large tecpatls. My joy was so great, but only those who excavate will understand the pleasure that I felt.”6 He thought he could not leave the four beautiful artifacts because they might be stolen, so his solution to the problem was to sleep in the field clutching his finds to his chest—further evidence of the passion he brought to his archeological endeavors (HSA: B2243, Box IV).
In other notes he proposed that this particular burial dated to the tenth century, and that “Chalco, according to Clavigero, means the place of fine stones.” Continuing with his description of the objects he found there, he writes, “The skull, #2010, was found in a burial, with a very beautiful stone chest covered with hieroglyphs. Assuredly it belonged to a great dignitary of the country” (HSA: B2245, Box VI). The discovery of this carved stone box and burial, during his first year in Mexico City, must have greatly inspired his later collecting since they were such significant finds. The box figures prominently in later photographs of his collection.
At first Boban carried out considerable digging and surface collecting throughout the Central Valley, an area now containing the enormous metropolis of Mexico City. He also worked in parts of the states of Mexico, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, and Puebla. Then in the early 1860s he began visiting San Juan Teotihuacan in the state of Mexico. The impressive archeological site of the ruined metropolis is located at the northeastern end of the Central Valley, some twenty-five miles from Mexico City. He described the ruins as “very rich in fragments of the ancient inhabitants, especially in their tombs, and there are a great number of them. But, unfortunately, after the arrival of the conquerors, all of this ruin has been plundered for its treasures” (HSA: B2245, Box VI).
Despite the quantity of artifacts that had already been removed throughout the previous centuries, he made a significant collection of his own from the ruined city. He may have purchased these artifacts from campesinos or farmers in the surrounding area, although it is possible that some of the obsidian and figurine fragments came from his own surface collecting. The large Teotihuacan-style stone faces in his collection seem to have come from excavations he undertook in Azcapotzalco, however (Hamy 1884: 143). There are no extant field notes regarding Boban’s work at Teotihuacan during this time to give proper provenience to these objects. The references in the catalogs of his collection say only that they come from San Juan Teotihuacan, a designation that includes the site and the nearby town.
Figure 4.3 View of Teotihuacan archeological site showing the Pyramid of the Sun. Photo by William Henry Jackson (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives).
Boban is meticulous about including as much information as possible about each of his finds, often referencing supporting data provided by early Spanish chroniclers. Including such extensive explanatory notes about individual artifacts was unusual for a collector at that time, or really almost any time. Frequently, collectors make little effort to record the source of an object, let alone details about its name within the culture of origin, its use, significance, and so forth. Clearly, from the beginning, the young amateur archeologist was intent on becoming a scholar of pre-Columbian Mexico.
Boban owned more than one copy of Clavigero’s Historia antigua de México, published in 1780 (Leavitt 1886b: 120). The Jesuit historian was the first to outline a chronology of pre-Columbian Mexican cultures, which Boban adopted and followed assiduously. Judging from the number he assigned to the skull from Chalco, he had already amassed some two thousand artifacts during his first year of residence, although, presumably, a large proportion of these numbered items would have been fragments of figurines and pottery.
Just as he had in California, Boban writes with great fondness and empathy for the native people, with whom he worked regularly and came to know intimately. He sympathized with them for the hard lives they led, despite all the changes that had taken place in Mexico over three hundred years. As he reported in one of his biographical notes, “An old Indian, who lived in the village of Culhuacan, for whose son I was the godfather, told me with a resigned air mixed with some sadness, ‘No, my little compadre [a term of endearment used by parents to address the godfather of one of their children], apart from the [end to human] sacrifices, we aren’t much better off since the arrival of the Spaniards’” (HSA: B2243, Box IV).7 It is easy to see why Mexican Indians might have felt that little about their lives had improved since the Conquest. They had paid tribute to the Aztecs and other conquering tribes over the centuries and would continue to do so with the Spaniards. Their only protection came from the friars, to whom they also paid a tithe in work and agricultural products. Overall, they labored ceaselessly but continued to inhabit the lowest rung of Mexico’s cultural and economic ladder.
Clearly Boban had a special relationship with his Indian compadre, since the role of godfather would only be given to a close and trusted friend. Boban thought highly of the native Mexicans with whom he worked and associated. “The Indian race,” Boban wrote, “is by far the better part of the population of Mexico, by a good measure” (HSA: B2240, Box I). Being as private and discreet as he was, he does not clarify his reasons for saying this, and he seldom indicates that his interactions with Mexican creoles and mestizos were unpleasant or unproductive; however, he always describes the Indians in the most respectful and admiring terms.
Boban also became interested in Mexico’s natural history. He kept a handwritten notebook detailing the flora and fauna of the country containing approximately 150 pages replete with information on amphibians, birds, butterflies, and reptiles in addition to trees, agave, corn, chilies, tomatoes, and other plants. Every entry begins with French, Spanish, and Nahuatl words for the subject, which is then discussed at length (HSA: B2247, Box VIII; Natural History).
In his observations, Boban strove to make clarifying links and connections. In another unpublished manuscript in the Hispanic Society of America’s Boban Collection, he wrote that hummingbirds were called huitzitzilin in Nahuatl, and that despite their diminutive size, they could be quite aggressive and warlike when threatened. Demonstrating his keen interest in understanding precontact Mexican cultures, he goes on to say, “Probably ancient Mexicans noticed this [defensive aggression against much larger birds], and it is why the name of the god of war is Huitzilopochtli, the left-handed hummingbird warrior” (HSA: B2247, Box VIII, Natural History).
He wrote at considerable length about the habits and behaviors of the hummingbirds that he had personally observed.
After residing in Mexico close to a quarter of a century we lived with those little winged phoenixes and raised them, … They disappear, that is certain, but like our European swallows, they migrate to warmer regions, probably not for fear of cold, but because the small insects, the mosquitos that are their food, disappear, forcing them to migrate. Hummingbirds behave in the same way when certain flowers or types of flowers disappear, and for that, a few hours will suffice for them to cross the chain of high mountains surrounding the Mexican plateau. Immediately south they are in warm lands with new flowers full of small insects. … Then they are like swallows returning with the season, … Suddenly they appear in the city gardens and in the houses and around flowerpots in patios and on windowsills. … They are preserved best in