Largest Aztec temple was decorated with over 100 starfish

Enlarge / This imprint preserves details of the internal structure of the starfish, as well as its overall shape. It's one of 164 starfish recently unearthed at the Templo Mayor site in Mexico City. (credit: INAH)

Aztec priests at Tenochtitlan offered a whole galaxy of starfish to the war god Huitzilopochtli 700 years ago, along with a trove of other objects from the distant edges of the Aztec Empire. Archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) recently unearthed the offering on the site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, in what is now Mexico City.

Ahuizotl, coast to coast

The offering included 164 starfish from a species called Nidorella armata, known less formally as the chocolate chip starfish because it's mostly the color of cookie dough, but it has dark spots. (It shares the nickname with the other chocolate chip sea star, Protoreaster nodosus, which provides an excellent argument in favor of scientific names.) Nidorella armata lives along the Pacific coastline from Mexico south to Peru, where it hangs out on shallow-water reefs of rock and coral.

For Tenochtitlan, the nearest source of chocolate chip starfish would have been nearly 300 kilometers away from the Aztec capital. Chunks of coral found in the same offering came from about the same distance away but in roughly the opposite direction-the western end of the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, these items came from the farthest eastern and western edges of the Aztec Empire, places that the Aztec ruler Ahuizotl had only recently conquered.

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